The Pragmatics of Deep Change—An HCI Case Study
Speaker
Peter Lucas
MAYA Design
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Description
The business literature is replete with case studies on the effects of so-called “disruptive technologies”—innovations that fundamentally undermine the status quo of an industry. Defending against the threats of such disruptions have become an accepted management skill. In contrast, however, the art of fomenting deep change via the successful introduction of a disruptive technology remains something of a cottage industry. One of the most important 20th Century examples of a disruptive technology—the introduction of the WIMP paradigm of user interface design—was fundamentally an HCI innovation. As the age of pervasive computing inexorably approaches, there is every reason to believe that there will be more HCI-driven disruptions. In this talk, I will present a “from the trenches” case study of a large-scale project that (a) is primarily HCI in nature and (b) depends on a certain amount of disruption for its ultimate success. The emphasis will be less on the technology itself than on lessons-learned concerning the practical difficulties of attempting to induce deep change in the ways humans interact with information systems.
In the late 1980s, teams led by Steve Roth and myself (separately at first, but soon together) began the study of a set of novel design patterns for building information systems that placed great emphasis on replicated persistent data objects, direct manipulation, user-composibility, and collaborative visualization. Developed under many project names, including Sage, Visage, Hyperfax, Workscape, Interstacks, CoMotion, CPoF, and Civium, we eventually chose the term “Information Centricity” as an umbrella label for this design style. As the work progressed, we slowly came to discover that moving our seemingly simple vision out of the laboratory was going to implicate the development of non-standard techniques in a number of diverse areas. Worse, many of these areas seemed peripheral to our goals and our expertise, such as database design, information architecture, UI toolkit design, peer-to-peer architectures, and indexing structures. In this talk, I will present a chronological synopsis of this project, focusing on the almost incredible naïveté we shared in the early years about the real challenges faced by aspiring agents of change, what we slowly learned, and how we learned it. Topics will include “The centrality of Architecture”; “The tyranny of orthodoxy”; “The challenges of funding”; “How long things take”; “The uses and dangers of fame”; “Shooting the engineer”; and “The importance of monomania”.
Speaker's Bio
Peter Lucas focuses on breaking down the disciplinary boundaries that lead to technologies that are poorly suited to the needs of individuals and society. He co-founded MAYA Design in 1989 and has guided its growth as a premier venue for interdisciplinary product design and technology research, serving both the private and public sectors. He was formerly MAYA’s President and CEO and continues as Board Chair. He was also co-founder and Board Chair of sister company MAYA Viz prior to its acquisition by General Dynamics in 2005. Peter received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from Cornell University, where he studied educational and cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin and was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an adjunct Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. His current research activities focus on a radically-distributed replication-based database technology and an associated information architecture intended to support the deployment of a large-scale public information space whose organization will be shaped by market forces and which is intended to scale without bound. Complementing this work is architecture for the assembly of modular pervasive computing devices whose interoperability is mediated via this information space. He co-authored a book on letter and word perception and holds 13 patents. He was the founding chair of Three Rivers Connect—an initiative of business and civic leaders that promotes the development of civic computing in the Pittsburgh region. Peter was also a member of the Networked Systems of Embedded Computing study committee, part of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council.