Research
The human-computer interaction design group is concerned with the design of user experiences for various application areas. Core areas include augmented learning and interactivity, collaborative working and shared understanding, conversation spaces, design process and methods, dynamic visualizations, HCI theory, and music informatics.
Core Project Areas
Augmented learning and interactivity
Collaborative working and shared understanding
Online communication spaces
Design theories, process, and methods
Dynamic visualizations
HCI theory
Music informatics
Security
Augmented learning and interactivity
| Project Title | People | |
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Digital Learning Environments Digital Learning Environments (DLEs) are advanced learning systems that exploit the Web media to create powerful learning. We're exploring the use of story space in our work with Time-Revealed Scenarios as well as with sophisticated practice systems such as Glerb.com. |
Marty Siegel, Elizabeth Boling |
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Mobile learning: The LillyPad Project The LillyPad project is investigating how mobile collaborative technologies can be designed to support and augment integrated inquiry processes both indoors and outdoors. Our approach is to enable students readily and meaningfully to switch their attention between physical activities in the field, digital interactions with a mobile computer and the collaborative interactions taking place in a group setting. In particular, we are developing mobile collaborative tools that can facilitate the fluid movement between observing what is in the physical world, collecting and recording real data in a database, comparing this with previously stored data, analyzing it using visualizations, and using this to generate hypotheses and draw conclusions that can be tested in the field. In so doing, our aim is to enable students to be able to practice more integrated inquiry processes; encouraging them to begin to synthesize and reflect more upon their various inquiries in both physical and digital worlds, and be able to communicate this to their peers and teachers in novel ways. (more...) |
Yvonne Rogers, Lenore Tedesco, Kay Connelly, Polly Baker, Bob Hall, Kara Salazar, Andy Kurtz, Richie Hazlewood, Tammy Toscos |
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WisdomTools, Inc. In 1999, Marty Siegel created Indiana University's first start-up company. WisdomTools focuses on the development of “next generation” e-learning tools for the Web. The “Scenarios” product is designed to develop deep, insightful learning, a kind of “practical intelligence” or tacit knowledge. |
Marty Siegel |   |
Collaborative working and shared understanding
| Project Title | People | |
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Activity-Centered Design for Physical-Digital Collaborative Environments Our research focuses uniquely on developing a framework that specifies which human activities can be better supported by which configurations of physical and digital devices in such environments. We propose a framework of configurations of collaborative physical and digital environments which owes to activity-oriented analysis and thorough investigation of existing examples of such environments. |
Youn-kyung Lim, Eli Blevis |
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Complexity, Collaboration and Creativity in Human-Computer Interaction Design Understanding actual users and their activities is critical to design a usable and useful interactive products. However, it requires large amount of resources if we try to do a rigorous analysis for deeper understanding of user experience. This research aims to develop tools and methods that enable designers to do this more effectively, by reducing the complication but enhancing the key ideas and creativity. This research project specifically focuses on the value of human-centeredness in design as well as collaborative and social aspects of people's activities using interactive products. |
Youn-kyung Lim, Yvonne Rogers, Keval Mehta |
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CoSpace: Shared surfaces and collaborative interactions This project explores how novel interactive surfaces can be designed and used by co-located groups to enhance collaboration and interaction with digital information and physical artifacts. Domains we are looking at are collaborative learning, working, and decision-making. The project has been using the state-of-the-art interactive tabletop, DiamondSpin, donated by MERL. It is also investigating how other surfaces can be integrated, including large mixed paper-electronic wall displays, tangibles and ambient displays. A central concern is how best to support the diversity of interactions that take place in these new forms of co-spaces. This involves investigating both (i) the processes of management and collaboration in person-technology interactions and (ii) processes of visualizing, manipulating, comparing and integrating information. The project follows on from the research Yvonne Rogers was carrying out on the eSpace project and the Dynamo project in the UK. |
Yvonne Rogers, Youn-kyung Lim, Richie Hazlewood, Tammy Toscos, Erik Pukinskis |
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The Design Exchange My main research project to date has been the design of a system I call the Design Exchange, which is targeted at allowing for the collaborative construction and reuse of design knowledge. In its present form, the Design Exchange uses open source software and is implemented as a Wiki. I am using the Design Exchange in my graduate class. In addition, I have conducted a number of participant ("user") studies to inform the thoughtful use of interactivity in the Design Exchange. The Design Exchange is very much a work in progress and needs to go through several more design iterations before it can be made to be widely available. Nonetheless, there is enough activity that an interested reader may wish to look at it directly. You can do so at: http://design.informatics.indiana.edu/wiki. The Design Exchange is informed by the theme of design in the following ways. What design is about: There are many levels of understanding what design is about and the Design Exchange Wiki seeks to accommodate many of these. It is intended as a container not only for everything from object-centered descriptions of design to empirical studies of human interactions to concept sketches and prototype plans, but also to strategic accounts of the social value of a design. What design is: The Design Exchange seeks to provide a framework for creating basic elements of design and for structuring these elements into design explanations. |
Eli Blevis, Youn-kyung Lim, Muzaffer Ozakca, Shweta Aneja, Justin Donaldson |
