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Further reading □ Foreword □ Contents □ Preface □ Prologue □ Acknowledgements □ Participants □ 1. Introduction □ 2. Control Structures □ 3. Syntactic Structures □ 4. Cognitive psychology and interaction □ 5. Visual Communication □ 6. Presentations □ 7. Working Groups □ 8. Group Reports □ 9. Postscript □ 10. Position papers □ 10.1 Anson □ 10.2 Baecker □ 10.3 Bo □ 10.4 van den Bos □ 10.5 Crestin □ 10.6 Dunn □ 10.7 Dzida □ 10.8 Eckert □ 10.9 Encarnacao □ 10.10 Engelman □ 10.11 Foley □ 10.12 Guedj □ 10.13 ten Hagen □ 10.14 Hopgood □ 10.15 Klint □ 10.16 Krammer □ 10.17 Moran □ 10.18 Mudur □ 10.19 Negroponte □ 10.20 Newell □ 10.21 Newman □ 10.22 Nievergelt □ 10.23 Ohsuga □ 10.24 Rosenthal □ 10.25 Sancha □ 10.26 Shaw □ 10.27 Tozzi □ 11. Bibliography
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⟶ ACD ⟶ Literature ⟶ Books ⟶ Methodology of Interaction
⟶ ACD ⟶ Literature ⟶ Books ⟶ Methodology of Interaction
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Further reading ⇓

□ Foreword □ Contents □ Preface □ Prologue □ Acknowledgements □ Participants □ 1. Introduction □ 2. Control Structures □ 3. Syntactic Structures □ 4. Cognitive psychology and interaction □ 5. Visual Communication □ 6. Presentations □ 7. Working Groups □ 8. Group Reports □ 9. Postscript
10. Position papers
□ 10.1 Anson □ 10.2 Baecker □ 10.3 Bo □ 10.4 van den Bos □ 10.5 Crestin □ 10.6 Dunn □ 10.7 Dzida □ 10.8 Eckert □ 10.9 Encarnacao □ 10.10 Engelman □ 10.11 Foley □ 10.12 Guedj □ 10.13 ten Hagen □ 10.14 Hopgood □ 10.15 Klint □ 10.16 Krammer □ 10.17 Moran □ 10.18 Mudur □ 10.19 Negroponte □ 10.20 Newell □ 10.21 Newman □ 10.22 Nievergelt □ 10.23 Ohsuga □ 10.24 Rosenthal □ 10.25 Sancha □ 10.26 Shaw □ 10.27 Tozzi □ 11. Bibliography

9. POSTSCRIPT

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GRATIN DAUPHINOISE

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Seillac, le 9 Mai 1979

Domaine de Seillac

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9.1 POSTSCRIPT - R.A.GUEDJ

The Workshop was very stimulating and over the four days at Seillac a growing and deepening involvement of the participants in the subject was observed. In a short time participants revealed enough of their own conceptions, misconceptions, and desires for a conceptual framework in which to study the subject, that they could be open and receptive to each other's perceptions of the subject. The aim of the Workshop was quite ambitious, it is my belief that progress was made towards the goals of a deeper understanding of interaction and an improved comprehension of what should be meant by better interactive systems.

It is now possible to identify some areas of disagreement which imply, as one participant said, some understanding of the subject. The following may be pointed to as areas where common concern seems to be growing:

  1. A view such as interaction consists of gaining access to smart software systems in a rich interactive environment is seductive and not completely satisfactory. The concern should be the communication of insight into the concepts and structures contained in such systems. To become seeds for progress such concepts and structures need to be expressed in simple terms with a small number of apposite metaphors.
    Nevertheless, it is quite clear that a wealth of essential notions are embedded in a system such as SMALLTALK.
  2. Most people still believe that the software necessary to make new displays and new technologies useful is at least as important as the hardware itself. However, people are now aware that "we have to develop a way of thinking about the present that does not preclude innovation due to Nick Negroponte's contribution. His general observations about the future cannot be dismissed for consideration at a future time but must be considered seriously now.

  3. Some participants do not find discussion of interaction in terms of sequences of input/output pairs sufficiently convincing, no matter what embellishments are added to describe their composition, description and representation. On the other hand there is a growing concern about the need for reliable specification techniques for interactive systems.

    The future will tell if such techniques can be derived from those proposed and sought in some of the position papers in this volume.

  4. There seems to be great potential in the application of experimental psychology to provide models for the evaluation of user-system performance.

