We turned to imagery as a way to inspire groups of designers to think broadly and engage meaningfully with each other during the design process. We looked for ways that images could serve as a starting point for group design activities, and as a gateway to other design knowledge. Specifically, we are interested in how imagery can be used to enhance claims during early-stage design. Claims, conceptualized by the classic Toulmin (1958) book and introduced to HCI by Carroll and Kellogg (1989), present a design artifact together with observed or hypothesized upsides (+) and downsides (-); e.g., a public display of information (+) can notify large groups of people about things of shared concern, BUT (-) often become unattractive, densely-packed discordances of data. Claims are accessible when compared to much denser knowledge capture mechanisms like papers, patterns, and cases. But it is still a daunting task for designers to look through long lists of textual claims toward finding the right ideas.

Our approach to mitigate this problem is to use imagery as a bridge to each claim. We chose to represent each claim with an image, selected not just because it captured a key aspect of the claim but also because it allowed designers who viewed it to include their own interpretation of the technology and the context.

Information exhibit image used in design sessions

We have used a set of around 30 image-claim cards in design activities (e.g., brainstorming, storyboarding), using the image cards both in printed and digital form. The benefits of the images-first approach were numerous. It allowed designers to process large numbers of claims quickly, connecting the ideas to their own experiences and expertise toward solving a design problem. It supported collaboration among designers through the shared understanding centered around the images. It encouraged broad speculation down paths not captured by the claims, sometimes resulting in new and different directions. A set of papers led by Wahid at Interact, DIS, and CHI capture the lessons and tradeoffs.

All of this is in keeping with the nature of a claim, whose original intent was as a falsifiable hypothesis (Toulmin, 1958; Carroll & Kellogg, 1989). However, a purely textual claim risks narrowing the associations of the reader to the words in the claim, and thus limiting the design considerations and even alienating designers unfamiliar with the text of a claim. It is through imagery, and specifically through images as the initial shared view in a design session, that designers can make sense of a problem and create meaningful and informed content.

Many people seem really mad at Tebow regarding his open faith. But lots of athletes thank their mothers…do we take that as an affront to the mothering of our own mothers, almost all of whom didn’t raise children who won major sports championships? And what about those interviews with the local person who just turned 100, or the latest “oldest person in the world”—do we begrudge those people’s enthusiasm that they lived so long because, e.g., they eat a green bean and ‘mater sandwich with mayo every day, or because they smoke a cigar every Sunday night, or because they wake up every morning at 5am. And what about the recently deceased Steve Jobs? In reading his Walter Isaacson bio he was an asshole: he denied fathering his daughter for many years, he cheated his friends, and he was pushed out of the company he founded. Yet his bio spent many weeks at the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Hopefully most of us will realize that you don’t have to be a Jobs-level jerk to lead a successful company, and we can pick and choose the elements of his life (and Clinton’s, and Giuliani’s, and Tebow’s) that seem important and relevant to us.

When reporters give Tebow a platform to speak, he can attribute his success to whatever factors he wants. Of course there will be people are wrong, or who take it to a ridiculous level. It’s up to us as careful readers and intelligent beings to decide whether these people are successful because of certain aspects of their lives, or despite them, or just concurrently with them.

The book represents an interesting pairing of authors. Paul Culmsee is a consultant who probably knows more about dialog mapping and Compendium than anyone (except maybe Jeff Conklin of gIBIS fame, who wrote a glowing foreword to the book with high praise for Culmsee). Kailash Awati is an information systems manager, with a couple of Ph.D. degrees and experience at several levels in academia. Both Culmsee and Awati blog prolifically, and many of their blog posts fed nicely into this book (a trick I’m using to prepare my book). People familiar with their styles will find their key writing styles featuring irreverent humor, pop-culture references, and in-depth examples prevalent in this book. (At times, though, I feel their pop-culture irreverence would be better if rooted in fact; e.g., the real Clippy story is interesting and perhaps relevant, and people and stories behind the development are still out there.)

