SIGDOC conference notes
I recently attended the ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication conference in El Paso, Texas. There were about 40 attendees from academia and corporate worlds both.
I attended only the first day of proceedings and the Bofs following. I led a Birds of a Feather (Bof) session about open source documentation for a small group that was very informal. It was great to talk with folks who are so keenly interested in pubs and who have so much experience and passion about information design and architecture. I discussed with one professor of Rhetoric and Writing studies at UTEP the online component of his courses and how it is used by students today and how they might interact in an open source project. He is most interested in giving students a way to customize their experience of the web site. If you watch the website-discuss alias on OSOL, you'll see the same sentiment. Folks want to change look-and-feel first.
I think the Academic and Research Community on OpenSolaris.org would be a great playground for writing students who need real software to document. I know that I was most interested in the real-world projects I was given to document as a technical communications student. However, open source in academia is still quite new and because I am from Sun, the professors generally thought of my comments about developers as being comments about customers and therefore not applicable to their situation. So, I learned a great deal by discussing opportunities with them that will hopefully result in a published article on the subject. Following are my notes on the talks.
Agency, Invention, and Sympatric Design Platforms, Brian J McNealy
WebCT is the online course tool used at UTEP and other Universities. Wikis are also in use for some components, but WebCT is the secure platform that enables electronic assessment. Brian talked about agentive potential being stifled by existing online tools and then tied this back to biology theory of speciation. He posited that online tools that foster invention and agency mimic speciation theory. He submitted WebCT as the alopatric component and compared writing for interfaces and databases with sympatric components in that they involve not just the individual and include multiple layers of writing. In general, he pointed out that meaning-making is visual and limiting the ability to alter or customize visual elements likewise limits innovation and agency.
Preference Based Queries for Course Sequencing, Penklis Georgiandis, Greece, University of Crete
The motivation for the system described in this talk was driven by personalized curriculum. The Skill and courses described included an atomic skill and the schedule of courses. The preferences gave priority with regard to descriptions and included a theme or thematic area of study. The sequencing was ordering according to pre-requisites, alternative course for atomic skills and extensions. This talk was very interesting because it described all of the math behind the preferences used in the course sequence queries with charts describing the priority choices as you walk through the scheduler.
The Decision Pattern: Capturing and Communicating Design Intent, David Wright, North Carolina State University
The problem solved by this paper and resulting course is one of determining how design decisions are made. The constraints are to minimize overhead of capturing the following elements of design decisions:
- context
- root cause of problem
- constraints on solution
- how problem is solved
Pattern: decision, intent, context, forces, resolution, predecessors
This talk was interesting because the speaker described the impact of the course and the feedback from his students. In general, computer science students either dropped the course because there were no coding assignments, or they really liked the class because it opened new doors to their own design patterns and helped them to gain much greater understanding of how and when in the development process design decisions are made and the factors at play. It also gave students a low-overhead mechanism for questioning and deconstructing their designs that many put into regular practice during the semester.
Chromatic Prototypes for Information Systems, M. McCool
This presentaiton began with a review of Newton's Optiks, 1704 and discovery of primary colors or 'colors unto themselves'. The presenter then referred to the work of Berlin & Kay and Mussell color chips, an array with cultural implications of color. the Mussel color chips resulted in a chromatic sequence that follows black/white: red, green/yellow, blue, then grey/orange/indigo/pink. Neuroscientific visual system for humans color spectrum matches closely the chromatic sequence. So, the paper asks if it is possible to use the chromatic sequence to code hierarchy of information to apply themes, improve retention, search, and navigation.
Information Salience and Interpreting Information, Mike Alberto, East Carolina University
Current problems include search, information overload, finding the chunk you need and making it linear. Information salience and problems that diminish described in the talk, as follows:
- Information occupies too much of the display
- Information is hard to integrate
- Remembering subtle cause and effect of information relationships
- Difficulty of unseen information
Designing for salience takes into account the following:
- Difference between designer and reader
- Not one-size-fits-all
- Timing of presentation (too early vs. too late)
- Signal to noise ratio of information
The effects of presentation:
- Cues get attention
- Privileged in order viewed
- Users think they use more information than they do
- Readers look for confirmation of assumptions
- Invisible or unseen is ignored
Redundant information can increase salience, but can also overemphasize problems or cautions.
Summary
Overall, a really interesting set of talks and I wish I'd stayed for the following day of presentations. Partly because the content was so excellent, but also because being on campus was really fun and I would have enjoyed a quick trip to Juarez while I was so close. But, I jumped on a plane next morning, extremely tired after four conferences in same number of weeks, very happy to be heading back home.
