And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
- T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets
The origins of the Workshop on Methodology of Interaction - Seillac II - can be traced to the first Workshop held at Seillac on Methodology in Computer Graphics [l]. Of the many questions raised at Seillac I, some have been actively pursued by groups all round the world [2,3,4] while others have remained somewhat fallow.
It was in response to a growing need for further discussion on the topic of graphic input that the IFIP WG5.2 Graphics Committee decided to hold a second Workshop. The subject was chosen, eventually, to embrace a wider topic than just graphic input and, instead, to cover the broader topic of interaction. It was felt that little progress could be made in the area of graphic input until a better understanding of interaction, itself, existed.
The publication of this volume as a sequel to Seillac I is a continuation of the objectives of the Graphics Committee to study basic issues in order to reach a better understanding of the fundamental concepts. It is important that any discussion on these issues is disseminated to as wide an audience as possible. As one of the participants to Seillac II pointed out there is little point in agreeing on subjects we do not understand. We can only make progress by disagreeing on subjects we do understand.
The contents of this volume are not to be taken as definitive conclusions but as contribution to the study of methodology in man-machine systems.
[1] R.A.Guedj and H.Tucker, Seillac I, IFIP Workshop on Methodology in Computer Graphics, Seillac, France, May 1976- Proceedings published by North-Holland, 1979.
[2] Status Report of the Graphic Standards Planning Committee of ACM/SIGGRAPH, Computer Graphics, 13(3), August 1979.
[3] Functional Description of the Graphical Kernel System (GKS) (Preliminary version of the proposal for DIN standard 0066252).
[4] Special Issue: Graphics Standards, , ACM Computing Surveys, 10(4), December 1978.