Procreating Pleasance in the Exploration of Dynamic Information Spaces

To procreate pleasance in the exploration experience, designers of navigation schemes must take into consideration the user requirements for ease and comfort. Such requirements generally argue that the design of navigation tools or schemes needs to encompass or address different extremes simultaneously in order to account for the user's dynamic behavior and cognitive requirements during exploration. In that sense, designers must long to form a symbiotic composition of goal-centered navigation and divergent navigation schemes by according between the properties of each. This approach addresses the possibility of changes occurring in the user's focus and interest as well as in his/her attention while navigating information spaces. People can suddenly feel bored with a current interest or discover a new one worth exploring. They also might be distracted or lured by something or someone in the periphery of their attention, or change to another mental status that redefines the relation between them and information niches [2]. Hence, preserving the fluidity of user behavior around information spaces classifies as a central issue in the design of navigation schemes for pleasant exploration.

[2] Bonnie Nardi's Information Ecologies

Definition: Pleasant Exploration of Information Spaces

When exploring information spaces, people navigate according to different degrees of focus. Some are seeking a predefined topic that fits in their interests, while others have a broader or shallower focus. Pleasant Exploration rests on an engineered information structure that addresses the possibility of changes occurring in the user's focus and interest as well as in his/her attention while navigating information spaces. People can suddenly feel bored with a current interest or discover a new one worth exploring. They also might be distracted or lured by something or someone in the periphery of their attention, or change to another mental status that redefines the relation between information and them. Hence, preserving the fluidity of user behavior around information spaces classifies as a central issue in the design of information structures for pleasant exploration.

In essence, the navigation metaphor chosen to engulf the activities associated with the exploration of information spaces seems to convey a sense of individualism, objectivity, and cognition for the designers of information spaces as argued by Benyon [1]. However, the user's behavior while performing these activities seems to suggest otherwise. Surfing the internet is a social activity per excellence. People exchange links and follow same trails to reach desired locations or information. Discovery also plays a big role in acquainting with interesting sources and foci of information in cyberspace, weakening the sense of individualism further. Raising the objective qualities of navigating information spaces doesn't seem to capture a holistic picture from our perspective. Our observations lead us to conclude that the rigidly of the navigation systems available to the users forces them to follow strict methodologies to forage for information. This unified strategy for seeking and maneuvering around information may convey a sense of objectivity and uniformism, but it actually pressures users to follow the logic of the system rather them giving them enough room to explore by their own thoughts and inspirations. Finally, navigation is not always a cognitive process. The impact of discovery when new interests arise during exploration seems to sometimes reset the focus of navigation in a partially unconscious way as objects in the periphery of attention become its center or visa versa.

reference
[1] Benyon, D. R. Beyond Navigation as Metaphor. In Proceedings of 2nd EuroDL conference, Crete, 1998

Defining Information Spaces

An information space is the application of a spatial metaphor to a set of units of information. The domain definition of an information set is ontologically associated with the sources of information that generate the content of the set. These fundamentally stem from a society of participators engaged in a interaction that follows the cyclic form of broadcasts, receptions, and reactions. Such activity constitutes a fundamental property of the blogosphere [1] where information spaces center on several types of blogs and forums that host the ever-increasing amount of articles, their associated comments, and the multimedia elements and hyperlinks that they contain. These articles or posts are generally archived whenever new ones get published on the hosting blog. They are either accessed by navigating through the archive's structure, or queried after by using a semantic search mechanism when provided on the hosting blog. Navigating information spaces of this sort signifies moving between different blogs and going to the archives and back to the main pages. It could also get lured into external hyperlinks that take surfers away from the context of their information niches [2].

References:
[1] Defining the blogosphere
[2] information ecologies, Nardi

Designing In Calm Technology: Calamity Requirements as Defined by Weiser

Mark Weiser defines Calm technology as a technology that induces calamity and comfort as part of the usage experience, and argue about several key issues that characterizes it. We have based ourselves upon these issues to define a set of preliminary requirements for calamity and comfort that cultivates a preliminary approach to the design of calm information systems. The following requirements address only the general aspects of calm information systems although case-specific requirements might also prove to be vital in certain settings such as Computer Supported Collaborative Environments, but this will be discussed in a later stage.

According to Weiser, these are the main requirements for calamity and comfort in information systems:

• Unobtrusiveness: The system should not interfere in any external user activity nor bother it.
• Engaging Peripheral and Central Attention: emulating the way humans use peripheral attention around central attention by making the move from peripheral to central and visa versa easy. This also requires special attention to affordances in the periphery.
• Provision of context and rich informative settings: people prefer to have lots of information without being innodated by it. The context of information sets gives users more power to handle their content, while rich information settings also induces the feeling of control. The periphery can be used to attune to much more information than a user can place in his/her center of attention.

