Mick McQuaid

We have a guest this week, Erik Hofer, whose various infovis and scivis projects can be seen on the third floor at SI North. Erik gave an initial title of Beyond the Desktop, but that may have changed slightly. In any event, the emphasis is the same. We’ve talked about users, and Erik’s talk will place users in environments outside the office.

Consider Shoemaker (2001). This paper is primarily concerned with users who work together and have different information needs. I have personally been in group situations where a single display showed a log of individual activities. In my case, representatives of multiple groups working together, it would have appealed to individuals to have glasses like those described in this paper, allowing some members of one group to shut out the logs of the other groups, while members assigned to bridging across groups needed to take a superficial look at everything. This scenario differs a little from Shoemaker’s private vs. public setup. Can you think of other situations where it might be advantageous to have a single display, but have parts hidden from some users? One issue to consider is motivation. In the example given above, the users would have considered information hiding a benefit. In the paper, privacy preferences were considered an issue.

What about the private / public distinction? Research by Mark Ackerman showed that people altered their work habits (in a good way) when they knew some limited information about what their collaborators were doing. If you agree, can you think of ways to extend this public / private display to stimulate this alteration?

Baudisch (2002) demonstrates the value of a focus plus context display that doesn’t require you to switch views during the course of work. One limitation of this study is that it employs very expensive displays that you could not afford to distribute on a one-on-one basis to everyone. The authors give a few examples of scenarios for use, including web designers, graphic designers, GIS specialists, chip designers, drivers, and gamers. It might be worthwhile to think about scenarios in which you might use these displays. Suppose you had one in a conference room, dining room, classroom, lobby, or other location where many people congregate. Can you give an example of how a focus plus context display could help in one of these environments?

North Campus has numerous tiled displays and opportunities for tiled displays in public spaces. North Quad, SI’s future home, may have tiled displays in public spaces. Ball (2007) explores such displays with respect to physical navigation. Although they use a somewhat elaborate setup, the past year has seen at least one very inexpensive package for gesture interaction with a display. It’s realistic to imagine interactive building directories, for instance, appearing on public displays. One interesting issue has to do with how multiple people approach public displays at the same time. Do they take turns? Do they respond to each other based on “eavesdropping”? Is there a way to represent situational information on a large tiled display that adds more than a linear combination of individual interactions?