KMi Seminars
Interaction Design for Everyday Technologies
This event took place on Wednesday 11 May 2005 at 12:30

Prof. William Gaver

As digital devices pervade our everyday lives, the scope of issues addressed by Human-Computer Interaction is growing and changing. We need to understand people?s attitudes and emotions as well as their needs and goals; we need to consider how to make technology delightful and desirable as well as useful and usable; and we need to investigate how technology can help us explore and reflect as well as solve problems and perform tasks. Design and the arts suggest new approaches for HCI that can address these issues, complementing more traditional, science and engineering-based approaches. In this talk, I describe new paradigms for HCI with examples of innovative information appliances and ubiquitous computing systems we have built.

William Gaver is Professor of Interaction Research at the Royal College of Art and leader of the RCA?s involvement in the Equator IRC. He has pursued research on innovative technologies for over 15 years, working with and for companies such as Apple, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Xerox. He has gained an international reputation for a range of work that spans auditory interfaces, theories of perception and action, and interaction design. Currently he focuses on design-led methodologies and innovative technologies for everyday life.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.