Including Temporality and Causality to the Design of Interactive Systems – Causality

In this 4-year project we propose to revise the way researchers and interaction designers understand, manipulate, and exploit the temporality of Human-Computer Interactions (HCI). The project addresses a fundamental limitation in the way interfaces and interactions are designed and even thought about today, an issue we call procedural information loss. It is the notion that once a task has been completed by a computer, significant information that was used or produced while processing it is rendered inaccessible regardless of the other purposes it could serve. While major progress has undoubtedly been achieved since the first Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) in terms of e.g. input and output capabilities and performance, interaction design, and so on, this issue remains present at every level of modern interactive systems, and it shapes the way we think, design, and implement interfaces and interactions. We argue that it hampers the identification and solving of identifiable usability issues, as well as the development of new and beneficial interaction paradigms. Overall, we aim to trigger and lead a profound change in the ways all interactive systems are designed, used, and augmented.

We propose that a number of systematic issues with GUIs today can be solved through a single design principle: changes to the interface and to user-manipulated data should be timed and traceable back to the input events that initiated them, and to the system states that participated in their computation. Our approach is to explore, develop, and promote finer granularity and better-described connections between the causes of those changes, their context, their consequences, and their timing. Applying this principle in interface design and implementation will solve a number of existing yet rarely addressed usability problems in all interfaces, and unlock new possibilities in interaction design. In particular, we will apply it to facilitate the real-time detection, disambiguation, and solving of frequent timing issues related to human reaction time and system latency; to provide broader access to all levels of input data, therefore simplifying the implementation of novel interactive systems and reducing the need to "hack" existing frameworks; and to greatly increase the scope and expressiveness of command histories, allowing better error recovery but also extended editing capabilities such as reuse and sharing of previous actions.

The originality of this project's approach consists in treating numerous usability problems from what we identify as a common cause: the lack, or untimely discarding, of relevant information about how changes come to occur in an interactive environment. This project will be the first to address those issues as a whole, rather than as platform-dependent, individual repairs. It will bring significant contributions in numerous aspects of HCI, including software engineering solutions to reconstruct I/O chains of events and design far more flexible histories of commands, novel models of human movement and psychomotor phenomena, and the principled design and evaluation of new and improved interaction and visualization techniques for everyday use of every type of computing systems. We aim for these contributions to become new industry and academic standards in the design and implementation of interactions and interactive systems.