Michel Beaudouin-Lafon

Instrumental Interaction in Multisurface Environments

Abstract

Today's user interfaces are based on the desktop metaphor and the principles of direct manipulation that were created more than 25 years ago. With the diversity of hardware platforms, contexts of use and types of information that we face today, this paradigm clearly shows its limits. I introduced Instrumental Interaction over ten years ago to address some of these issues. Based on the observation that humans create and use tools in the real world to manipulate and interact with physical objects and materials, I created a conceptual model that decouples information substrates from the tools used to interact with them. More recently, this model was extended to address environments where groups of users interact with multiple input-output surfaces such as wall displays, multitouch tables and smartphones. In this talk I will describe and illustrate the principles and applications of instrumental interaction, in particular in the context of our WILD multisurface environment (http://www.lri.fr/~mbl/WILD). I will show how it challenges the notion of application and opens the door to more flexible interactive software that can be tailored to the need of its users.

Biography

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon is Professor of Computer Science at Université Paris-Sud (France) and a senior member of the prestigious Institut Universitaire de France. He was director of LRI, the laboratory for computer science at Université Paris-Sud (280 faculty, staff, and PhD students) for eight years. Michel has worked in human-computer interaction (HCI) for over 20 years and was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2006. His research interests include fundamental aspects of interaction, engineering of interactive systems, computer-supported cooperative work and novel interaction techniques. He works in the In Situ group, a joint lab between LRI and INRIA (http://insitu.lri.fr), and at Stanford University where he is spending a sabbatical year. Michel has advised twenty Ph.D. students, sits on several journal editorial boards and on many program committees. He was the technical co-chair for the ACM CHI 2013 conference in Paris. He founded AFIHM, the Francophone association for human-computer interaction, and was a member of the ACM Council and the ACM Publications Board.