How designers work - making sense of authentic cognitive activities

In recent years, the growing scientific interest in design has led to great advances in our knowledge of authentic design processes. However, as these findings go counter to the existing theories in both design research and cognitive science, they pose a serious challenge for both disciplines: there is a wide gap between what the existing theories predict and what designers actually do. At the same time, there is a growing movement of research on authentic cognitive activities, which has among other things documented the central roles of action and the physical environment in these activities, something that existing cognitive theories have overlooked and cannot properly account for. This creates an explanatory gap analogous to the one found in design. This book aims to fill both of these gaps with a cognitive theory of how designers work. It revolves around the roles of physical activities and working materials in design, and the theory explains at length how these have functions that are essential to cognition. The two threads of design and cognition run in parallel throughout the book: the cognitive theory is applied to design, but is also consistently related to cognition in general. The result is, in back cover text parlance, a 'provocative' account of cognition and human performance, which should be of interest to cognitive scientists as well as to design researchers

Applying Direct Combination to afford spontaneity in Pervasive Computing

In rich pervasive environments, there will be numerous opportunities for end users to dynamically create services of interest by causing two or more devices or resources to interoperate together, often under changing circumstances. In general, users find this kind of process hard to manage. Existing programming architectures make the situation difficult to address in a principled, scaleable way. Users find it hard to tackle such problems via devices with small, resource-poor user interfaces. It is proposed that a good theoretical basis for addressing an essential aspect of all of these problems is the theory of Direct Combination. When the Direct Combination framework, based on the theory, is applied to spontaneous interactions, the user interface can be made relatively simple, and the amount of search required by the user to specify desired actions can be greatly reduced. We present Direct Combination (DC) and the new interaction techniques it gives rise to for pervasive environments. We consider two different support architectures. We argue that one of these, the role-based architecture, has particularly good properties for modelling rapidly changing pervasive environments, and for highly distributed implementations. We demonstrate how the concept of viewpoints can be used to focus, filter and afford operations, and how this can be well supported by the role-based architecture

AudioGPS: Spatial audio navigation with a minimal attention interface

In this paper we consider a prototype audio user interface for a Global Positioning System (GPS) that is designed to allow mobile computer users to carry out a location task while their eyes, hands and attention are often otherwise engaged. Audio user interfaces for GPS have typically been designed to meet the needs of visually handicapped users, and generally (though not exclusively) employ speech-audio. In this paper, we consider a prototype audio GPS user interface designed primarily for sighted mobile computer users who may have to attend simultaneously to other tasks, and who may be holding conversations at the same time. The system is considered in the context of being one component of a user interface for mobile computer users. The prototype system uses a simple form of spatial audio. Various candidate audio mappings of location and distance information are analysed. A variety of tasks, design considerations, technological opportunities and design trade-offs are considered. Preliminary findings are reported. Opportunities for improvements to the system, and future empirical testing are explored

Beyond Inheritance, Aspects & Roles: A Unified Scheme for Object and Program Composition

The areas of inheritance, aspect-oriented programming and rolebased decomposition share the same problem: For all three, the number of candidate schemes is large, all of them different and none of them clearly superior to the rest. Instead of proposing another variation on any of them, this paper presents a simple, unified approach to program composition. The scheme is shown to be compositionally complete, that is, to be sufficient for defining any program composition that is theoretically possible, and therefore forms a superset of all other approaches to program composition. The paper shows how this scheme specifically may supersede inheritance, aspects, and roles. It goes on to show via examples how the scheme can be used as a practical objectoriented language construct. Lastly, it demonstrates how the scheme can be combined with program specialization to yield very good runtime performance. This scheme can make objectoriented languages smaller, yet substantially more powerful and expressive than they currently are

How designers work

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How designers work

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Meeting the software engineering challenges of interacting with dynamic and ad-hoc computing environments

We argue that the normal circumstances for pervasive computing technologies will be dynamic and ad-hoc settings, in that the available technical resources will evolve and/or change frequently, rather than having been installed by design. We describe a second-generation software architecture for Ambient Combination [14], engineered to meet the software engineering challenges of achieving transparency of use under such conditions. The architecture uses advanced software composition techniques closely related to aspect-oriented programming, along with computational reflection, to represent domain objects and their properties at a problem-oriented, high conceptual level. This architecture achieves a very good separation of concerns, while also providing the flexibility and extensibility needed to address the open-ended nature of these situations. This also enables the architectural building blocks to be flexible distributed across different machine configurations in an uncomplicated and robust manner