Information Centricity:

Adventures in Monomania

Peter Lucas

MAYA Design

CHI ’07

1 May, 2007

What it takes to change the world:

A reasonably good idea

A reasonably stable plan to get it done

Work at it year after year after year

Our Little Contribution to Monomania:

Information Centric Design

“Information Centric Design”

Term coined by Steve Roth and me in mid 1990s.

Continuous research since 1989. Refers to a style of interaction design that

emphasizes replicated persistent data objects direct manipulation user-composability collaborative visualization

A Simple Vision

Treat Data as “Things” Things have persistent identity Things have locations within some

topographic space Things are public, i.e. intrinsically shared

Direct manipulation of “things” empowers users

Automate the arrangement of “things” so as to produce lucid visualizations.

Workscape 1989-1994:

Well-funded project commissioned by Digital Equipment Corporation

Unify handling of information in the office Design and prototype a disruptive

application (high-risk/high-reward) Deal with hundreds of documents all at once

Workscape Demonstration (1993)

Introduced at CHI ‘94

Workscape ca. 1993

QuickTime™ and aH.264 decompressor

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

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The Web Forager Card, S., et al, PARC, CHI 96

“Ballay [1994] with co-workers at the MAYA Design Group implemented a 3D design for an office system. Their design is artistically striking …”

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

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Data Mountain Robertson, G. et al, Microsoft Research, UIST ’98

“In 1994, MAYA Design Group introduced Workscape as the first example of a 3D spatial layout of documents under the user’s control.”

None of these efforts led to products

Difficult to build

Development tools poorly suited Failure of Will:

Perceived as a new “Desktop” at a time when competing with Microsoft was considered suicide

Web emerging as the new orthodoxy DEC imploding

BUT:

They helped us understand the value of a disciplined, constrained design space

Charles Eames on constraints:

Q: “Can great design be achieved in the face of severe constraints?”

A: “Great design requires severe constraints.”

The Real World is Full of Constraints

The physical world provides plenty of constraints. The laws of physics are unrelenting.

On the screen of a computer, anything is possible -- all bets are off.

Designers need to impose constraints on themselves and their designs

“Physics-based” UI Design

Well-defined object identity model (“Currency”)

Core of inviolate, consistent basic user operations

Pervasive/Ubiquitous Computing

Pervasive computing per se is a done deal and not overly interesting. Technological inevitability. Just economics.

What’s interesting is what it enables: Pervasive Information Access

Peer-to-peer technologies, massive replication, Universally-unique Identifiers (UUIDS) -> a true Cyberspace

The discipline of “thing based” design produces interaction models pre-adapted for the coming Cyberspace

Broadening agenda: VISAGE 1994-date

1994 -- new collaboration with Steve Roth and Jake and the Sage project at CMU

VISAGE was a series of ARL & DARPA-funded systems that pushed information centricity to maturity