British Group www.bcs-hci.org.uk Inter aces54 • Spring 2003 HCI 2003 starts to materialise in Bath due for completion in September Words, words, everywhere, nor any stop to think Joined-up thinking with Buckingham Shum & ClaiMaker Cassandra laments lost lyrical love Kilgour chews his words carefully Croucher’s CubistFrog and Laura’s Linux Lingo Cockton sounds off but McEwan heads off! Published by the British HCI Group • ISSN 1351-119X1 Human–Computer Interaction View from the Chair contents Drop the red pants and lose the red faces? 2 View from the Chair Will we ever drop our red UserMan overpants 3 Editorial and don professional attire? Will we take pride in HCI methods that demonstrably deliver 4 ClaiMaker: A semantic web tool for modelling, across product contexts? Can we drop the analysing and visualizing HCI literature matching red faces when confident predictions Simon Buckingham Shum about designs fail to materialise in use? We will not, unless we take HCI methods seriously and 5 Deflections Product Recall create better methods through research, and Gilbert Cockton monitor and improve methods in practice. Developing professionalism is a key goal for 6 CubistFrog.com: an Adventure in Information the British HCI Group, an inclusive group that Architecture seeks effective interactions between educators, Tom Croucher researchers and practitioners. Indeed, I can 7 A Bluffer’s Guide to Linux think of no true profession without such a virtuous stakeholder triangle. Laura Cowen Without research, a profession cannot develop. 8 Conference Report: NordiCHI 2002 Without education, it cannot endure. Without N Bryan-Kinns and F Hamilton practitioners, there is simply no profession. Practitioners are thus absolutely necessary, 10 BHCIG Reports but they are not sufficient. Without close 11 Conference Preview: HCI 2003 co-operation with educators and researchers, professions ossify and die out as trade unions of Tom McEwan vested interests. 12 HCI Educators’ Heads North Today, there are only HCI specialists and no Sandra Cairncross professionals. No professional body currently accredits and polices practice (just calling 14 The Cassandra Column ourselves ‘professionals’ is silly). There may never be an HCI profession. Instead, existing 15 Workshop Report: HCT – 2002 professional bodies such as the British Barbara Crossouard Computer Society, the Ergonomics Society or 17 My PhD the British Psychological Society may agree on Stavros Kammas mutually recognised specialist accreditation. Does it matter whether we become HCI 18 Vet’s column professionals or accredited specialists? Many of Alistair Kilgour us already are professional members of the BCS, ES, BPS or whatever. Do we need two 20 Book Reviews professions and dual allegiances, or do we need 25 The Brits are Coming additional specialist qualifications that provide Gilbert Cockton appropriate assurances for clients, customers and (ultimately) users? 26 Profile Either way, a body of knowledge has to be Tom McEwan mastered, demonstrated, and continuously updated. Mastery of knowledge is necessary, 28 HCI Executive Contact list but not sufficient. We must also demonstrate effective competencies, or knowledge remains utterly academic, in the pejorative sense. But this is not the only sense of academic. There is the positive sense of mastering a subject and supporting inspired students in their own mastery of the subject, of extending and repairing a body of knowledge, and of applying knowledge in practice in a way that commands respect from full-time practitioners. So, once again, only an inclusive group can develop accreditation for HCI specialists. Gilbert Cockton [email protected] 2 Interfaces 54 • Spring 2003 Editorial The power of words is a running theme throughout this issue undergrads coming through: Tom Croucher presents a – though we seem to have more pictures and diagrams than student’s eye view of information architecture – a notion too ever before! Several are of Bath and its campus, which will often neglected and that could only help the poor benighted host a great HCI2003 in September. nomadic workers that Stavros Kammas hopes to help After too long an absence from these pages, Simon through his PhD. Barbara Crossouard has a detailed review Buckingham Shum returns with details of what he’s been up of the HCT Workshop at Sussex where a number of other to. The ClaiMaker project threatens to allow us to compre- doctoral students presented and discussed their work. hend what people mean when they write and cite. As Xristine has outdone herself once more with a bumper crop Cassandra’s spiky attack, on the unusability of some of seven book reviews. academic literature, displays, this is not a moment too soon. Laura Cowen increases our vocabularies with her bluffer’s In what he threatens to be the last of his Veteran’s Columns guide to Linux. You will shortly be name-dropping distros (cue write-in campaign) Alistair Kilgour also thinks about