Speaker: Professor Alan Dix (Lancaster University)
Abstract: Whether it is people or places, apps, web sites or devices in the home, we rarely interact once, but rather repeatedly over time. Understanding and feelings develop slowly and with each interaction so that our experience is framed and formed by all our previous interactions. Furthermore, each interaction is often looking forward to the future, so that experiences are partly retrospective, partly prospective; the present always interwoven with the not now.
This extended nature of experience with digital devices and applications was brought to our own attention by studies of social networking applications, in particular photosharing. For example, when you post a photo you are partly re-living the experience portrayed, but also partly imagining the impact on others, their interpretations of your decision to post the photo, and your own experience of posting is intimately tied to these presentiments. However, the issue seems to cut across many kinds of experience and kinds of device.
Much of the literature on experience focuses on short periods or individual moments of interactions 'an experience'. While some frameworks do look forward and back (preparation, reflection, etc.) their focus is still on singular experiences, not the way that protracted sequential, often cross-media, episodes work together.
We do not have a complete understanding of these extended episodic experiences, but have begin to formulate some of the key issues and challenges that a theoretical understanding needs to address.
Bio: Alan is Professor of Computing at Lancaster University and researcher at Talis based in Birmingham, but, when not in Birmingham, Lancaster or elsewhere lives in Tiree a remote island of the west coast of Scotland. He has long hair, a beard and is the son of a carpenter, but thereafter all pretensions to saintliness end. Alan began his career as a bearded mathematician at Cambridge, worked as a research scientist at the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering (lots of brightly painted tractors), a Cobol programmer for Cumbria County Council (lots of beige and brown ICL mainframes), then in 1984, thanks to Alvey, he became a bearded computer scientist. Since entering academia he worked for almost 10 years at York University before moving to become a Reader at Huddersfield in 1994, an Associate Dean of the School of Computing at Staffordshire University for two years (lots of meetings) and then Professor of Computing at Lancaster University. During all this, Alan was one of the founders and directors of two dotcom companies, aQtive (1998) and vfridge (2000), which, between them, attracted £850,000 of venture capital funding. and he is also a director of LUBEL, the Lancaster University commercial exploitation company. In September 2010 he started working for Talis a semantic web company who, inter alia, provide the platform underlying the BBC and UK data.gov.uk open data initiatives. As well as numerous articles on many aspects of human-computer interaction and related areas, Alan has written and edited several books including a big textbook on Human-Computer Interaction and a smaller textbook on Artificial Intelligence. He is currently completing a new book TouchIT on physicality and design. His interests are eclectic: formalisation and design, physicality and digitality, the economics of information, structure and creativity, and the modelling of dreams. Recently he and a colleague have developed technology for autonomous pixels that can be configured in turn any surface or space into a two or three dimensional display; this is about to go into commercial production and, it is hoped, will transform the nocturnal appearance of towns and cities across the world.
…followed by an opportunity to meet the speaker over refreshments in the Mixed Reality Lab