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Re-framing the desktop interface around the activities of knowledge work

Published: 19 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The venerable desktop metaphor is beginning to show signs of strain in supporting modern knowledge work. In this paper, we examine how the desktop metaphor can be re-framed, shifting the focus away from a low-level (and increasingly obsolete) focus on documents and applications to an interface based upon the creation of and interaction with manually declared, semantically meaningful activities. We begin by unpacking some of the foundational assumptions of desktop interface design, describe an activity-based model for organizing the desktop interface based on theories of cognition and observations of real-world practice, and identify a series of high-level system requirements for interfaces that use activity as their primary organizing principle. Based on these requirements, we present the novel interface design of the Giornata system, a prototype activity-based desktop interface, and share initial findings from a longitudinal deployment of the Giornata system in a real-world setting.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '08: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2008
    308 pages
    ISBN:9781595939753
    DOI:10.1145/1449715
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 19 October 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. activity-based computing
    2. context-aware computing
    3. desktop computing
    4. giornata
    5. knowledge work

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