A theory of place for interaction design

Malcolm McCullough
Art & Design
and Architecture & Urban Planning
University of Michigan
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7:00pm
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
411 West Hall (Ehrlicher Room) directions...

Pervasiveness raises the stakes in human-centered interaction design. Embodied and embedded computing means pervasiveness is hardly just anytime-anyplace connectivity. Contexts, places, and situations become not only essential success factors, but indeed the premise for many new designs. Here, instead of universality, (which is the usual meaning of "ubiquity"), the goal is situated computing. Today there are many strong cases for contextual systems; and the wicked problems in knowledge representation are about location modeling. In order to meet this challenge, interaction designers need to understand not only first principles in cognition, as they tend to do well, but now also embodiment, physical typology or pattern language, and some basic sociology or ethnography of place. At a qualitative level, the one discipline to have explored all these issues most integrally is architecture. In the last decade, architecture and interaction design were expected to meet in the design of virtual worlds; but now instead, and with consequences potentially far more gratifying or worrisome, they meet in the physical city. This talk provides an interdisciplinary conceptual framework for understanding why, the beginnings of how, and where.

About the Speaker

Malcolm McCullough is associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also served on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Design School, and has worked briefly and long ago at Autodesk and Xerox PARC. Well known to the CHI community, he is the author of Abstracting Craft (1996) a philosophical book that became a pick on interactivity and work practices. McCullough's most recent book, Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing, will be published by the MIT Press this winter.