akm@cs.uoregon.edu (Anant Kartik Mithal) (02/21/91)
Does anyone know of a group devoted to issues about Human Computer Interaction / User Interfaces? If there is none, how does one go about setting one up? Please e-mail me, and I will summarize if there is interest. kartik -- Anant Kartik Mithal akm@cs.uoregon.edu Research Assistant, (503)346-4408 (msgs) Department of Computer Science, (503)346-3989 (direct) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1202
andrew@calvin.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick) (02/26/91)
In article <1991Feb21.024959.6698@cs.uoregon.edu> akm@cs.uoregon.edu (Anant Kartik Mithal) writes: >Does anyone know of a group devoted to issues about Human Computer >Interaction / User Interfaces? If there is none, how does one go about >setting one up? I think comp.cog-eng pretty well fits the bill. -- Andrew Patrick, Ph.D. Department of Communications, Ottawa, CANADA andrew@calvin.doc.CA "The interface IS the program."
coshima@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Craig Oshima) (02/26/91)
In article <1991Feb25.164210.14599@rick.doc.ca> andrew@calvin.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick) writes: [regarding a newsgroup covering hci and comp. interfaces] >I think comp.cog-eng pretty well fits the bill. I disagree, at least in some respects. I think that a newsgroup for topics regarding human factors engineering, design, research, and modeling (etc.) would be a valuable forum for HCI. Being a grad student in human factors engineering, I am all for such a group, but to my knowledge none exists. Although cognitive engineering has much in common with human factors, they do differ. So I agree with you in that comp.cog-eng could cover hci, but a group for human factors in general would also be a good forum for hci, and would probably be a better creation for society than "alt.sex.without-love.with-martians." So I also pose the original question (or a variation of it anyway): Assuming that this group does not exist (which is true to the best of my knowledge), how does one go about creating one? We are planning on setting one up in the local domain, but one with a larger scope would be both more interesting and more valuable. > "The interface IS the program." Or at least the important part... :-) Craig --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Craig Oshima | Modern art is what happens when a painter University of Illinois | stops looking at girls and persuades himself coshima@s.psych.uiuc.edu | he has a better idea. -John Ciardi ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
thom@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) (02/26/91)
I also think that the idea of a special HCI/UI group is different from the regular concerns of cog-eng. I tend to look at interfaces from the aesthetic design end, as an art, and I've never felt that many of the cog-eng folks can draw anything more then smiley faces -- not a put down, I accept visual dyslexia as a fact of academic life. :-> If you can't draw or really design aethetic environments you tend to wait till the end to call in the artists, which is about how interface design has been done to date. I realize that there are exceptions, but ... Also, Cog-eng by it's very name spends an most of it's time trying to wander around psychological areas which may not even exist. Didn't there use to be an area called the 'affective' domain. Why don't we change the name of this group to affective-engineering? Would put an interesting spin on interface design. Do you think that cognitive-engineering comes under affective-engineering, or visa versa? I'd appreciate a broader discussion area. --Thom
fabio@dm.unibo.it (Fabio Vitali) (02/26/91)
In article <1991Feb21.024959.6698@cs.uoregon.edu> akm@cs.uoregon.edu (Anant Kartik Mithal) writes: >Does anyone know of a group devoted to issues about Human Computer >Interaction / User Interfaces? If there is none, how does one go about >setting one up? I, for one, would appreciate it very much. It's just that I don't think it would work. I mean, I read alt.hypertext and comp.groupware, and, apart for some (very few) messages from people needing advice, they are mostly dedicated to announcements for conferences and seminars. There is no flame, no sharing, no discussion on them. In short, they are moribund newsgroups. I fear very much the same would happen in the field of HCI. It is too broad a subject, with too many open issues about it, so that, I think, everyone would fear too much of starting a flame war on anything, and would not post anything that was not widely acceptable and, therefore, obvious, in such newsgroup. Anyway, I strongly agree on the necessity of this kind of subject. I just wish a little bit of sharing was going on on Hypermedia, Groupware, Human Computer Interaction, etc. They started pretty interesting, Nelson and such, and became boring and sooo academic and cautious ("You must have missed my paper at the III Conference on Hypertexts and Cabbages, which explained why such approach wouldn't work") not to be interesting anymore. >Please e-mail me, and I will summarize if there is interest. I didn't, not because I don't know how to do it, but because I wanted to light up the discussion a bit, here. I crossposted to alt.hypertext as well, and suggest to add also comp.mac.system, comp.amiga.something, comp.atari.something, comp.os.msdos.windows, comp.unix.xwindow, etc. (I don't actually know the names of most of those, so I leave the crossposting to someone else). So, please, don't email him, let's discuss it publicly. >kartik Ciao Fabio -- Fabio Vitali There's a clear morale to this tale, now that Dept of Computer Science I think about it: when you're dead you're dead. Univ. of Bologna ITALY And yet another morale occurs to me now: e-mail: fabio@dm.unibo.it make love when you can. It's good for you.
