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Abstract:
Virtual Reality has
been hailed as the panacea for improving many activities, including easier
learning, better understanding and training, more engagement and more pleasure.
It has been claimed that the technology can provide opportunities for
new kinds of experience, enabling users to interact with objects and navigate
in 3D space in ways not possible in the physical world. However, little
is known about the nature of navigation and user interaction with virtual
environments. Consequently there is little guidance on what methods to
use to design VEs to enable the putative benefits to materialise. In my
talk, I will outline how different kinds of research activities (theory
building and application, exploratory and experimental studies, prototyping,
user testing) are instrumental in informing the design of virtual environments.
I will show how general user-centred design methods can be tailored when
tackling specific issues concerned with the design of VEs. To illustrate our
approach, I will describe how we have designed a virtual theatre for young
children to support learning through playing.
Abstract:
Most of today's digital
libraries are not designed for children. To produce usable and useful DLs,
designers need to ensure that good design features are incorporated, taking
into consideration users' needs. We describe our experience working with
children as design partners and testers in building a children's digital
library of stories and poems for 11-14 year olds, using a concrete example
to demonstrate our design philosophy and research approach. The study provides
insights on useful design features children's digital
libraries should have,
and their importance to children. The initial work we have done highlights
issues and provides a basis for the building of usable and useful digital
libraries for children.
Wednesday 25 April
2001 - 2pm, B39, Engineering & Computing Building, Applied Sciences
Requirements Engineering
as Performance: Ethnographer meets Requirements Engineer
Bridgette Wessels
, Dept of Computing Science
, University of Newcastle
Although there is some evidence that researchers
in requirements engineering (RE) reflect on their practices, there is
a lack of research that focuses on RE as a particular type of social activity.
This points to a need to understand the social processes of RE, which could
inform an analysis of RE' potential (and inability) to contribute to system
development. In order to understand the dynamics of RE in the context of
system development this paper discusses RE from a cultural anthropological
stance. The argument is positioned in current debated about RE and Information
Systems (IS) literature, and is grounded in a particular IS project called
AMASE, which involves an ethnographic stance in its own activities. The
paper discusses some of the debate around requirements from an anthropological
perspective, which serves to problematise some of RE's assumptions. It then
describes the AMASE project in its role of modeling socio-technical systems.
In relation to both the above points the concept of ethnography as both reflective
and reflexive practice in design constituencies is introduced. Finally the
ways in which the performance of the design constituency is understood by
ethnography, grounded in the AMASE project, are used to shed light on the
social processes of RE in system design.
Abstract:
In this talk, I will
discuss the nature and management of inconsistency in software development.
The motivation of the work described arises from the inevitable existence
of inconsistencies in many real software processes and products, and
the need for techniques that tolerate inconsistency and support its management.
The talk will overview different kinds of inconsistency and present a
framework describing our research agenda for inconsistency management.
I will then discuss some past and current work on
providing formal (logic-based)
support for reasoning and acting in the presence of inconsistency. Some
lessons learned about inconsistency management in NASA requirements specification
documents will conclude the talk.
Abstract:
I will present
a number of research projects in the PLAY research group, where we explored
different ways to interact with computers beyond the desktop. For instance,
in "Informative Art", wallmounted displays showed dynamic information in
a style inspired by a variety of modern painters. In "Pirates!", users joined
a context-aware computer game and had to move and interact in a physical
space as well as through hand-held computers.
Abstract:
An increased availability of information technology
(IT) is currently influencing decisions to monitor structures more frequently.
IT is invariably used to interpret structural behaviour from monitoring
data.
However, engineers remain frustrated with IT results.
Engineers work with incomplete knowledge, problem specific characteristics,
and context dependency. Although such conditions require interactivity
and multiple
solutions, most structural monitoring software provides
automatic data-analysis with one interpretation.
The aim of this research is to determine appropriate
computer support for engineers to consider multiple-interpretations so
that they can converge upon better explanations of current structural behaviour.
This is done through the presentation of an interactive space of solutions
to which engineers can add contextual information and delete irrelevant
knowledge as necessary. In order to do this successfully, compatible human-computer
interaction (HCI) for engineers is needed with suitable visualisations
of
data and behavioural interpretations.
The main contribution of this work is the inception of Engineer-Computer Interaction (ECI) which is a new sub-domain of HCI specifically tailored to engineers. ECI provides a generic blueprint which i) uses an information classification schema, ii) integrates standard engineer characteristics and working procedures into the software, and iii) provides a modular approach to task decomposition; for the development of software.
A software toolkit for structural monitoring - Structural Monitoring Tool Kit (SMTK) - has been developed according to the ECI blueprint in order to illustrate ECI utility. SMTK was empirically evaluated through standard HCI techniques to illustrate its compatibility with engineers when performing structural monitoring data interpretation. Results show that engineers prefer software which has been developed following ECI than existing software because ECI software is tailored to their needs. A second prototype is suggested for in-service prediction to illustrate ECI generality. Finally, areas for future work have been highlighted.
In conclusion, ECI is useful for the design and
development of software for structural monitoring and has the potential
to be applied to other engineering tasks. The ECI extensible foundation
leads to revealing
comparison between structural monitoring and
tasks such as analysis.
Designing for
ludic values (date tbc)
Bill Gaver,
Computer Related Design
, Royal College of Art