HCI2002/EUPA: Mackay puts Conference in Context

Wendy Mackay of INRIA’s InSitu Computing Lab opened the 2002 HCI/First European Usability Professional’s Association conference held at South Bank University this year. The chosen theme was "Memorable but Invisible", and she began the trend of arguing with its title. The conference auditorium was full as she suggested that it was not the interface that should be memorable, but the experience of using it. Then she questioned also the wisdom of this: perhaps habituation was better than memorability?

Next she moved into the field of invisibility, offering two kinds of transparency: the seamless experience of using a 'black box' and the kind of application that makes its guts visible to the user. She pointed out that, unlike with physical objects such as books, the user needs considerable contextual information to work out what to do with virtual objects since they can be operating with many hidden assumptions and within a variety of programs or systems.

Twisting this round, she devoted the rest of the talk to looking at what contextual information the gadgets need about the user. 'In situ computing is not just the physical context, also the user’s context (much trickier).'

Among her many interesting points were a consideration of the disciplines that inform HCI: science, design and engineering. She looked briefly at the different cultures of each and their relationship with context: the software engineer seeks to be rid of it, to build models and find the general case; the designer depends on the design brief and the context of use is rarely considered outside this; while the scientist traditionally searched for the generalisable tendency, but has become open to the idea of context with the emergence of chaos theory.

From looking at the value of combining the 'scientific' quest for fundamental understanding with inspiration from considerations of use, she moved on to looking at the outcome: co-adaptive systems. This, she defined as a system where the users adapt to the new technology and they also adapt the technology to meet their needs.

Frustratingly, most customisation goes on when a product first arrives into someone's life, she observed, and this is also the time when the user will know least about how they will want or need to use it.

But she stressed the need for writing in flexibility to design, both for the physical contexts of use and the individual's: 'What you design will be co-opted by users so design for it,' she concluded. 'Design with abstractions that retain detail; borrow from sciences that respect context and take advantage of the physical world's context.'

Interestingly, her talk continued the theme adopted by Tom Moran to close the "Designing Interactive Systems" conference this June. He discussed and advocated 'adaptive design': a form of design that is deliberately open to adaptation by its users (see Tom Moran brings Adaptation to Design) – a trend recognising the increasing importance of what Usability News has christened 'end-designers' (see Ann's Rant: Users as Designers - Challenge of the Network Age).

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