Designing Interactive Applications to Support Novel Activities

R&D in media-related technologies including multimedia, information retrieval, computer vision and the semantic web are studying and experimenting on a variety of computational tools that, if sufficiently matured, could support many novel activities that are not practiced today. Interactive technology demonstration systems produced typically at the end of their projects show great potential for taking advantage of technological possibilities. These demo systems or “demonstrators” are, however crude or far-fetched, a significant manifestation of the technologists’ visions and a milestone of the transformation of emerging technologies into novel interaction scenarios and applications. In this article, we reflect on design processes and crucial design decisions made while designing some successful, web-based interactive technology demonstrators developed by the authors. From this, we identify a number of methodological issues in applying today’s requirement-driven usability engineering method to designing this type of novel applications and solicit a clearer distinction between designing mainstream (conventional) applications and designing novel applications. More solution-oriented design approaches leveraging design thinking are required and more pragmatic evaluation criteria needs to be introduced that assesses the role of the system in exploiting the technological possibilities to provoke further brainstorming and discussion. Such an approach in design and evaluation will support a more efficient channelling of the technology-to-application transformation which is becoming increasingly crucial in today’s context of rich technological possibilities.