Systems, interactions and macrotheory

A significant proportion of early HCI research was guided by one very clear vision: that the existing theory base in psychology and cognitive science could be developed to yield engineering tools for use in the interdisciplinary context of HCI design. While interface technologies and heuristic methods for behavioral evaluation have rapidly advanced in both capability and breadth of application, progress toward deeper theory has been modest, and some now believe it to be unnecessary. A case is presented for developing new forms of theory, based around generic “systems of interactors.” An overlapping, layered structure of macro- and microtheories could then serve an explanatory role, and could also bind together contributions from the different disciplines. Novel routes to formalizing and applying such theories provide a host of interesting and tractable problems for future basic research in HCI

Testing possibilities: on negotiating writing practices in a 'postdigital' age (tools and methods)

The exponential growth of new media technologies presents opportunities and challenges for writers. Fast-paced change - featuring what can seem like perpetual updates of hardware and software - undermines the possibility of growing attached to particular tools and practices. Collaboration is key to social media and many of the new technologies, and not something that sits easily with the traditional image of the writer as someone working alone. This article considers how writers can negotiate the demands of a ‘postdigital age’. Adopting a teacher-practitioner stance, it proposes that the remediation of a writer’s own practice is key. As well as considering how a writer can work to remediate his or her own practice, whereby - as new challenges and opportunities arise - a writer looks to existing skills and prior experience and adapts or applies them in new contexts as part of a process of, in effect, collaborating with him or herself, this article begins to explore whether such remediation can be taught. An aim is to reach a new theoretical position on how individuals can approach the creative potential of writing in the 21st century and more effectively embrace existing and emerging opportunities provided by interactive digital technologies

Live and public: one practitioner’s experience and assessment of Twitter as a tool for archiving creative process

This interdisciplinary article explores from a practitioner’s perspective, ways in which developments in Web 2.0 technology, in combination with mobile phones, facilitate and encourage new methods of archiving creative process that result in new experimental forms of writing. It takes the author’s use of Twitter as a case study. The research purpose is to consider the benefits of developments in new technology to creative writing practitioners. An aim will be to reach a new theoretical position on how social media and mobile technology can aid and generate creativity by enabling archiving of the creative process to be an ongoing, live, dynamic experience

Tweets as microfiction: on Twitter’s live nature and 140 character limit as tools for developing storytelling skills

For many years, the pedagogy of creative writing has been delivered primarily through workshops in which students critique each others’ work. Students only need their imagination and a pen and paper to begin writing a story. It has not been necessary for creative writing teachers to prioritise use of emerging technologies and in consequence, creative writing classrooms have remained largely ‘low tech and quaintly humanistic.’ This interdisciplinary paper explores from a practitioner-teacher perspective how social media can help develop theory and practice in the pedagogy of creative writing. It does so by presenting an account and early stage assessment of pilots conducted using Twitter with creative writing BA students at a UK University since November 2012. It is argued that the strict character limit of tweets, in combination with their live and public nature, can force critical enquiry into what comprises a meaningful narrative. Summary reflections consider how the Twitter pilots contribute to a new theoretical position that helps bring understanding to skills it is necessary for writers to develop in the face of emerging technologies in the 21st century

Using film cutting in interface design

It has been suggested that computer interfaces could be made more usable if their designers utilized cinematography techniques, which have evolved to guide the viewer through a narrative despite frequent discontinuities in the presented scene (i.e., cuts between shots). Because of differences between the domains of film and interface design, it is not straightforward to understand how such techniques can be transferred. May and Barnard (1995) argued that a psychological model of watching film could support such a transference. This article presents an extended account of this model, which allows identification of the practice of collocation of objects of interest in the same screen position before and after a cut. To verify that filmmakers do, in fact, use such techniques successfully, eye movements were measured while participants watched the entirety of a commerciall

Measurements of the Secondary Electron Emission from Rare Gases at 4.2K

Dependence of the secondary electron yield (SEY) from the primary beam incident energy and the coverage has been measured for neon, argon, krypton and xenon condensed on a target at 4.2K. The beam energy ranged between 100 eV and 3 keV, the maximal applied coverage have made up 12000, 4700, 2500 and 1400 monolayers correspondingly for neon, argon, krypton and xenon. The SEY results for these coverages can be considered as belonging only to investigated gases without influence of the target material. The SEY dependencies versus the primary beam energy for all gases comprise only an ascending part and therefore, the maximal measured SEY values have been obtained for the beam energy of 3keV and have made up 62, 73, 60.5 and 52 for neon, argon, krypton and xenon correspondingly. Values of the first cross-over have made up 21 eV for neon, 14 eV for argon, 12.5 eV for krypton and 10.5 eV for xenon. An internal field appearing across a film due to the beam impact can considerably affect the SEY measurements that demanded the beam current to be reduced till 9.0E-10A. Duration of the beam impact varied between 500 \mu sec and 250 \mu sec. It was found that reliable SEY measurements can also be taken on a charged surface if the charge was acquired due to beam impact with electrons of higher energy. All SEY measurements for once applied coverage have been carried out for whole range of incident energies from 3 keV down to 100 eV without renewing the film. Developing of pores inside of a deposited film can significantly increase the SEY as it was observed during warming up the target.Comment: 10 Pages - 25 figure