User Interface

At the urging of two very well informed colleagues (Sarah & Hall, who are more involved in the arts than I am) I've started reading this 1991 book by Brenda Laurel.

Given that the IT horizon is only 3-5 years off - this book was written a very long time ago (e.g. pre-our web.) Still, I'm amazed by how relevant are the issues presented! This gives me a clue that the book is going to be very much worth reading.

I'm sufficiently excited that I'm writing this before I've finished even 20% - so this can't be a "review" (although I have my suspicions that a lot of book reviews are written after reading less than 20% :-) - so I'm suggesting that I can fairly call this a Book Preview.

This 52 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Setting the Groundwork for a Content Management System: Keeping the User's Needs in Focus.

This video is, quite simply, the most compelling demonstration I have ever seen for an alternative computer interface design.

It's beautiful, as well as intuitive.

Jeff Han's Multi-Touch Interaction Research page describes the project. See also the discussion on this NASA web forum. (Yes, that's NASA as in rocket science!)

The video has been massively popular, so you may have problems accessing the version linked from Jeff's page -- try the link I've given at the top.

I could be dreaming this up, but if not, perhaps one of you can point me to a little more information. It seems like I had read somewhere that someone had received a grant to begin looking at various types of research and adding geospatial data to it. I know of a database or two that profiles characters in fiction books, their location, the setting, etc. And I know that many LC records include information about time period, setting, etc. It would be really cool to see this represented visually on a map.  I can imagine something similar being valuable for browsing all kinds of materials. Google/Yahoo maps meets visual reference tool. I can imagine a slide control that displays research across areas by date, the ability to zoom in on concentrated areas. Who knows what we might serendipitously discover if we were presented with a contextually relevant GUI like that. Does it already exist out there?