Even though I am at the end of my dissertation work, my work in relation to mo-bile technology has only just begun. Design issues concerning the different aspects of interface design for mobile technology are far from resolved. The technologial devel-opment shows no sign of slowing down and the pervasive computing focus becomes increasingly important as more and more computer chips become embedded in the sur-rounding environment. There are many different ways by which you could approach these issues of which I will mention only one, namely the way I have chosen in my further pursuit of research within the realm of mobile work and pervasive computing.
9.4.1 Designing a mobile EPJ
Hospitals in Denmark are currently engaging in projects to replace the paper-based patient journal with an electronic journal. However, most of these electronic patient
journal (EPJ) systems are PC’based and thus stationary, forcing the user to come to the
“seek out” the journal to get access to the patient’s information, which does not support the work practise for neither nurses nor doctors. A one-year project with the purpose of enhancing such an electonic patient journal system with a mobile unit to better support the work tasks at a hospital started in October 2001, with participation from the Center for Pervasive Computing at Aarhus Universitet. Based on an empirical study of a surgical hospital ward using an EPJ, we aim to develop twohand-held prototypes for accessing patient data. The first prototype will illustrate how EPJ data can be accessed through a browser application on a hand-held PDA. The second will illustrate design of client applications, supporting specific work tasks, and we will with this prototype focus specifically on information visualisation aspects for the hand-held device as part of an effort to design generel user interface principles for ’babyfaces’.
9.4.2 A Post-WIMP analysis of mobile technology interfaces
Having argued that interface paradigms created for the PC (e.g. the direct manipulation paradigm and the desktop metaphor) are ill suited for applying to design of mobile tech-nology interfaces in [Nielsen and Søndergaard, 2000, Bertelsen and Nielsen, 2000][P4,P5], it seems to be time to consider alternatives. A structured analysis of how Post-WIMP interface properties [Beaudouin-Lafon, 2000] may be used in relation to design of mobile technology could be an interesting starting point for discussing and suggest-ing general design principles for mobile technology. I see this work done in spirit with the systematic analysis and development of CPN/Tools for the CPN2000 project [Beaudouin-Lafon et al., 2001]
9.4.3 Fluid links on mobile interfaces
The use of fluid links and fluid structures in general [Zellweger, 1998] have been intro-duced in different contexts ranging from eBooks over spread-sheets to web pages with success. I find the approach in relation to mobile technology and particularly palm-top devices very promising because the fluid links provide a space-economic apprach to information visualisation, enabling the user to call forth information as it is needed without changing the current context of use.
Appendix A
The SmartWindows project
The SmartWindows project was a six-month internally defined project for the User Centered Design group at Danfoss (UCD) involving seven people (Jacob, Thomas, In-grid, Kirsten, Shin, Nina, Eva) from the group and two research assistants (Pernille
& I) from Aarhus University. Furthermore, other actors were involved in shorter or longer periods of the process; The project was part of a coordinated field study in the BIDI project and several workshops were held with participants from the BIDI part-ners, several one- or two-day workshops with external participants were used to inform the process, e.g. with guest lecturers Paul Dourish (situational computing workshop), Melissa Sefkin (interaction analysis workshop), and Jeanette Blomberg (ethnography workshop). Last, but not least, the project was very focused on engaging users in de-sign, which is reflected in the ethnographically inspired fieldwork using video to cap-ture the daily tasks of the process operators, and the unusual large number of feedback, design and evaluation workshops with the users in this six-month period. In summary, the process can be described as task-driven and highly open with participants from many different disciplines.
A.1 Introducing the work setting and methods used
The work setting studied was a combined heating and power plant in Sønderborg (SKV). The aim of the project was to support the work of process operators at the plant and in that to investigate into the needs for ’smart tools/windows’—hand-held devices. A group of eight researchers, armed with video cameras and working in pairs followed four of the process operators over the course of two weeks to get an under-standing of the work done and the needs of the operators in performing this work. A set of scenarios exemplifying a (gennemgående) inability to access relevant/vital infor-mation outside of the control room was created from the field video tapes and based on these, we started to design a hand-held device the operators could take with them when they walked around on the plant that could function as a window into the system, hence the name "SmartWindows".
After the initial field study, some of the researchers went back to the combined heating and power plant with a selection of foam-block mock-ups and let the users create their own future scenarios with the ’hand-held device’, describing in some detail in which situations they would use a hand-held device and what kind of information they would need. These future scenarios were enacted on site and captured on video.
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Rather than going into detail with all the workshops, I will try to provide an overview of the massive number of cooperative, user-involved sessions in this project with Table A.1.
The combined heating and power plant is highly distributed with thousands of com-ponents spread over a wide area but control is central as all component/sensor infor-mation is sent to a central control system in a central control room with the aim of providing sufficient overview to supervise the process. Though the field study we re-alised that lack of information locally at the plant made it necessary for the process operators to work in pair, one situated at the control room with access to the system information while the other moved around on the plant doing the maintenance work that requires access to the physical components and the information available in the area (temperature of pipes, sound of motors, etc.). Another guiding force in their work was the alarm list, which was monitored and filtered each shift by the person in the control room.