[unrev-II] The Unfinished Revolution

From: Dick Karpinski (dick@cfcl.com)
Date: Mon Jan 31 2000 - 12:04:47 PST


From: Dick Karpinski <dick@cfcl.com>

I've just copied Dave's note about The Digital Carrel to the mailing
list supporting a ten-week Stanford seminar with Doug Engelbart which
is abbreviated UnRev-II. Doug invented the mouse, but he still wishes
to enhance humanity's capability to deal with complex, urgent problems.

The late Horst Rittel, Prof. of Architecture at UCB, invented IBIS, the
Issue Based Information System, initially to archive the arguments and
decisions concerning the multitude of issues involved in designing a
public building. It has been used with success for other issues. IBIS
simply uses (colored/typed/labeled) links from Issues to Positions to
Arguments pro and con. The collection permits a newbie to see a whole
landscape of a large discussion systematically.

Does The Digital Carrel offer some usable archiving like that?

The very much alive Jef Raskin, inventor of the Macintosh, has written
a book, The Humane Interface, which will be released this year on the
24th of March by Addison Wesley Longman and ACM Press. He has analyzed
many of the human-computer interface issues and offers a new Flying
User Interface to take advantage of his discoveries.

In 1948, George Orwell published his book about a high-tech alienating
environment. The publisher nixed the original title, "1948", so Orwell
called it "1984". By happenstance, the Macintosh was introduced that
year. I'm told that there was a goal, quite radical at the time, that
a new Macintosh owner should feel in charge of the machine within one
hour. It was not easy to meet that goal, but Apple did so well at it
that the Mac sold more units in its first year than any other computer
in recorded history.

In 1999, Apricus built a medical information system with a flying user
interface of Jef's design. Without restricting the power and utility of
the application, this system has empowered its users to access the data
held there easily and quickly with less than one minute of instruction
and practice. That is, users feel in control of the machine roughly two
orders of magnitude faster than initial Mac users did.

The Humane Interface is not a how-I-did-it book, scrabbled together to
explain the wonderful Apricus success. It is a deliberate, careful
development of the field of user interface analysis and design, using
the best data available from cognitive psychology and user testing. It
will change your thinking about how people can and should interact with
computers, even if you disagree with every claim. I suspect this will
become the standard text for the next decade of UI instruction.

I hope that you, and every system designer will read the book and use
its lessons to improve your applications and my life.

Dick Karpinski dick@cfcl.com (707) 887-9321
The world's largest leprechaun

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