Matthew Hockenberry

Small business applications of sourcemap: a web tool for sustainable design and supply chain transparency

This paper introduces sustainable design applications for small businesses through the Life Cycle Assessment and supply chain publishing platform Sourcemap.org. This web-based tool was developed through a year-long participatory design process with five small businesses in Scotland and in New England. Sourcemap was used as a diagnostic tool for carbon accounting, design and supply chain management. It offers a number of ways to market sustainable practices through embedded and printed visualizations. Our experiences confirm the potential of web sustainability tools and social media to expand the discourse and to negotiate the diverse goals inherent in social and environmental sustainability.

Wetpaint: scraping through multi-layered images

We introduce a technique for exploring multi-layered images by scraping arbitrary areas to determine meaningful relationships. Our system, called Wetpaint, uses perceptual depth cues to help users intuitively navigate between corresponding layers of an image, allowing a rapid assessment of changes and relationships between different views of the same area. Inspired by art diagnostic techniques, this tactile method could have distinct advantages in the general domain as shown by our user study. We propose that the physical metaphor of scraping facilitates the process of determining correlations between layers of an image because it compresses the process of planning, comparison and annotation into a single gesture. We discuss applications for geography, design, and medicine.

Tangible Interfaces for Art Restoration

Few people experience art the way a restorer does: as a tactile, multi-dimensional and ever-changing object. The authors investigate a set of tools for the distributed analysis of artworks in physical and digital realms. Their work is based on observation of professional art restoration practice and rich data available through multi-spectral imaging. The article presents a multidisciplinary approach to develop interfaces usable by restorers, students and amateurs. Several interaction techniques were built using physical metaphors to navigate the layers of information revealed by multi-spectral imaging, prototyped using single-and multi-touch displays. The authors built modular systems to accommodate the technical needs and resources of various institutions and individuals, with the aim to make high-quality art diagnostics possible on different hardware platforms, as well as rich diagnostic and historic information about art available for education and research through a cohesive set of web-based tools instantiated in physical interfaces and public installations.

A mindset for user-centered spatial applications

Places are spatial locations that have been given meaning by human experience. The sense of a place is its support for experiences and the emotional responses associated with them. This sense provides direction and focus for our daily lives. Physical maps and their electronic decedents deconstruct places into discrete data and require user interpretation to reconstruct the original sense of place. User centered mapping is an approach that preserves sense of place rather then requires the user to recreate it from disparate data. Instead of attempting to collect this discrete data, the focus becomes on observing mechanisms that already encode sense of place directly. This approach allows the construction of representations showing places that are similar semantically and those that conform to specific user objectives without requiring cognitive interpretation from a user. To accomplish this, user centered mapping focuses on attempts to understand place in the way a human might by analyzing existing accounts of place, such as business listings or blog entries as well as ongoing affordance to support certain kinds of events or visitors. It produces a semantic description of a place in terms of human action and emotion, and with regard to an understanding of the cognitive needs of the user in question.

A sense of spatial semantics

This paper describes an approach to the semantic analysis of location information. The system gathers verified natural language input and uses a ranking system to produce semantically meaningful tags. These associations are tied to precise spatial locations allowing a viewer to get the sense of a space.

placeMap: building community through active context mapping

placeMap is a web application that builds a community through an understanding of a users context in an active spatial landscape. Beginning with the traditional campus map, placeMap reimagines what a map should be by placing the users community life at the center of the map.

Abbrevicons: efficient feedback for audio interfaces

Abbrevicons are a technique for encoding audio information efficiently while still providing the user with useful and appropriate feedback. Ideally, abbrevicons are targeted towards audio interfaces that are infrequently used and where the user doesn’t have the opportunity to develop a strong model of the system or make sense of rich encoding schemes. Abbrevicons allow us to present natural language feedback that is identifiable and comprehensible, while taking significantly less time than traditional verbal feedback. Abbrevicons can decrease the speed of short descriptive feedback by up to 200% while still ensuring user comprehension. These techniques seek to provide richer user feedback in audio interfaces while still keeping in mind the need for efficient user interactions.

Simple tutors for hard problems: understanding the role of pseudo-tutors

The construction of cognitive tutors is often focused on tightly constrained domains. This is because the creation of a cognitive tutor is a time-intensive process. Pseudo-tutors allow us to model a small number of problems in a relatively short time. There is no need to program a general cognitive model if we can demonstrate this model by example. The creation of a relatively small set of examples can have real cognitive benefit to the student.The LSAT Analytic Logic Tutor demonstrates that this is possible. This tutor was designed for teaching strategies for solving analytic logic games. Although such a task would be difficult to model in general, three rich problems produced enough of an impact to significantly improve student performance. This is an interesting example where a small suite of well-designed pseudo tutors are significantly more useful than a full cognitive tutor.

Renaissance panel: the roles of creative synthesis in innovation

The Renaissance ideal can be expressed as a creative synthesis between cultural disciplines, standing in stark contrast to our traditional focus on scientific specialization. This panel presents a number of experts who approach the synthesis of art and science as the modus operandi for their work, using it as a tool for creativity, research, and practice. Understanding these approaches allows us to identify the roles of synthesis in successful innovation and improve the implementation of interdisciplinary synthesis in research and practice.