The Project on People Computers and Design will be sponsoring a special seminar (in addition to our regular Friday talks) On October 10 at 2:15pm in Gates 104. Everyone is welcome.

Interaction Design for New Media: A Pattern Approach

Jan Borchers, Universities of Darmstadt and Ulm.
jan@informatik.tu-darmstadt.de

The plethora of emerging new media technologies, from the World-Wide Web to immersive virtual realities, to e-books and ubiquitous, invisible information appliances, requires HCI experts more than ever to work together with software engineers and users in an interdisciplinary team in order to create appropriate new interaction designs. A major problem in these teams is communication.

This talk proposes a new, unified framework that uses "pattern languages", a concept adopted from architecture, to model experience in the human-computer interaction, software engineering, and application domain of interactive software projects. This creates a "lingua franca" for everybody involved in the design process.

The talk will include a demonstration of some of the interactive exhibits, such as "Personal Orchestra", "Virtual Vienna", or "WorldBeat", that were designed by the author using this approach.

For more information about this approach, see the recent DIS 2000 paper, "A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design", available at <http://www.tk.uni-linz.ac.at/~jan/publications/>

Dr. Jan Borchers works as computer science researcher and lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction for New Media at the Universities of Darmstadt and Ulm in Germany. He holds a Ph.D. with first-class honors from Darmstadt University of Technology for his work on a pattern-based approach to interaction design.

He has designed and lead the development of interactive systems since 1995, including "Personal Orchestra" which lets users conduct the Vienna Philharmonic, the "Virtual Vienna" 3-D city tour (both for a large museum in Vienna), and the award-winning interactive music exhibit, "WorldBeat" (presented, for example, at CHI'97).

He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science with first-class honors from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany in 1995, after studying in Karlsruhe and at Imperial College, University of London, with emphasis on human-computer interaction, computer graphics, connectionism, and educational theory.

He has authored papers for journals such as IEEE Multimedia, Computers & Graphics, and the SIGCHI Bulletin, and presented his work at CHI, DIS, IEEE ICMCS, HCI International, WWW, and other conferences. He participated in workshops about issues such as wearable computing, electronic books, and HCI patterns, and co-organized HCI patterns workshops at INTERACT'99 and CHI'00. His book, A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design, is the first to deal with HCI patterns in detail, to appear with John Wiley & Sons in 2000.

Jan Borchers is a member of ACM and its special interest group in computer-human interaction (SIGCHI), and the German Computer Science Society (GI) and its software ergonomics group. He can be reached at <jan@informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>; see <http://www.tk.uni-linz.ac.at/~jan/> for more information.

Titles and abstracts for all years are available by year and by speaker.

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