Gale Moore

Reducing the gap between what users know and what they need to know

Universal usability [17] is currently impeded by system complexity and poorly-crafted interfaces which lead to confusion, frustration, and failure. One of the key challenges is the gap between what users know and what they need to know [17, p. 86]. This paper describes and presents early results from three related research projects designed to identify and close this gap and to examine how users might learn what they need to know.

Designing for human emotion: ways of knowing

Recently researchers from a range of disciplines have begun inquiring into the place of emotion in the design and use of technology to ask how, and in what ways, products and systems evoke emotions in people and how these emotions can be understood, measured, or more generally assessed? This diversity of perspectives has brought theoretical and methodological richness to the field, yet has made it increasing challenging to make sense of the literature. This paper argues that by organizing these diverse accounts of design according to the underlying epistemology and theoretical perspective, it is possible to accommodate a variety of approaches and provide a way to give meaning to the diverse outcomes. Published papers representing a range of the approaches to research on human emotion were identified in the literature, and assessed in terms of researcher motivation, the way “emotion” is conceptualized and operationalized, the nature of the knowledge claims, and the background assumptions of the authors, both implicit and explicit. By mapping research production to more fundamental assumptions and values, a space is opened for more constructive and nuanced dialog on the validity, meaning, and significance of diversity for advancing the field overall.

ePresence Interactive Media and Webforum 2001: An Accidental Case Study on the Use of Webcasting as a VLE for Early Child Development

This chapter presents the use of the ePresence Interactive Media System as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for Webforum 20011, a 2-day hybrid event that brought together local and geographically distributed participants to hear presentations on the latest science in early child development. The ePresence VLE supported social interaction and collaboration across time, distance, and space and captured multimedia archives of the event that subsequently led to a number of post-Webforum activities. Webforum 2001 was the culminating event for an initiative called the Millennium Dialogue on Early Child Development. Planning for this initiative began in 1999 to explore conceptually and technologically innovative ways to educate, empower, enrich, and engage a variety of different stakeholders seeking to advance their understanding of early child development (Matthews & Zijdemans, 2001). Led by Daniel Keating, then at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in collaboration with Invest in Kids Foundation, and the Lawson Foundation,2 conceptualization for the Millennium Dialogue grew out of Keating’s previous work as director of the Human Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research [CIAR]3. The product of that effort was Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations (Keating & Hertzman, 1999), a collective volume that used socioeconomic gradients to describe the significant association between socioeconomic status (SES) and developmental health.4 Three major themes had been identified in this research: (i) the wealth of a nation is rooted in the developmental health of its individuals; (ii) enhancing developmental health requires a deep understanding of the core dynamics of human development from a wide range of perspectives, from the biological to society; and (iii) to support developmental health in an era of profound unprecedented transformation, societies must become “learning societies” which actively

Debating the media space design space

Why do Audio Video (AV) communications infrastructures differ so widely in some of their key features? What factors led designers and mearchers to choose radically different se Iutions to the same design problems? This panel brings to gether users, researchm and key designers to expose their rationale and debate some of the issues which are cunently being confronted in the development of such technology.