    Work in the directions described by Tom Moran to make psychological expertise available to system's designers should be strongly encouraged. However, the relative importance of the evaluation criteria in such models may prove to be crucial.

  5. There is some agreement that any satisfactory conceptual framework must contain several levels. The sets of levels (intention, connotation, denotation, constituents), (conceptual, semantics, syntactic, lexical), (user's model, command language, feedback, information display) have all been considered as bases but mappings between these sets are quite difficult to make. Considering the role of input/output in such frameworks does not seem to shed much light on the problem, except on the problem of a taxonomy of position papers! Yet it must be said that each approach seems to encapsulate some important aspects of interaction.

The use of interactive systems will spread. Their impact on our everyday life, both at work and in the home, will greatly affect us and our world. Further work on this most important of subjects is to be encouraged in the strongest terms possible.

9.2 AN OPEN LIST OF STATEMENTS

This section is an attempt to present in condensed form some of the major issues arising from the Workshop. The format of this section is a list of statements, extracted either from the reports of subgroups or inspired by the discussion sessions. It is hoped that these statements convey the feeling that new way

The list in no way reflects a consensus of opinion other than in the need for a conceptual framework. The underlying concepts are yet to emerge as discrete entities and a methodology for designing interactive systems has yet to be convincingly advanced. Nevertheless, it may be fruitful to note for the benefit of users and system designers that some of the notions expressed at Seillac II seem to constitute a preliminary step in the right direction to understanding interaction, and hopefully to building better systems. It is hoped that a sound and organised corpus of knowledge will arise from these notions by some kind of refinement process through the efforts of those who carry on the work started at Seillac II.

It is of minor importance that some statements may seem controversial; the issues to which they relate are of supreme importance.

A. The user is part of the system (the machine is also)

  1. In interactive systems, man and machine play a symmetrical role, in the sense that they exchange initiative, they share responsibility for system control and task performance, and they both can show complex behaviour.
  2. The user has a model of the task environment, which includes a model of the system.
  3. Evaluation techniques based on models of interaction are an essential ingredient to avoid bad design. For example, we need to consider such criteria as time, errors, learning, functionality, recall, concentration, fatigue, and acceptability.

B. Interaction is a style of control

  1. Good interactive systems exhibit a style of control.
  2. There is a small number of styles of control structures.
  3. Flexible and powerful control structures and control functions seem to be essential to interaction.

C. Interaction can be split into knowing and doing

  1. For the user as well as for the machine, there is an awareness of agreement (presence or lack) on what is to be done and how it is to be done.
  2. The flavour of interaction is to achieve agreement on what to do (knowing) then pass control to task performance (doing). When the task is completed, or when disagreement occurs in task performance (errors, unexpected events), then control is returned to knowing. so that agreement may be re-established before doing is resumed.

D. Interaction and modes of communication

  1. Both the user and the machine can engage in several modes of communication. Depending upon task analysis, these modes may conceptually appear under such convenient names as information analysis, information gathering, editing, browsing, exploration of level, etc...
  2. Flexibility (permissiveness) between modes directly affects interaction. Particular modes of control may be applicable to particular modes of communication. Modeless interactive systems are supposed to show more flexibility.
  3. Modes of communication should not be confused with the modalities of sentences used by the user or the machine. Sentences can take three basic modalities; namely assertive, interrogative and imperative. These modalities show the intentions of one acting upon the other with three fundamental purposes of respectively:
    • giving an element of knowledge
    • requesting some information
    • issuing an order

E. The interactive environment

  1. A programming environment with basic tools essential to interaction is a necessity for the designer of interactive systems.
  2. The nature of the tools directly affects the quality of interaction of the interactive systems designed.
  3. The nature of the tools affects the user's model of the system. Therefore the user needs an interactive environment also.
  4. It is asserted that systems that transfer well have the user's model of the system close to the designer's model of the system. This may have implications on the respective environments.
  5. The tools should provide for -user's parallelism, i.e. the user may want to progress in his task in some parallel manner, (which means here that he may enter upon several processes which may be processed in parallel).
  6. The tools should also provide for parallelism between the user and the machine, i.e. communication between user and machine processes can occur in parallel.
  7. Every interactive system has an input language which requires a language processor. That processor should be made available to the applications programmer as it is a fundamental part of the interactive system.

F. Description of interactive systems

  1. An informal description of the semantics of interaction is essential.
  2. As soon as the semantics are right and well understood formal syntactic techniques should be used.
  3. It may be necessary to look at different techniques to describe interaction.

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