Section: Overall Objectives

Research Themes

INSITU addresses four major research themes:

Interaction and visualization paradigms focuses on the trade-off between power and simplicity in interactive systems, both in terms of interaction and in managing and visualizing data. Rather than accepting one or the other, our objective is to shift the trade-off curve, creating systems that provide more power while retaining simplicity. We are currently investigating multi-scale (zoomable) interfaces, interactive information visualization, bimanual interaction, multimedia (video and audio) and tangible interfaces. Our goal is to not only explore these paradigms individually but also to investigate how to integrate them into real-world applications.

Mediated communication focuses on how to help people to maintain peripheral awareness of each others' activities at a distance (to “stay in touch”), while maintaining privacy and ensuring that users stay in control of their communication channels. Our objective is to generate a design space for alternative forms of communication, developing and testing new communication applications that illustrate different dimensions of the design space. We are currently developing communication appliances for home settings, including support for the elderly, children, remote couples and families.

Research methods focuses on how multi-disciplinary teams can create effective interactive systems that take context into account. Our objective is to create new research methods that include users throughout the design process, to test these methods in real-world settings and to disseminate these methods to researchers and designers. We are currently investigating participatory design techniques that actively involve users throughout the design process and multidisciplinary design techniques that facilitate communication among researchers from engineering, social science and design disciplines.

Engineering of interactive systems focuses on creating effective tools for building interactive systems. Our objective is to generate libraries, exploratory toolkits and platforms that enable us to quickly implement and work with new concepts, while also enabling researchers within and outside of INSITU to benefit from our research. We are currently investigating tools that facilitate the design and adoption of effective interaction techniques and paradigms and component-based architectures to facilitate dynamic management of interactive systems. Our goal is to develop open source toolkits that enable us and our research colleagues to design and implement advanced interactive systems.

Although we articulate each theme separately, we often intermix them within actual projects. We also work across disciplines, providing us with research breadth, and at the same time, seek to obtain depth in particular projects. We apply our own research methods to the design of new interaction techniques, develop our own tools for developing these techniques and integrate these techniques in the design of innovative interactive systems, which we test in real-world settings. Our long-term goal is to create a new generation of interactive environments that provide a compelling alternative to the current generation of desktop computers.