There were a few major weaknesses of the book (though in the spirit of “wicked-ness”, many of these drawbacks to me may be neutral (or advantages!) to you, so take them as such). The index is very weak (less than 3 pages for a book approaching 400 pages). I’d love to look up what they have to say about strong reciprocity, or whose views of claims they discuss, or their view of McCall’s PHI approach to wicked problems, or their thoughts on positions in IBIS, or numerous other topics—but such a short index just doesn’t provide adequate support for a lot of important queries. In addition, I often find that books suffer from a certain myopia when it comes to the authors’ favored approaches, though there’s somewhat less fan-dom in this book than is seen in many books of this type. They certainly show a favoritism to IBIS and Compendium, but it’s the authors’ prerogative in writing a book to choose approaches to focus on and how much to talk about the weaknesses of a favored approach. More generally, they took the “depth over breadth” approach in this book, with heavy details about a few approaches rather than touching on a more inclusive set. It’s great to see examples, but not at the exclusion of alternatives. Somewhat telling, the references list contains only 122 references—there’s no mention of the work of Schön, Toulmin, McCall, Moran, Carroll, or others who have had important (nay, foundational) things to say about the topics in this book.

So who should get this book? The book targets technology managers who are looking for a way to address complex problems, and plenty of software professionals (e.g., ones who want to “deprogram” their managers) could benefit from it as well. Certainly anyone who uses Compendium or, more generally, embraces IBIS as a design approach or wicked problems as a problem classification should read it. If you like Jeff Conklin’s book, then (dare I say it?) I bet you will like this one even more. To grossly oversimplify, this is like Conklin’s book but moreso: more motivation and framing of the problem type, lots more examples, 5 years more of experiences and Compendium advances, more history of where these ideas came from, and more positive and negative examples of Compendium’s utility. If that sounds appealing, you should get a copy of this book.

Three phases highlight the progress in this evolution:
- Carroll and his colleagues at IBM T.J. Watson in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were seeking ways to design not just toward creating a single design, but toward crafting a theory-based approach to design to enable designers to build on each others’ work in a meaningful, scientific way. This work continued until Carroll left for Virginia Tech, at which time his focus largely shifted to collaborative computing (save for a few papers that seemed to draw on his IBM work).
- Sutcliffe and Carroll’s collaboration, highlighted by Sutcliffe’s sabbatical time at Virginia Tech. Sutcliffe had been working for many years on knowledge abstraction in software design, and, like Carroll and his group, he was inspired by potential roles for theory in HCI.
- Three summative works led by Carroll, Sutcliffe, and Rosson. Each presented a different view of the role of claims—in the fields of design, engineering, and education, respectively.

Claims were introduced to the field of HCI in Carroll and Kellogg’s “Artifact as theory nexus” paper at CHI 1989. They seemed to base their definition on Toulmin’s 1958 use of the term, in which he established claims as a hypothesis-centered approach to crafting arguments. The Carroll and Kellogg paper seeks to move beyond the narrow focus of cognitive-based theories that were prominent in the 1980s (that focused on low-level phenomena like keystrokes) by introducing the a hermeneutic approach based on psychological claims, the effects on people of both natural and designed artifacts. Claims were the central part of a task-analysis framework, an attempt to position the design and interpretation of HCI artifacts as a central component of HCI research. This approach was intended to bridge the gap from research to innovation—reconciling the “hermeneutics vs theory-based design” conflict in the title. Several examples in the paper showed how developing an understanding of a claim—the artifact and its possible effects—can point out how much we have to learn and can encourage us to draw broader conclusions. Many of these issues, in particular the connection of claims and claims analysis to the task-artifact cycle, is elaborated in a Carroll, Kellogg, Rosson 1991, but the ideas were first presented in the 1989 paper.

