New perspectives on interaction: What IA can learn from research on visual math cognitive tools (Karl Fast)

Karl Fast, InterAct Research Group, Faculty of Info & Media Studies, U of Western Ontario
- teaches in HCI program
www.livingskies.com
karl.fast@pobox.com

Update: Karl couldn't make his slides available but kindly provided me a handout (PDF) that covers the main points.

"visual math cogno tools" (MCTs)
visual math representations (VMRs)
- beautiful patterns: cellular, chemical

Math concepts - symbolic representations (e.g., Maxwell Equations = electricity)

DISCIPLINE PERSPECTIVES

- IA: conceptualizes users as rats in maze (find the cheese! rat-centered design!)
- Usability: let's simplify the maze!
- Persuasive design: get the rat to like the maze
- Experience design: change the color of the maze, add mood music
- Infoviz: Use the visual processing: Let's add density - a lot of mazes!

AGENT IN ENVIRONMENT

- Adapt yourself to the environment
- Move to another: IAs designing to avoid people from doing this!
- *Adapt environment to yourself: infoviz aims to do this in order to deal with the previous two

WHY MATH?
- Most people don't understand
- variable levels of abstraction
- reduce computational problems
- study how interaction w/ visual representations supports learning, exploration, problem-solving, analyzing, evaluating, reasoning, etc. (thinking of info beyond retrieval, not just finding things!)

RESEARCH GOAL: FRAMEWORK FOR INTERACTION W/ VMRS
- descriptive frameworks, rules and guidelines, increasingly prescriptive
*- mapping knowledge, discovery and use tasks to visualization types!
- what tool is appropriate for what type of interaction?

THREE BASIC INTERACTIONS

Conversing (talking)

Manipulating (using hands)

Navigating (using the feet)

TASK-BASED INTERACTIONS: 12 tasks (see slides)
Communication w/ a representation

E.g., Fragmenting
- reverse of composing and chunking
- fragmenting icosahedron (20-sided polygon?), tetrahedon
- via: cutting but leaving whole connected, exploding
- we naturally do this: design process, visual processing of a page (parsing the meta of a blog page: title, profile, post)
- e.g, grouping results by document type (fragments)

Discrete filtering

Range-based (dynamic) filtering - over time and space
- PARSE tool

TRANSITIONS
- understanding relationships between different representations
- combines animating, repicturing, searching

INTERACTIVITY
- as distinct from interaction
- feel, form, properties and qualities of the interaction
- affordance, etc. (see slide)

"academics are paid to be clever, not to be right."

Epistemic actions and Tetris
- research shows as you get more experienced, the no. of rotatations increase! (vs decrease)
- pragmatic actions: external actions to move closer to a goal
*- epistemic actions: external actions that modify environment to reduce time, complexity, unreliability of cognitive processes

EPISTEMIC ACTIONS IN THE MAZE
*- if we think of pragmatic actions, we focus on optimality, the one path, the fastest
- but optimal relative to what?
- what's optimal in IA design? time? fun? learning?
- but epistemic actions are important too: what are the implications

*ct: one of the best, if not the best, definitely the most unexpected source of ideas - mind-changing