Toward an articulation of interaction esthetics

Even though the emerging field of user experience generally acknowledges the importance of esthetic qualities in interactive products and services, there is a lack of approaches recognizing the fundamentally temporal nature of interaction esthetics. By means of interaction criticism, I introduce four concepts that begin to characterize the esthetic qualities of interaction. Pliability refers to the sense of malleability and tightly coupled interaction that makes the use of an interactive visualization captivating. Rhythm is an important characteristic of certain types of interaction, from the sub-second pacing of musical interaction to the hour-scale ebb and flow of peripheral emotional communication. Dramaturgical structure is not only a feature of online role-playing games, but plays an important role in several design genres from the most mundane to the more intellectually sophisticated. Fluency is a way to articulate the gracefulness with which we are able to handle multiple demands for our attention and action in augmented spaces

Personal Information Management Competences: A Case Study of Future College Students

Abstract. The research project presented in this paper aims at modeling the media literacy competences required to organize and manage collections of in- formation in the form of personal and shared digital environments. In-depth in situ interviews were conducted with future college students (N=11). During the interviews, the informants gave a guided tour of their personal space of infor- mation, and demonstrated how they used different digital tools to organize it. We identify three dimensions of personal information management (PIM) com- petence, based on the analysis of the way our informants describe their PIM practices by referring to and articulating (1) the constraints and affordances of the tools and devices they use, (2) the activities these tools and devices support, (3) the costs and benefits of these practices for these activities, and (4) their tastes and preferences towards them