A 1992 BIT paper by Carroll, Singley, and Rosson provided the first in-depth view of the tech transfer of UE results (though see the Moran and Carroll 1991 special issue and 1996 book described below). It connected the Scriven view of mediated evaluation to claims upsides and downsides, positioning claims as a contributor in the field of design rationale. In so doing, it expounded upon claims as a way to reuse knowledge, by encouraging designer consideration of specialized vs abstract claims. The expectation was that designers could use claims to “avoid throwing away thoughtful empirical work”. They avoided Grudin’s paradox, stating outright that design rationale (including claims-centric design rationale) was not an automatic mechanism, but requires additional human thought to yield a reusable knowledge unit.

A 1992 TOIS article by Carroll and Rosson opined that HCI should be an action-science “that produces ‘knowledge-in-implementation’ and views design practice as inquiry”. The paper argues that the task-artifact cycle is an action-science because designers must respond to user requirements by building artifacts with upsides and downsides—i.e., claims. This paper distinguishes the scenario/claim roles as such: “Where scenarios are a narrative account, claims are a causal account.” It argues that scenarios provided a situation narrative, but they are too rich, hard to classify, and hard to reuse (arguments brought up again and addressed to varying degrees by Sutcliffe, Chewar, and others). It is the claim that establish the link to action-science by facilitating design analysis, providing a mechanism for generalization and hypothesis, and explicitly recognizing potential tradeoffs.

A 1994 IJHCS paper by Carroll, Mack, Robertson, and Rosson provided a software-centric scenario-based design approach, with Point-of-View (POV) scenarios drawing parallels to object-centric/object-oriented development. This paper represents the most process-based, engineering-focused, and software-generative view of scenario-based design—both until this time and thereafter. Although claims play a fairly minor role in this paper (only appearing in step 4, leveraging the upsides and downsides in analysis and hillclimbing), there seemed to be opportunity for a much larger role: identifying objects, specifying interactions between objects, supporting inheritance, etc. There was also initial discussion of an education focus for POV scenarios, SBD, claims, and such—but it was not elaborated, and the 2002 Rosson and Carroll textbook described a more simplified approach to teaching design. This paper seemed to be hypothesized starting points that were not fully pursued by the authors—rich for mining by Sutcliffe, Chewar, and others in the years to come.

Moran and Carroll’s 1996 Design Rationale book (elaborated from their 1991 special issue of the HCI Journal) is pointed to as a landmark in the field of design rationale. It draws together contributions from Jintae Lee, Allan MacLean, Clayton Lewis, Simon Buckingham Shum, Gary Olson, Gerhard Fischer, Colin Potts, Jeff Conklin, Jonathan Grudin, and many others. Of relevance to the topic of claims is the introduction (by co-editors Tom Moran and Jack Carroll) and a Carroll and Rosson chapter. These chapters exhibit connections in their work to Horst Rittel (wicked problems, IBIS), Francis Bacon (deliberated evaluation), Herb Simon (environment and behavior), and Donald Schön (contexts of experience)—putting forth the most synthesized view of the position of claims within the design community. Some of the psychological themes, particularly those of Simon, are elaborated in Carroll’s 1997 journal paper in Annual Reviews of Psychology.

A 1999 Sutcliffe and Carroll IJHCS paper summarizes the joint efforts of the two authors on the use of claims as a knowledge capture and reuse mechanism. It delved into the possibility of using claims as a reuse mechanism, a concept touched upon in previous work but never described in sufficient detail. The paper introduced a formatting and classification scheme for claims (and scenarios) to enable their reuse, including a process and alternate pathways for claim evolution. Among the augmentations was the first explicit connection to its derivation history and background theory (i.e., where it came from), leading to the first claim map that can reflect parentage, original/evolving context, motivation, evidence, and possibilities for reuse. Also of great importance was the acknowledgement of work left to do: methods for indexing, tool support (hypertext links, structure matching), and the need for buy-in (and stay-in) incentives.

