Annual Chapter Dinner

Join your local display industry peers for the Bay Area SID Chapters Annual Summer evening of good food, good company and intriguing information. This informal annual gathering is widely known for its lively interaction and pleasant surroundings. This year the dinner will be a classy, picnic-style affair under the stars and Redwoods in the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains, at the estate of Gus Carroll, our own Chapter Secretary/Treasurer, a short 10-minute drive from downtown Los Gatos. 

Topic:  Surprising Visual and Cognitive Aspects of an Information Lifestyle -- From Inattention to Monopixel Digital Jewelry

Abstract: People seek out and use information in an amazing variety of ways. They strap devices onto their bodies to make sure they always know the current time, have ready telephone connectivity, can send & receive messages or can lookup content in portable data pools via their PDA. At the same time, we all swim in a sea of information that's being streamed to us via multiple channels left, right, center and behind. It is not uncommon to be in very display-rich environments -- as I sit in my home office writing this, I can see 5 monitors and 6 specialized displays ... and I haven't turned around. The question for my work centers on this:  What happens to the user in the middle of such a display-centric world? 

From my perspective as user scientist, fascinating questions arise when we place people in such rich display settings. In my talk I'll review some of the work we have done in my lab about the effects of having information available in multiple places and what happens to people trying to understand what's going on. I'll show some data that suggests that sometimes more IS more, and simultaneously, less can be better. We'll review what happens when people need to use display environments to try and make sense of complex information, and what some of the surprising cognitive effects that lie at the interaction of people, use and information displays. We'll then cast our vision into the future and examine what the notion of 'display' is in the future, and where the idea of an extended user interface might go in the years ahead.

About the Speaker: Dan Russell is really a research scientist who is currently a lab manager. He has done duty in the the war zone of product design and development,  taught at universities (Stanford, Santa Clara) and been a part of the hypertext, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, education, interaction design and ubiquitous computing communities. As a consequence, he has seen the whole process from wild-eyed speculative thinking, through the functional spec, final delivery and all other constraints in battles of development... and the confusions and insights of academic research. Along the way he has written a bunch of things about various technologies and design work; ranging from models of human motor behavior through computer vision and models of people making sense of complex information. He used to give full day tutorials in the Hypertext world -- emphasizing the importance of design practices to that community. In interaction design, he has "carried the water, borne the torch, advocated and evangalized -- even harassed and harried" the involved parties when necessary.

More practically, perhaps, his teams at Xerox PARC, Apple and IBM have always included a heavy element of both visual and interactive design as well as ethnographic studies. Dan notes, "frankly, we've found that our professional design intuitions about what works and what doesn't work, while wonderfully polished and honed over years of practice, continually need real-world validation no matter how clever and accurate we think we've been during the design process."