around your colleagues with a kernel of accuracy. I’m what some of the HCI vocabulary actually signifies, and pleased to welcome Laura as Deputy Editor for this issue, not muses on the effectiveness of words as we try to communi- least because that means she’ll be doing my job from the next cate across disciplines and with normal people. issue. It’s hard to believe that three years have passed since Never neglectful of the acerbic capabilities of prose, Janet Finlay passed the job on to me, I’ve had such a great bodyline bowler Gilbert Cockton lobs in a couple of short time. But issues 42-54 of Interfaces would have been full of pieces in his usual irrepressible style. Hopefully these will typos, poorly laid out and ill-structured had it not been for provoke a storm of letters and emails, with which to fill the the professional skills of Fiona Dix, and they would have had next issue. no content were it not for the contributing editors, including Words are the currency of conferences, of course, and this Xristine, Alistair Kilgour, Martha Hause, Alan Dix and Alex time of year always supplies a rich collection of conference Dixon (who edited issue 50 in my absence), and of course the and workshop reports and previews. But these are not merely dozens of individual writers. Thank you all. prosaic! Bryan-Kinns & Hamilton report on the madness in So that’s it for now from me in this role – I remain as Aarhus – telepresent lamps, bicycle wheelies and multi- BHCIG communications chair – coordinating this publication, sensory seedpods are but a few of the non-text interfaces. UsabilityNews, the website, mailing lists and future channels. Cairncross earns her first centrefold, previewing the forth- Thank you for reading, and Alan’s given me, on page 26, the coming HCI Educators’ in Edinburgh at the end of March. last (ahem) word! This two-day workshop is for anyone interested in the HCI Tom McEwan capabilities of graduates. There are some excellent retiring editor RIGHT TO REPLY NEXT ISSUE Make Interfaces interactive! We invite you to Interfaces welcomes submissions on any HCI- have your say in response to issues raised in related topic, including articles, opinion pieces, Interfaces or to comment on any aspect of HCI book reviews and conference reports. The next that interests you. Submissions should be short deadline is 15 April, but don’t wait till then – we and concise (500 words or less) and, where look forward to hearing from you. appropriate, should clearly indicate the article being responded to. Please send all contributions with thanks to commissioning editors: to the Editor. Deputy Editor: Laura Cowen Vet's Column: Alistair Kilgour, [email protected] To receive your own copy of Interfaces, join the British Book Reviews: Xristine Faulkner, [email protected] HCI Group by filling in the form on page 27 and sending it My PhD: Martha Hause, [email protected] to the address given. Profile: Alan Dix, [email protected] Deadline for issue 55 is 15 April 2003. Deadline for issue 56 is 15 July 2003. Electronic versions are preferred: RTF, plain text or MS Word, via electronic mail or FTP (mail [email protected] for FTP address) or on Mac, PC disks; but copy will be accepted on paper or fax. Send to: Interfaces, c/o Laura Cowen, Mail Point 095, IBM United Kingdom Laboratories, Hursley Park, Winchester Hampshire, SO21 2JN Tel: +44 (0)1962 815622; Email: [email protected] and copy email submissions to Fiona Dix, Interfaces production editor; email: [email protected] PDFs of Interfaces issues 35–53 can be found on the B-HCI-G web site, www.bcs-hci.org.uk/interfaces.html Interfaces 54 • Spring 2003 3 ClaiMaker: A Semantic Web Tool for Modelling, Analysing and Visualizing HCI Literature In Interfaces several years ago (Issue 39), I proposed the use of ‘relational metadata’ as a way to connect research publications to each other as a form of ‘semantic citation’. Since that earlier proposal, the EPSRC (in their wisdom) funded the Scholarly Ontologies project [1]. In collaboration with Elsevier and the International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, we have been building an environment to investigate the new avenues opened up by semantic web and visualization technologies for scientific publishing and argumentation. This derives from a long history of visual hypertext argumentation tools [2] going back to the formative visions of HCI pioneers Bush and Engelbart. In this article, I’d like to bring the HCI community up to date on progress, and, for those of you excited by it, to invite your collabora- Figure 1: User interface to ClaiMaker, showing how a researcher tion to take it forward. can build a set of claims. Key: Literatures as semantic networks 1 A claim that has already been constructed, ready to submit; The key idea is that literatures are large networks of claims 2 the Concept to link from, which has 3 been assigned the type Evidence, and and counter-claims – interpretations.