Sutcliffe’s 2000 TOCHI paper seeks to address the irrelevance of HCI in industry, particularly with regard to a theory-based engineering approach. The paper seeks to identify ways to deliver HCI knowledge in a tractable form that is reusable across applications—and, more importantly, across application areas. The paper argues that claims could provide a bridge if reuse scope was improved; specifically, if there were generic versions of claims and artifacts, and if there were mechanisms for matching claims to new application contexts. The bulk of the paper provides a three-step process to accomplish this: steps for creating more generic claims, mechanisms for cross-domain reuse, and approaches to recognize broader implications. Parts of these are elaborated in Sutcliffe’s book (described later) and in the dissertations of Christa Chewar and Shahtab Wahid. Other important products of this work are the notion of claim families, a claims-patterns comparison, and an explicit recognition of the importance of claims as “designer-digestible” knowledge (one of my favorite phrases).

This series of papers culminated with three books that offered very different visions of design, with very different roles for claims. I plan to elaborate on these books in a future post, but here’s a brief summary of each. Carroll’s 2000 Making Use book pulled together his vision for scenario-based design for scientists, with an eye toward the discovery process. Claims are used to augment the scenario-based design process, highlighting key aspects of the design (and leaving the generalization of claims as an exercise for the designer). Sutcliffe’s 2002 The Domain Theory provides a reuse-centric view of software engineering, extending the vision of Rittel and the design rationale literature and approaches. The role of claims is to make concrete Domain Theory’s high level of abstraction (too high, according to critics) by leveraging the high utility (but low flexibility and poor reuse) of claims. Finally, Rosson and Carroll’s 2002 Usability Engineering textbook advocates scenario-based development as a teaching tool, with claims and claims analysis a complementary and guiding technique to scenario development during each stage of design. It presents claims in a simplified, stripped-down manner (for better and worse) meant to be highly accessible for students. These books kicked off a period of scientific application, engineering refinement, and creative design that has continued in the years since they appeared.

Chronological bibliography:
== S. E. Toulmin (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge Press.
== J. M. Carroll and W. A. Kellogg (1989). “Artifact as theory-nexus: Hermeneutics meets theory-based design.” In Proceedings of CHI, pp. 7-14.
== J. M. Carroll, D. A. Singley, M. B. Rosson (1992). “Integrating theory development with design evaluation.” Behaviour and Information Technology 11, pp. 247-255.
== J. M. Carroll, M. B. Rosson (1992). “Getting around the task-artifact cycle: How to make claims and design by scenario.” ACM Transactions on Information Systems 10 2, pp. 181-212.
== J. M. Carroll, Mack, S. R. Robertson, M. B. Rosson (1994). “Binding objects to scenarios of use.” International Journal of Human Computer Systems 41, pp. 243-276.
== J. M. Carroll (1997). “Human-computer interaction: Psychology as a science of design.” Annual Reviews in Psychology 48, pp. 61-83.
== A. G. Sutcliffe and J. M. Carroll (1999). “Designing claims for reuse in interactive systems design.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 50, pp. 213-241.
== A. G. Sutcliffe (2000). “On the effective use and reuse of HCI knowledge.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7 2, pp. 197-221.
== J. M. Carroll (2000). Making Use: Scenario-based Design of Human-Computer Interactions. MIT Press.
== A. S. Sutcliffe (2002). The Domain Theory: Patterns for Knowledge and Software Reuse. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
== M. B. Rosson and J. M. Carroll (2002). Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction. Morgan Kaufman.

John Nichols’ The Milagro Beanfield War describes a battle over water rights in northern New Mexico. The primary focus is on the development and portrayal of characters (archetypes? stereotypes?) that reflect the independent spirit of a community of people who mainly want to be left alone. In the afterword to my edition of the book, Nichols notes “I hadn’t planned out the novel; I just started typing.” And it kind of shows, for better and worse, with a loosely-connected slow-moving story about amusing people doing odd things. And if you only have two hours, you can watch the well-received Robert Redford film adaptation of the book (disclaimer: I’ve not seen it yet).

Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang has something of a similar tone, focusing on a group of people who share little more than a strong sense of environmental responsibility in the face of building, dam, bridge, and road construction in the southwest. Brought together on a rafting trip, they decide the way to exhibit their love of nature is to destroy all aspects of the construction: the buildings and bridges and such, as well as the bulldozers and other machines that aided in their construction. Like the previous book, this one is more about the development of the characters and the portrayal of the landscape rather than telling a story—which can be a good thing if you want a sense of the American southwest.

