Terry Winograd

The Interactive Workspaces project: experiences with ubiquitous computing rooms

The Interactive Workspaces project explores new possibilities for people working together in technology-rich spaces. The project focuses on augmenting a dedicated meeting space with large displays, wireless or multimodal devices, and seamless mobile appliance integration.

The action workflow approach to workflow management technology

Abstract This paper describes the ActionWorkflow™ approach to workflow management technology: a design methodology and associated computer software for the support of work in organizations. The approach is based on theories of communicative activity as language/action, developed in a series of systems for coordination among users of networked computers. This article describes the approach, gives an example of its application, and shows the architecture of a workflow management system based on it.

Computer systems and the design of organizational interaction

The goal of this paper is to relate theory to invention and application in the design of systems for organizational communication and management. We propose and illustrate a theory of design, technology, and action that we believe has been missing in the mainstream of work on office systems. At the center of our thinking is a theory of language as social action, which differs from the generally taken-for-granted understandings of what goes on in an organization. This approach has been presented elsewhere, and our aim here is to examine its practical implications and assess its effectiveness in the design of The Coordinator, a workgroup productivity system that is in widespread commercial use on personal computers.

Time as essence for photo browsing through personal digital libraries

We developed two photo browsers for collections with thousands of time-stamped digital images. Modern digital cameras record photo shoot times, and semantically related photos tend to occur in bursts. Our browsers exploit the timing information to structure the collections and to automatically generate meaningful summaries. The browsers differ in how users navigate and view the structured collections. We conducted user studies to compare the two browsers and an un-summarized image browser. Our results show that exploiting the time dimension and appropriately summarizing collections can lead to significant improvements. For example, for one task category, one of our browsers enabled a 33% improvement in speed of finding given images compared to the commercial browser. Similarly, users were able to complete 29% more tasks when using this same browser.

FRAME REPRESENTATIONS AND THE DECLARATIVE/PROCEDURAL CONTROVERSY

Publisher Summary This chapter presents some criteria for evaluating ideas for representation. It also presents a rough sketch of a particular version of a frame representation, and discusses the ways in which it can deal with the issues raised. The proceduralists assert that human knowledge is primarily a knowing how. The human information processor is a stored program device, with its knowledge of the world embedded in the programs. The declarativists do not believe that knowledge of a subject is intimately bound with the procedures for its use. They see intelligence as resting on two bases: a quite general set of procedures for manipulating facts of all sorts, and a set of specific facts describing particular knowledge domains. In thinking, the general procedures are applied to the domain-specific data to make deductions. Often this process has been based on the model of axiomatic mathematics. The facts are axioms and the thought process involves proof procedures for drawing conclusions from them.

Architectures for context

The development of context-aware applications will require tools that are based on clearly defined models of context and system software architecture. This essay introduces models for each of these, examines the tradeoffs among the different alternatives, and describes a blackboard-based context architecture that is being used in the construction of interactive workspaces.

ICrafter: A Service Framework for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In this paper, we propose ICrafter, a framework for services and their user interfaces in a class of ubiquitous computing environments. The chief objective of ICrafter is to let users flexibly interact with the services in their environment using a variety of modalities and input devices. We extend existing service frameworks in three ways. First, to offload services and user input devices, ICrafter provides infrastructure support for UI selection, generation, and adaptation. Second, ICrafter allows UIs to be associated with service patterns for on-the-fly aggregation of services. Finally, ICrafter facilitates the design of service UIs that are portable but still reflect the context of the local environment. In addition, we also focus on the system properties such as incremental deployability and robustness that are critical for ubiquitous computing environments. We describe the goals and architecture of ICrafter, a prototype implementation that validates its design, and the key lessons learnt from our experiences.

Power browser: efficient Web browsing for PDAs

We have designed and implemented new Web browsing facilities to support effective navigation on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) with limited capabilities: low bandwidth, small display, and slow CPU. The implementation supports wireless browsing from 3Coms Palm Pilot. An HTTP proxy fetches web pages on the clients behalf and dynamically generates summary views to be transmitted to the client. These summaries represent both the link structure and contents of a set of web pages, using information about link importance. We discuss the architecture, user interface facilities, and the results of comparative performance evaluations. We measured a 45% gain in browsing speed, and a 42% reduction in required pen movements.

SIDES: a cooperative tabletop computer game for social skills development

This paper presents a design case study of SIDES: Shared Interfaces to Develop Effective Social Skills. SIDES is a tool designed to help adolescents with Aspergers Syndrome practice effective group work skills using a four-player cooperative computer game that runs on tabletop technology. We present the design process and evaluation of SIDES conducted over six months with a middle school social group therapy class. Our findings indicate that cooperative tabletop computer games are a motivating and supportive tool for facilitating effective group work among our target population and reveal several design lessons to inform the development of similar systems.

Integrating information appliances into an interactive workspace

The authors present a robust, infrastructure-centric, and platform-independent approach to integrating information appliances into the iRoom, an interactive workspace. The Interactive Workspaces Project at Stanford explores new possibilities for people to work together in technology-rich spaces with computing and interaction devices on many different scales. It includes faculty and students from the areas of graphics, human-computer interaction (HCI), networking, ubiquitous computing, and databases, and draws on previous work in all those areas. We design and experiment with multidevice, multiuser environments based on a new architecture that makes it easy to create and add new display and input devices, to move work of all kinds from one computing device to another, and to support and facilitate group interactions. In the same way that todays standard operating systems make it feasible to write single-workstation software that uses multiple devices and networked resources, we are constructing a higher level operating system for the world of ubiquitous computing. We combine research on infrastructure (ways of flexibly configuring and connecting devices, processes, and communication links) with research on HCI (ways of interacting with heterogeneous changing collections of devices with multiple modalities).