We also add a couple of requirements that we find essential in the scenario of information processing and consumption:

• Clarity of information: centers on the user of the right surrogates and representational processes. Surrogates must be chosen to be as expressive as possible when maintaining low cognitive requirements. In the periphery, the maintenance of low cognitive requirements is more critical that the high degree of visibility by which information can be understood from the surrogates that represent it.
  
• Ontological specifications: Calm technology information systems should thrive to render the inherent ontology related to the structure and relationships among units of information visible. The ontology adopted by the information system should neither contradict the user ontological model, nor become a universal ontology. In short, matters of ontological concerns should reflect the user´s understanding and methodological thinking when projected onto the information spaces.

These five requirements form the general fundamental properties of calm information systems or more generally, calm technology. Weiser says that technology encalms when it empowers our periphery. Such statement may have large consequences to what concerns the design and implementation of information visualization schemes and interactive informative systems.

[Reference]: Mark Weiser and John Brown. Designing Calm Technology. Xerox PARC. 1995

Building user-interfaces for IMS Specifications

IMS develops open technical specifications for interoperable learning technology. Several IMS specifications have become worldwide standards for delivering learning products and services. However, these specifications are difficult to use by people with rather simplistic technological background such as teachers, small learning institutions, and others.

In order to facilitate the dissemination of these standards, the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona has been working on a set of experimental tools that implement user interfaces for IMS specifications such as Question & Test, Learning Design, and Learning Design. Libraries where developed in Java to implement the functionalities associated with the specifications such as saving and instance of a schema, verifying the instance's compatibility with the specifications, and implementing the fields, data structures, and relations defined in the specifications.

The QAED tool is a complete user interface implementation that facilitates the creation and management of assessment repositories. It is based on the IMS Question & Test Interoperability specifications known as QTI-Lite. IMS specifications promote coordination between distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors. This tool was produced for the purpose of creating an e-learning framework and relies on a set of QTI-Lite Libraries to provide IMS specifications for the construction of assessment contents. These libraries mirror in their structure a direct mapping of the specification hierarchy into a set of Java classes. The QAed tool is a standalone application and undergoing efforts are transforming it to an open-source plug-in for service oriented architectures. In parallel, efforts are being applied to upgrade the libraries to QTI 2.0 specifications.

Experimentations with these tools are helping to design a schema to bring the IMS specifications a visage that can be utilized by novice learners or learning designers in producing, distributing, and consuming learning components in accordance with global specifications.

THESIS:

Developing a web-based New Media channel for pleasant and diverging exploration of information spaces

Abstract

The information inherent in web media objects is constantly changing as new knowledge gets published and reacted upon. However, people still access pages with frequently changing contents in a discreet fashion and navigate them from pit-stop to pit-stop often returning to search engines and link lists to contextualize or search for elements of their interest. We aim to build a dynamic media channel that harvests media objects from web sources according to a channel’s interest formula, and then dynamically passes these objects to its spectators. The latter’s interests contribute to the channel’s interest formula by interacting with appealing objects through an interface that segregates between zones of direct and peripheral attentions. Direct attention is devoted to a certain centralized group of objects while objects of relation, similarity, or of providence keep surfacing in the contour, creating a sense of divergent exploration and discovery [kerne]. Pleasance is achieved by using calm technology principles in designing for reflection and concentration rather than efficiency [weiser, sense&sensitivity].

THESIS: Definitions from Wikipedia

Channel, in communications (sometimes called communications channel), refers to the medium used to convey knowledge from a sender (or transmitter) to a receiver, while Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and/or video signals, (programs) to a number of recipients ("listeners" or "viewers") that belong to a large group. Hence a broadcasting channel is medium that connects a transmission center to a wide group of recipients to distribute information.

Knowledge is information of which someone is aware. Knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject, potentially with the ability to use it for a specific purpose. In the realm of Epistemology, knowledge has been assumed to have at least the following three properties: justified, true, and believed.

Intimite is an adjective that means Familiar; near; friendly; confidential.

Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed", because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities; it is contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience.

A conceptual model is a theoretical construct that represents physical, biological, or social processes, with a set of variables and a set of logical and quantitative relationships between them.

Multimedia is the use of several different media (e.g. text, audio, graphics, animation, video, and interactivity) to convey information. Multimedia also refers to the use of computer technology to create, store, and experience multimedia content. Multimedia is also a pleonasm as media is the plural of medium, hence it is a double plural. As the information is presented in various formats, multimedia enhances user experience and makes it easier and faster to grasp information. Presenting information in various formats is nothing new, but multimedia generally implies presenting information in various digital formats.