From a very different genre is Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. It’s not often that a book can give away the ending in the title and still be worth reading, but this book manages to do just that—mainly because it’s more about the characters and the land than a story. It’s loosely based on a true story about Catholic priests sent to the American Southwest in the mid-1800s, and it does a great job of capturing the great difficulties in traveling across the desolate landscape of New Mexico (which still isn’t trivial, even with a giant GPS-equipped minivan). Cather paints a picture of the landscape that still exists today—reading this book will provide a nice preview if you’re planning to spend time in this area.

Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, which I talked about extensively in a previous post, captures life in the dust bowl (parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas) around the time of the Great Depression. The local towns around here named the book the area’s common book, leading to lots of interesting events with reflections passed down from those who survived during this era. It’s a good book made better by the events that were held in the area.

There are a couple of Boulder authors who came highly recommended by our local independent book store, the Boulder Book Store. Marlys Millhiser’s best-known book, The Mirror, was my favorite of the recommendations. It’s a sci-fi/horror mix about a young woman who switched places with her grandmother, leaving the the granddaughter to navigate the early 20th century with late 20th century knowledge and skills. But the most interesting aspect was in tracing and reflecting upon the evolving lifestyle in Boulder and the surrounding areas during the 20th century. Millhiser has written a number of other books, including a popular series of mysteries. And on the topic of mysteries, I read one of an extensive series by Boulder author Steven White and looked through a couple of others—they seemed like the usual mystery novels, but with references to Arapahoe Avenue and King Soopers and such sprinkled through them. If you like books by authors like John D. MacDonald and Dean Koontz and Robert Parker, then White’s mysteries (and Millhiser’s) will probably appeal to you. It’s not my favorite genre though, so I’m a bad person to comment on it.

So that’s the “local” reading I’ve done—comments and suggestions greatly appreciated.

The cards come in a set of around 30, with a picture and caption on one side (e.g., “at the beach” with a picture of a user sitting at the beach with a mobile device on her lap) and a description of the situation on the other side (e.g., “Spending a day on the beach might expose your mobile device to …”). The cards are available through the workshops that Larsson and his group run, accompanied by a nice 64-page book that describes some activities that can be done with the cards.

Dynamic User Experience context cards from HaptiMap

Part of the draw for me is that the cards are a lot like the PIC-UP cards and Brain cards we developed in our lab—but with a focus on context instead of impact (for PIC-UP) or technological features (for Brain). For each of the card sets, there’s an assumption that the user population has certain things that they know, but certain things they don’t—or things they need to be reminded of. In the case of context cards, it’s context, encouraging the designer to consider how will the technological device you’re developing work at the beach, or in the dark, or while moving. Seems like a reasonable approach, and one that the HaptiMap group apparently uses in developing mobile products and in running workshops. Looking forward to seeing more from this group.

Two writings were central to this historical review, connecting to all the other papers referenced here: Hypermedia Support for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on from gIBIS and QOC by Buckingham Shum, Selvin, Sierhuis, Conklin, Haley, and Nuseibeh (the title of which inspired this post’s title); and Rationale Management in Software Engineering: Concepts and Techniques by Dutoit, McCall, Mistrik, and Paech. And a great many more readings were highly influential and enlightening: the classic “Design Rationale” book by Moran and Carroll that captured the 1996 state-of-the-art for the design rationale field, the recent pair of special issues of the Human Technology journal on Creativity and Rationale in Software Design, and ongoing practitioners’ views on wicked problems and IBIS via blog posts and white papers by Paul Culmsee, Kailash Awati, Jeff Conklin, and others I’m surely forgetting.

