Sunday Workshops

Kumiyo Nakakoji,
JST/SRA/NAIST

Mark Gross,
University of Washington

Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds,
Loughborough University

The early stages of design - in any domain - are cognitively intensive, and not clearly structured as what we think of as "problem-solving" activities. The tasks involved in early stages of design are often characterized by nebulous thoughts, trial-and-error, exploration, ambiguity, and imprecision. In the early stages designers employ metaphors, allow ideas to remain open, and identify requirements and frame a problem.

Although design has been an abiding interest in the CHI community, we lack a firm understanding of these cognitive modes, the processes of early design, and the types of computational support they imply. This one-day workshop aims to address this lack, by bringing together practicing designers from diverse domains, cognitive scientists and HCI researchers who study designing, and system builders who construct tools for early stages of design.

External representations are one focus of the workshop. In many domains, sketching, diagramming, and free arrangement of physical components play an important role in early stage design. What are the cognitive and technical characteristics of these external representations that make them useful for early design, and how can we take advantage of this in computationally enhanced design environments?

Participants (up to 15 people) are asked to prepare a 20-minute presentation or demonstration of a technique, an empirical study, or a computing tool or a system pertaining to the early stages of design tasks. Following these presentations, we will discuss and reflect on the commonalties and differences among the approaches, and begin to develop a framework for comparison.

Contact
Send position papers to Kumiyo Nakakoji: kumiyo@is.aist-nara.ac.jp
For more information go to: http://ccc.aist-nara.ac.jp/CHI2001-WS-on-Design/.

Poika Isokoski,
University of Tampere

Scott MacKenzie,
York University

Mobile computing devices like mobile phones, handheld computers, digital cameras, GPS navigators, pagers, game consoles, wrist-top computers and many other types of gadgets are becoming more frequent every day. Many of these devices would benefit from an easy and effortless system for text entry. Not surprisingly, systems claiming to satisfy this need have been proposed in recent years. A good understanding on the merits of these systems, however, is lacking.

This one-day workshop invites experts in the area of mobile text entry to investigate:

• the state of the art across cultures and languages
• the users' needs in the future
• significant research directions in mobile text entry

The 10-12 participants are selected on the basis of a two-page position paper. The paper should address one or more of the questions above with emphasis on ideas that help to see the "big picture". In addition the participants should list their relevant experience. Especially experience in inventing, implementing, and evaluating (empirically or theoretically) text entry methods should be indicated. Publicly available (preferably in the web) documents should be cited when referring to systems that are not globally known. This is necessary because the position papers of the selected participants will be distributed before the workshop to allow everybody to familiarize themselves with each other's work. The position papers are accepted in three formats: ASCII, PDF, and a URL pointing to a publicly available web page.

Contact
Send position papers and URLs to:
Poika Isokoski: poika@cs.uta.fi

Paul McInerney,
IBM Canada

Christian Pantel,
PeopleSoft

Karl Melder,
Microsoft

It is not sufficient for usability engineers to simply identify usability defects. These defects must be communicated, tracked, resolved, and reported on. The effectiveness of a usability engineering process can be measured by its success rate in successfully resolving legitimate usability issues. This one-day workshop will seek to identify best practices for managing usability defects from the time they are identified to closure.

Four main activities will be discussed:

• Identifying candidate usability defects
• Analyzing and documenting defects
• Communicating defect information
• Tracking and working towards the resolution of defects

The primary goal of the one-day workshop is to identify best practices for the management of usability defects.

The supporting goals of the workshop are to:

• Share professional experiences and techniques
• Understand the circumstances under which techniques and tools are effective
• Share the existing literature related to the topic
• Fill gaps in the usability literature

The primary selection criteria for the 15 participants will be their depth of experience in managing usability defects throughout the development cycle and the maturity of their process and tools. We will favor participants who have had an important role in defining the usability defect management process in their organizations and those who have worked on large project teams.

Potential participants will be required to submit a 2-4 page position paper detailing their work experience, types of organizations for which they have worked, the variety of usability defect management techniques and tools they have experienced, and their analysis of the best techniques and tools for managing usability defects.

Contact
Send position papers to Paul McInerney: paulmci@ca.ibm.com

Constantine Stephanidis,
ICS-FORTH & University of Crete

Demosthenes Akoumianakis,
ICS-FORTH

In the emerging Information Society, Universal Design is increasingly becoming a fundamental step in the provision of anyone, anywhere access. In recent years, an increasing number of experts from a variety of engineering disciplines and technological domains have argued the potential of universal design to provide useful insights towards an Information Society which respects and values diversity in human capabilities, technological infrastructure and usage contexts. This is also evident from recent collaborative research work aiming to address the technical challenges involved in appropriating the benefits of universal design in Information Society Technologies (IST).

This workshop aims to explore the opportunities offered by universal design in IST in general, and HCI in particular, and assess its relevance, potential value and limitations in the context of designing interactive products and services.

The workshop will focus on:

• Identifying the state of the art in universal design
• Reviewing methods and techniques currently in use
• Laying out the foundations of a conceptual frame of reference for introducing universal design into IST in general, and HCI in particular

Participants will be invited to contribute their views and experiences in the application of Universal Design, by providing documented evidence of past or on-going scientific and technical work, to elaborate on such experiences, and to provide constructive input towards the consolidation of a validated code of practice so as to influence the IST industry, as well as the academic and research community.

Contact
Send position papers to Constantine Stephanidis: cs@ics.forth.gr