Affordance and design symmetry

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Speaker
Harold Thimbleby
Director of University College London Interaction Centre

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Whilst it is generally accepted as a positive design criterion, affordance actually only gives the weakest of hints for interaction designers. After discussing symmetry as a pervasive and appealing design feature, we show how very useful it is to consider affordances themselves as a design symmetries, within programs, within user interfaces and within user models. Exploiting affordances, understood in this way, makes user interfaces simpler, and makes user manuals shorter—and also makes programs simpler and more reliable. The talk will be of particular interest to interactive systems designers: people struggling to find workable and effective design principles. The ideas of mathematical symmetry also uncover interesting ideas in programming language semantics. Psychologists who like debating affordance/affectance and taking issue with Gibsonians will also have fun.

Speaker's Bio

Harold Thimbleby is Director of UCLIC, the University College London Interaction Centre. UCLIC is an interdisciplinary centre, recently founded as a joint initiative by the UCL Departments of Psychology and Computer Science. UCLIC is the successor to the well-known Ergonomics Unit at UCL. UCL is one of the top three UK universities, and—amongst other things—has the British Library and the British Museum on its doorstep. Harold has over 333 publications (mostly in Human-Computer Interaction) and has given over 20 conference keynotes and 250 seminars in 14 different countries. He is 28th Gresham Professor of Geometry, thus holding the oldest mathematics chair in the country, dating back to 1597. He is a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award Holder, and a winner of the British Computer Society Wilke’s Medal.