Rittel is often pointed to as the initiator of design rationale due to a series of papers from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. He laid out an extensive definition for wicked problems, featuring ten distinguishing properties, with Melvin Webber in a 1973 paper Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (though Rittel and his colleagues had been discussing the issue and postulating approaches for at least five years prior to the paper). Other Rittel papers suggested that the right approach to address wicked problems was through issues, situationally-dependent questions that are “raised, argued, settled, ‘dodged’, or substituted” during a design session. Rittel’s concept of an issue is core to his Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) approach to group design and decision making, in which issues start a questioning process that links each issue with facts, positions, arguments, and other structures through knowledge relationships. The result is a knowledge space that doesn’t solve the issue, but rather creates an environment of “support” and “planning” where people better understand each others’ points of view.

IBIS was refined and simplified in subsequent years, and the IBIS tree-like structure led to many automated tools. Rittel’s student Ray McCall created a Procedural Hierarchy of Issues (PHI) refinement to IBIS that included many of the early tools: PROTOCOL, MIKROPLIS, PHIIDIAS, and JANUS. Other approaches to design rationale management drew inspirations from this early IBIS/PHI work: QOC by McLean, Young, Bellotti, and Moran; and DRL from the work of Potts and Bruns and of Lee. Perhaps the first widely-used tool was gIBIS, a graphical IBIS tool developed and popularized in the 1990s by Jeff Conklin and his collaborators, and its follow-up tool QuestMap. Much of the reflective literature on design rationale groups these techniques together, with Dutoit et al. noting that “there are so few significant differences in the schemas of IBIS, QOC, and DRL” (though there’s an excellent detailing of the differences in that paper). In general, these tools tended to be less intrusive than the original IBIS approach (e.g., less formality, resulting in simpler structures) and more prescriptive outcomes (with specific solutions). This simpler model enabled more immediate value to the participants, for whom value from the tool was imperative for any time investment.

Conklin joined with numerous other researchers and practitioners—Simon Buckingham Shum, Al Selvin, and others—to create the most current and widely-used instantiation of the IBIS ideas in the Compendium dialog mapping tool. I discussed Compendium in a previous tool review post, though I didn’t use it to its fullest capacity—in a collaborative situation in which divergent opinions need to be drawn together toward a common understanding. The big issues that I had with Compendium were with scalability and history: it’s hard to see more than a dozen nodes at once, and support for rolling back to previous views was limited. But it’s much more usable than gIBIS, and it seems to have attracted a fairly sizable following among usability consultants. Features like scalability and history don’t seem to be a focus of the Compendium tool. In fact, it seems that the biggest contribution of Compendium is not in how knowledge is represented (which had been done before) or in how it is manipulated (simplified…or in some cases ignored or deferred to a future version of the tool), but in the social processes around how the tool is used: an expert in knowledge management and the IBIS/Compendium provides real-time guidance during the analysis process, toward helping the participants debate directions moving forward.

In summary, two related trends that I notice in these IBIS-based tools are that (1) the “hard” stuff is left for experts; and (2) the approaches seek more immediate value to designers. Perhaps this is a response to a shift from academia to consultant environments—consultants certainly need to carve out an “expert” role for themselves, and they’d better make sure there’s value to the participants at the end of the day.

Another trend from IBIS to QOC to gIBIS to Compendium is that the approaches seem to be increasingly question-driven—as opposed to issue-driven—with progressively fewer structuring options for the knowledge that is generated. Does the path of simpification and certainty of IBIS tools violate the original wicked problem mandate that problems don’t have solutions, merely different states of being? Or does the simplification actually match the vision of wickedness that Rittel initially posed? I worry that the increasingly tree-like structure of many of these graphs draws designers further away from the initial problem and doesn’t encourage revisiting issues (though I’ll acknowledge again that Rittel’s original IBIS graph (non-tree) structure with its many loops and cycles is far harder to understand).