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Piki-Wiki The Piki-Wiki is a new project that is quite speculative. It is a very abstract and ambitious idea. The Piki-Wiki is envisioned as an open source system for eliciting images and sounds from all over the world, indexing them in global co-ordinates and time, and making this data widely available. The concept is different than an ordinary photography site, as the Piki-Wiki is not intended as an outlet for personal expression nor a repository for family memories; rather, it is conceived as a means for producing a highly detailed global portrait. Piki-Wiki is in some sense a notion of open source news, except that it is restricted to pictures and ambient sound rather than text in a particular language. There are many issues that need to be worked out about the Piki-Wiki, from the need to ensure that such a system is culturally sensitive and compliant with human subject research protocols and intentions, to the actual design, engineering, and distribution of a mechanism--possibly a special purpose appliance--capable of collecting the data. |
Eli Blevis |
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Promoting Integrated and Collaborative Learning through the Design and Application of Pervasive Technologies This project is funded by IU's Pervasive Technology Labs fellowship program. It is concerned with the design and application of pervasive technologies to promote novel forms of learning that move beyond the classroom. Ubiquitous computing and mobile technologies provide much scope for designing innovative learning experiences that can take place in a variety of outdoor (e.g., parks, city centers, woodlands) and indoor settings (e.g., museums, learning centers, labs, home). While learning activities already occur in these contexts, pervasive technologies can enable such activities to be more integrated and collaborative. Outdoor fieldtrips and computer-based indoor learning activities are typically performed separately; for example, students may go on a field trip and observe and collect data that, on another occasion, they will input into a software simulation package back in the classroom. This separation of what are interlinked activities can make it difficult for students to see and understand the connections between what are essentially the same representations and processes, being studied but in different contexts. |
Yvonne Rogers, Richie Hazlewood, Polly Baker, Lenore Tedesco |
Virtual reality and online communication spaces
| Project Title | People | |
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Amateur Multimedia Narrative and Games Massive communities of amateur animators and game designers have developed in recent years, often around a particular technology. A notable example is Newgrounds, a Web site that is home to more than a quarter of a million Flash submissions. These include animations, music videos, and video games. The design and development of video games--even low budget, low quality productions such as those found on Newgrounds--is not a trivial endeavor, requiring drawing, programming, screenwriting, animation, and game rule design abilities. Yet Flash designers, most of them young (high school and college) and very inexperienced, have contributed tens of thousands of them to Newgrounds alone. In this study, we catalog and infer standard game play rules, physics and artificial intelligence similarities among over a hundred amateur flash-based games. Our analysis reveals that the designers commonly (though not universally) rely on a common core of game design strategies--including thematic, scripted/interactive, and rules-based--and that these constitute the "grammar" of amateur Flash games at Newgrounds today. |
John Paolillo, Jeffrey Bardzell, Matt Weldon, Will Ryan |  |
Conversation Spaces Interactive communication has become faster and shorter, with “Instant Messenger” (IM) being the best example. This project explores human communication in the opposite direction: deep, meaningful conversation spaces. We're looking beyond threaded forums to design new, computer imaginative ways of people conversing given access to the Web and social networking environments. |
Marty Siegel, Jesse Beach, Shaowen Bardzell, Jeffrey Bardzell |
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Improving Human Communication in Online Forums The purpose of this study is to investigate how people interact with one another in online discussion forum postings. The researchers will seek to understand how the forums encourage people to participate in certain ways, while discouraging them from acting in others. The findings will help the researchers design new online forum applications that improve user's ability to communicate. |
Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Marty Siegel |
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Narrative Temporality and Game Rules The study of temporality is one of the key strategies in the narratological analysis of texts, as it casts into relief the relations among the sequence of events recounted (histoire), the recounting itself (discours), and the context of the performance of this recounting. This strategy is of value in the study of video games, especially cinematic games such as the Final Fantasy series, for which storytelling is so central to their experience. Yet narratological methods have come under vigorous attack in video game studies, which is more skeptical than film studies was about the importation of narratological theory. Following Manovich's more general concept of transcoding, we are discovering and interpreting the complex relationships between the semiotic elements on the narratological level and the game rule/algorithmic elements on the logical level, with the hope of constructing a theory that can benefit from narratological and ludological analyses by simultaneously recognizing that games are logical, rule-bound systems and culturally meaningful artifacts. |
Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Will Ryan |  |
Sex-Interface-Aesthetics: The Docile Avatars and Embodied Pixels of Second Life BDSM Anyone paying the slightest attention to virtual worlds knows that sex is a major part of them, in particular, more fetishized forms of sex. There are obvious reasons for the popularity of fetish sex in these worlds: they can be considerably less expensive than real-life fetish sex; the anonymity of these worlds frees people to act without the usual social restraints; and the increasingly compelling visuals of these environments provide high quality visual simulation. Yet the obvious explanations fail to account for the attractiveness of a subculture, such as that of BDSM, in the first place. We believe that metaverses such as Second Life provide new interfaces to a classic, if taboo, aesthetic. We contend that virtual worlds enable the construction of a BDSM aesthetic that is connected to, yet distinct from, the real-life BDSM aesthetic, and that moreover the differences can largely be explained by structural forces associated with computer interfaces themselves. |
Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell |  |
The Virtual Event Aesthetic Virtual worlds may start off as spaces, and initially, most players devote themselves to exploring them. However, over time, players increasingly value other players more than the environment and canned quests or mindless monster hacking. Perhaps the primary mechanism for players to come together is the event, in which players meet in a particular time and place and work together to do a given activity (such as dancing, a costume contest, defeating a nasty monster, recovering a quest item). Event design, then, takes on an importance that rivals environment design. So what defines a successful event? What are the characteristics that many or even all events share? In the Virtual Event Aesthetic study, we analyze dozens of virtual events to expose their characteristics, specifically the ways that they create community and other forms of value for players. |
Shaowen Bardzell, Jeffrey Bardzell, Will Ryan |  |
Design theories, process, and methods
| Project Title | People | |
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Digital Creativity Software applications designed for creativity are not only written in object-oriented languages, but their tools, operations, behaviors, scripting languages, and visual interfaces also assume a certain object-orientedness of the media they are used to create as well as assume that their users will work in a design paradigm that is also informed by principles of object-oriented programming. This study examines some of the aesthetic, ethical, and socio-cultural consequences of the object-oriented "grammar" of these creative applications. |
Jeffrey Bardzell |  |
Incorporating Ontological Design Philosophy into a Design Framework Accessible by Design Professionals Many theorists of design are now leveraging the power and sophistication of schools of critical theory (including phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and deconstruction) to create powerful new design philosophies. These theories, by their very nature, are difficult, rendering them largely inaccessible outside of the academy. Unfortunately, designers will design whether or not they have access to adequate theories. In this study, we explore the extent to which it is possible to elaborate a general design framework that is meaningfully informed by design philosophy and yet accessible to design professionals outside of the halls of the academy. |
Jeffrey Bardzell, Eli Blevis |
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Prototyping in HCI Design Prototyping has been a core activity in a design process. However, it has also been true that there is still lack of systematic knowledge about prototypes and prototyping. In this research, we explore the definition of prototypes and the more effective ways of using prototypes in interaction design by re-examining the current notions of fidelity of prototypes, different methods of using prototypes, and possible misperceptions of prototypes in use. |
Youn-kyung Lim, Erik Stolterman |
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Dynamic visualization
| Project Title | People | |
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TimeWeb TimeWeb is a Web-based visualization tool that allows users to explore space and time relationships. It was first used as a front-end to a complex African prehistory archaeological database. Today we're exploring new uses and new designs to explore the Web from a time- and place-based perspective. |
Marty Siegel, Youn-kyung Lim |
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Über-me What are the design, security, political, and ethical issues around tracking everything that a person produces (documents, speech, notes, etc.)? This project begins to articulate these issues and explores how the data may be displayed over time. | Marty Siegel |  |
HCI theory
| Project Title | People | |
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Computer Imagination New technologies are often seen and marketed as including and superceding earlier technologies (as the photograph was seen to improve upon painting, and cinema was seen to improve upon the photograph). However, the full potential of new technologies is often overlooked, in part because people can only see in the new an improved version of an old, rather than the new technology in its own right. When the hitherto overlooked potential of a new technology is realized, the result is often culturally transformative. This study examines early applications of technology, evaluating "computer imagination" as a measure of the extent to which the transformative potential of an application was realized. |
Jeffrey Bardzell, Marty Siegel |
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Critical Studies in Human-Computer Interaction Design Theory The intention is to explore, analyze and criticize underlying assumptions and the rationale behind some of the most influential theoretical attempts in HCI and related fields.The purpose is to develop a deeper understanding on how theories can influence practice and to develop critical thinking around the role, purpose, and function for theories in the field. The project is divided into separate studies focused on the concepts: design complexity, concept design, interaction complexity, and critical HCI. |
Erik Stolterman |  |
Music Informatics
| Project Title | People | |
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| Limestick: Laptop Interface for Musical Expression
The Limestick is an experimental interface for laptop musicians that focuses on improving the connection between the performer and the audience. The form and function of the Limestick enables the performer to be the focal point of the performance, and allows the audience members to have a clear view of the performer and a clear understanding of how the performer's actions relate to the music. |
Justin Donaldson |  |
Music Plus One The goals of my "Music Plus One" project are similar to the more familiar "Music Minus One" (MMO). MMO makes a recording of a piece of music for soloist and accompaniment, such as a sonata or concerto, where only the accompaniment is actually recorded. The music is prefaced by several warning clicks (something like Lawrence Welk's "and a one and a two and a ..."), and the soloist tries to play along with the recording. A heartfelt yet futile battle of wills follows which eventually results in the live player's unconditional surrender to the robotic insistence of the recording. Thus, contrary to both musical etiquette and common sense, the soloist must follow the accompaniment.More |
Christopher Raphael |