cohill@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Andrew M. Cohill) (02/26/91)
In article <41138@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> thom@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Thom Gillespie) writes: > > ......you tend to wait till the end to call in the artists, > which is about how interface design has been done to date. I realize that > there are exceptions, but ... > I have to agree. I would go even further and argue that what passes for "design" in computer systems design is really a corrupted form of engineering. Design has very little to do with trying to completely specify the system before building it. Design, as understood in art and architecture, is an exploratory process. The notions of "iterative systems design" and "rapid prototyping" are attempts to address some of the problems with current practice, but the industry is too hung up on methods. It is a very difficult problem, because most analysts and human factors people are encouraged in school to use analytical methods to solve problems. But systems of information are not algorithms, and cannot be decomposed into functional modules as easily as we would like to think. The people that claim to be able to do this end up ignoring "exogenous" factors like the physical environment, the psycho-social climate of the workplace, formal and informal lines of communication, and the political implications of systems. -- | ...we have to look for routes of power our teachers never | imagined, or were encouraged to avoid. T. Pynchon | |Andy Cohill cohill@vtserf.cc.vt.edu VPI&SU
carm@tove.cs.umd.edu (Richard Chimera) (02/27/91)
It seems to me that HCI/UI is an inherently multi-disciplinary field. And should stay that way for some time to come. If we were to create a new bboard for discussions relating to HCI/UI, we may think that is the best or only place to hold such discussions, and lose out on many valuable discussions on other bboards that don't seem so closely tied to the computer. It's happened many times before that computer science researchers duplicate work that was done in another field without knowing about those earlier findings. I think that by monitoring many worldwide bboards that have something in common with HCI/UI issues would be the best way to stay in touch with those issues. And by doing this, we can realize surrendipitous discoveries of issues we never would have thought of in our own little world. My suggestion is for HCI/UI people to post here the bboards they follow from which they think they get HCI/UI info. My list is: alt.hypertext comp.cog-eng comp.groupware comp.lang.visual comp.mail.multi-media bboards from which I've unsubscribed: comp.software-eng comp.multimedia sci.psychology -- | Richard "carm" Chimera | Zorched by Zarches, | | Human Computer Interaction Laboratory | spaceman Spiff's | | A.V. Williams Bldg, rm 4166 | crippled craft crashes | | College Park, MD 20742-3255 | on planet Plootarg! |
ec1k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Edward P. Costello) (02/27/91)
On 26-Feb-91 in Re: A newsgroup for HCI/UI? user Richard Chimera@tove.cs. writes: >It seems to me that HCI/UI is an inherently multi-disciplinary field. >And should stay that way for some time to come. If we were to create >a new bboard for discussions relating to HCI/UI, we may think that is >the best or only place to hold such discussions, and lose out on many >valuable discussions on other bboards that don't seem so closely tied >to the computer. While I agree that it is a multidisciplinary field, I disagree that discussion should be watered down among five groups. For one thing, I feel the very thing you cite (the replication of research efforts) would occur more readily when discussion is dispersed among other groups. Each of the groups you listed deal with issues of human-computer interaction, but are also more specific than general hci (is there such a thing?). Finally, many companies and organizations do not carry the alt.* hierarchy and thus are shut out of a group like alt.hypertext. I find it surprising that, considering the age of "the net," there is no mailing list or newsgroup that attempts to cover "straight" human-computer interaction issues. A possible worse case scenario: a group for hci could be a sort of collector point whereby people could be directed towards more specific groups. -just my 3 cents -ed costello -mapw/communications design center
dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu (David Mark) (02/27/91)
In article <4bmnyim00Uh_A0m8c6@andrew.cmu.edu> ec1k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Edward P. Costello) writes: > >I find it surprising that, considering the age of "the net," there is no >mailing list or newsgroup that attempts to cover "straight" >human-computer interaction issues. > I think that there *IS* such a group: comp.cog-eng! I have been following this list for about two years, and it seems to have had a wide range material on HCI, user interfaces, etc. What has been wrong, or specialized, about comp.cog-eng? Or does the name put off some potential subscribers/posters for reasons that I would not be aware of? Or did the original 'charter' when the group was established specifiy that only a certain subset of HCI topics should be discussed? Perhaps someone still has a copy of the original call for votes that created this group. David Mark dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu
jiro@shaman.com (Jiro Nakamura) (03/01/91)
I agree that it would be nice to talk about HCI/UI, but what can we talk
about? Well, here's a topic:
Anyone know of any mail order companies that have the Mattel PowerGlove
for the Nintendo systems? I have the schematics for connecting it up to
my NeXT and a source program to play with, but no one in Ithaca sells them.
:-(
Also, does anyone have the tech docs for the PowerGLove? I'd like to
know exactly how to operate it (line-level signals and all) rather than
rely on someone else's code.
- Jiro Nakamura
jiro@shaman.com
--
Jiro Nakamura jiro@shaman.com
Shaman Consulting (607) 253-0687 VOICE
"Bring your dead, dying shamans here!" (607) 253-7809 FAX/Modemnews@linus.mitre.org (News Service) (03/01/91)
Therre is a problem with the PowerGlove - the data from it is encrypted. I have been working on a research proposal (following the one at the University of Virginia) to develop a virtual reality test bed using a Power Glove as a data input device. My friend at UVA ended up getting a "black box" from the manufacturer so he could use it. I beleive there is a thread on another BB about this, but I do not know the BB. From: bkillam@ccels3 (bill killam) Path: ccels3!bkillam Bill Killam
chalmers@EuroPARC.Xerox.COM (Matthew Chalmers) (03/06/91)
In article <1991Mar1.145023.29363@linus.mitre.org>, news@linus.mitre.org (News Service) writes: > Therre is a problem with the PowerGlove - the data from it is encrypted. I have > been working on a research proposal (following the one at the University of > Virginia) to develop a virtual reality test bed using a Power Glove as a data > input device. My friend at UVA ended up getting a "black box" from the > manufacturer so he could use it. I beleive there is a thread on another BB > about this, but I do not know the BB. > From: bkillam@ccels3 (bill killam) > Path: ccels3!bkillam > > Bill Killam This comes up every few weeks or so in the sci.virtual.worlds newsgroup. Check it out. Regards, --Matthew P.S. I doubt comp.cog-eng is the right place for discussion on the range of subjects I considered the original poster on this subject to be interested in. I suppose comp.graphics, comp.cog-eng, comp.groupware & alt.hypertext collectively cover the range, but somewhat incoherently due to the varying levels of 'techie-ness' in each. Shame.