One big drawback I see with all of these approaches is their inability to deal with the changing truth that occurs in most design efforts and is prominent in the field of human-computer interaction. I think that’s central to my issues with Compendium and other tools—regarding scalability and history—in which problem spaces become more complex over time. Lots of factors—the state of technology, the skill sets of the designers, the knowledge, skills, and acceptance levels of the target user population—change over time, and decisions that were made at any single point may not apply later. Recall two other key feature of wicked problems: that solutions (or problem states) aren’t right or wrong, and that there’s no stopping rule. Popper, as paraphrased in Rittel and Webber’s 1973 paper, suggested that solutions to problems should only be posited as “hypotheses offered for refutation”; otherwise, you can end up pursuing tame solutions to wicked problems.

Finally, we must be careful that we’re not reducing the wickedness of a problem to the creation of a claims map, or the mapping of a dialog, or the removal of storms from brains—in effect, turning the wicked problem into a tame one. Or, if we choose to do that, we must ensure that, when a design team goes back to look at a DR representation, each element in it is appropriately questioned. Sometimes computer tools can hurt in that regard—they help designers violate some tenet of wickedness by providing a “memory” that captures truths that don’t exist, or by encouraging the capture of knowledge at the wrong granularity.

One thing that struck me from the talk was his description of the 787 development effort as the “best collection of notes that he’s seen taken on a project” (rough quote). He talked a lot about the tools and advances in the dCog approach—but he also had great praise for the team that was working on the project. The team seemed to know each other well (many were current or recent lab members), and they had a native language speaker on the team whom Ed described as vital to the project’s success. To me, it seemed that the tight team with a common lingua franca regarding the research approach and methods was as important or more important than any tool or method. And Ed was clearly well-connected with the team as individuals and as a group, sharing stories about every one of them it seemed.

Ed also talked briefly about where dCog is going (though he noted that he could have given another whole talk on that). His focus over the last 5-10 years has been to look at how embodiment connects to dCog; specifically, how the indexicality of gestures and other embodied actions can be captured and interpreted. He acknowledges the ease with which video data can be captured…and the great difficulty in processing it in a fast and cheap manner. He’s looking to sensor data, innovations in eye-tracking, and Kinect-like motion-capture systems as a way not only to capture more data but also to index it. This will be a gateway to more rapid debriefings and more meaningful analyses.

Also good to know was this closing quote: “23 years of studying flying makes me more comfortable about flying”. Good to know we’re going in the right direction!

For a discipline like HCI, in which changes in context have great influence over the way a user interface should look and act, it seems that claims often would be the better choice. Does that mean claims are good and patterns are bad? Not at all…but it does mean that great care should be exhibited in choosing which to use for a given design problem. Patterns seem well-suited for domains like web development, in which there’s an assumption that a typical individual working alone at a desktop or laptop machine is seeking to accomplish a task. By “typical”, I mean, e.g., that the person has close to 20/20 vision (perhaps corrected), cognitive skills sufficient to process a fairly complex screen of information, motor skills sufficient to use a mouse and keyboard, and some experience using a web browser. But as soon as those typical traits are violated in your target user population, or as soon as you start designing for noisy or busy or mobile situations, or when you’re seeking to do something very different with your interface, it’s necessary to question the truths—which seems to be a strength of claims.

These lessons were underscored in one of my current projects—designing work support interfaces for young people with moderate to severe cognitive disabilities. So many of the mobile interface claims just don’t hold when designing for people with cognitive disabilities: button sizes have to be bigger (sometimes with only a single “button”), the number of choices have to be limited (to two or at most three!), and single-switch scanning should redundantly be employed to communicate on-screen text. In addition, the experiences have to be tailored differently: repetition in experience and questioning is often more important than reflection, and great care must be taken in the use of appropriate symbol sets. An expert at mobile interface design would almost have to “start over”, throwing away (or, at a minimum, reconsidering) all knowledge about how to design the interface.

A lot of so-called “truth” in interface design goes away when the context changes. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to capture design truths, just that they should be treated with scientific skepticism when encountered in a new design problem. Capabilities of humans can differ depending on user population characteristics, as can the situations in which an interface will be used. My current thought is to use claims in this way: making it clear in design activities that they are meant to be challenged and questioned, not taken at face value. It’s there that I think the greatest value for claims (and the distinguishing value from other knowledge capture approaches) can be realized.

