Panel natural, cultural & cybercultural interfaces: points of view

ABSTRACT

The title of the panel implies a walk through on different interfaces based on human-dependent assumptions that may condition their implementation, their application and their usability. The nature of the problems encountered when designing a system that should be used by different classes of users - and therfore must satisfy and facilitate access to information to people having varied skills - is manifold. Nevertheless, by designing user-centered interfaces we are trying to improve the quality of work, reduce memory load, enable the detection and extraction of the required information for making evaluations, taking decisions and smoothly progress along a well-defined path until the project termination.The people in the panel have a wide range of experiences in the broad area of multimedia communication and, more particularly, have worked in different communication domains where the spatial view, the environment and the application determine the features of the interface, in some cases considering management and inventory problems, artistic work, data search and navigation activities, in others restoration (and relative documentation) projects with the possibility of monitoring such projects. In particular, the importance of a small scale prototype to verify some of the basic assumptions, which were established at the beginning of the interface design project, must be strongly considered. The purpose of the panel will be to review and discuss the nature of communication for a given set of environments and cultural patterns, debating the nature of some established guidelines and suggesting new ones while also focusing on the specific applications stemming from Cultural Heritage, where the nature of information is complex and multifold: numerical, textual and pictorial. Likewise, the motivation for the users of the proposed systems may differ from one time period to another, so changing goals, methods and actions to be undertaken by such users according to the present status of the activity. Restoration, classification, documentation and presentation are some of the different functions that are typical of the application we are considering and which will be analyzed by the panelists.