These are a few of the problems I would like to understand. To explore these issues scientifically is a challenge which my students and I are trying to meet by videotaping people interacting in naturalistic settings, by running controlled experiments in the laboratory, and by building computer models of expertise to explore the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. One study we are currently running is to discover the impact of interruption in everyday work settings. Each of us is interrupted at a gross level an average of 8 times an hour when we are working. Interruption is part of a tangle of issues involved in cognitive overload.
Few topics are of greater importance in our modern age.
Another set of studies we are running focuses on some of the interesting interactive techniques people develop to count coins, play cards, sort objects, play scrabble, solve jigsaw puzzles, and construct solutions to simple blocks world problems. We believe that the lessons we are learning will help us not only understand the complex interactive relation that holds between ourselves and our activity space, it will also help us to design better interactive interfaces for software and multimedia systems. A third set of projects we are actively engaged in has to do with designing and implementing virtual environments for collaboration and learning. Since Jan of 1999 I have been teaching several of my UCSD classes from the University of California Washington DC Center. The interactive learning environment we are building incorporates telepresence, 3D models, collaboratories and a host of other social tools to create an exploratory space where students can work together both among themselves and with the teacher.