Cognitive disabilities are manifested in a wide variety of ways, and as such there’s no one set of symptoms even for a given cognitive disability; e.g., someone recovering from a stroke may exhibit memory loss, an inability to understand things they see, reduced capability to speak, or other symptoms–and that’s just one of many types of cognitive disabilities. Given these differences, it’s tough to come up with an agenda that speaks to everyone. The folks in charge of the conference did an admirable job, and I’ll touch on some of the highlights for me (and put forth a “wish list” for future conferences, from the perspective of a first-time attendee).

The morning sessions focused on the national- and state-level economic issues that affect (and often dictate) the direction of cognitive disability research and development. With the economy in a bit of a tailspin, this session was, as you might expect, a bit dismal. It was great to have some of the numbers and statistics available—it’s certainly something that I expect to use in writing proposals and papers—but I wish it had been covered in less time.

The poster and demo sessions (there was a morning one and an afternoon one) were both great. They were dominated by projects from the University of Colorado schools, and it was good to see the work that’s been going on around here. It was also great to connect with the companies in the area who are working to improve technological solutions to problems of people with cognitive disabilities. In particular, I got to talk extensively with people at AbleLink Technologies and Imagine Smart Home. It was also helpful for me as a first-timer that there were posters highlighting prior conferences from the last 3-4 years.

Lunch was held as a set of hosted roundtables, with an impressive list of hosts. I was a bit lost trying to find the best match to sit in on–the list of roundtables was not available on the website, so I couldn’t plan ahead of time. And the tables had the leaders’ names on them, but not the topic! I was able to sit at a table on dispersing technology with Rodney Bell, which was pretty on-topic for me–but after hearing the panels in the afternoon there were a few that I might have chosen to attend instead. If I could change one thing, I’d switch the panels to earlier in the day to provide a preview of the roundtable leaders to the attendees.

Rodney Bell did a good job with his roundtable. As a technology consultant for the Coleman Institute, he was clearly plugged in with the needs and directions of the field. He had a great list of advice, though he touched on one of my pet peeves for the area: he stated that “smartphones and tablets are the future of computing” for cognitive disabilities. I certainly think that they are part of the future, but there’s a lot of need for the key characteristics of a desktop or laptop, as there are things that devices of the form factor of a phone or tablet just can’t (and never will be able to) do very well or at all. Choose a smartphone or tablet when you need the portability or combination of functionalities (e.g., GPS, accelerometer, sensors) that they provide, but sometimes the desktops or laptops that may already be in hand will meet your needs as well or much better.

The two 5-person, 1-moderator panels were the most informative element of the conference. It provided an opportunity to get varying opinions on two key topics for cognitive disabilities: cloud computing and technological integration. Clayton Lewis led the topic on the former, and he had clearly thought a lot about the questions for each panelist. Ann Cameron Caldwell led the other panel, featuring some differing opinions on the roles that technology can and should hold for people with cognitive disabilities (from self-advocacy networks, corporate leaders, and others). I would have been even happier if the panels were longer. And again, I wish I’d heard a bit from each of those people earlier in the day so I could have made a point to approach them or attend their roundtables—perhaps just a lament from a first-time attendee that most didn’t experience.

The last two talks were very engaging as well. Cathy Bodine, the Executive Director of the Assistive Technology Partners Group at UC Denver talked about some of their uses of technology in recovery and rehab—and I got to have a drink with her afterwards and landed an invitation to her open house next week. And Peter Blanck, a University Professor and PhD/JD at Syracuse University talked about his experiences as a lawyer on the side of people with disabilities—wow, what a dynamic and engaging job of integrating stories around the key points of his arguments. He argued that cyberspace is a “place” that should be accessible, just as physical places like stores and offices must be accessible to people with disabilities, and he highlighted key issues to b e resolved in the courts related to cloud computing, cross-country regulations, and more.

So in all, it was definitely a worthwhile experience. I plan to have a couple of posters in next year’s event, and I expect to be better positioned to gain more from the event.