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Call For Participation for CHI'95 Workshop 
   - sponsored by ACM/SIGCHI - 

        +--------------------------------------+
        |      KNOWLEDGE-BASED SUPPORT         |
        | FOR THE USER INTERFACE DESIGN PROCESS|
        +--------------------------------------+

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
! NOTE!      DEADLINE EXTENDED               !
!      DEADLINE is February 6 (Mon)          !
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

        May 7-8, 1995        Denver, Colorado, USA

Organizers: 
     Uwe Malinowski (Siemens Corporate R&D, Germany)
     Kumiyo Nakakoji (SRA Inc., Japan & University of Colorado, USA)
     Jonas Loewgren (University of Linkoeping, Sweden)

OVERVIEW

The goal of this workshop is to develop a conceptual map for various
knowledge-based supporting techniques for the user interface design
process, such as intelligent agents, computational critics, or
constraint-based guidance. Rather than applying a single technique,
designers can use this map to decide which combination of supporting
techniques is appropriate for their current task.  During the process
of constructing this map, opportunities and limitations of the
technical combination of different approaches will be explored. In
this workshop, rather than trying to find "the best approach," we use
the assumption that combining the approaches increases usefulness as a
pre-requisite. No discussions about :which technique is better" will
be allowed.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please submit
a position paper. The organizers will select participants by reviewing
these submissions.  In the position paper, make sure that you report
on your relevant experience in the area of knowledge-based design
support. We are especially interested in your success as well as
failure stories in applying one of the techniques. You may address the
questions listed below and formulate other questions of relevance
within the page limit (3-5 pages). Please do not attempt to survey the
area as a whole. This will be taken care of by means of the
questionnaire, to be distributed later on.


APPLICATION DEADLINE:
    February 6,1995 for submission of position papers (electronic
    submission is encouraged (3-5 pages - see below for detail)
ACCEPTANCE NOTIFICATION: 
    February, 28, 1995
SEND (electronic or paper) TO: 

     Kumiyo Nakakoji
     
        CB430
        Department of Computer Science
        University of Colorado
        Boulder, CO. 80309-0430, USA
     
       tel: +1 (303) 492-3912
       fax: +1 (303) 492-2844
       
     E-mail: kumiyo@cs.colorado.edu

-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
MOTIVATION

At CHI'94, a panel was held to discuss the "best" interaction
technique for user interface design support. At the end of the
discussion, the panelists as well as the audience came to the
conclusion that each of the proposed techniques has both strengths and
weaknesses. It seems that a combined approach that combines the
strengths should result in better support for the user interface
designer. A challenge is to find out how to combine the different
approaches to overcome the weaknesses of the individual ones.

A workshop at CHI'95 is the appropriate forum to work on 
and discuss this question with respect to both the expected 
participants and the point of time. Individual approaches 
have reached a stage where they are about to leave or have 
already left research laboratories for industrial usage. 
Strengths and weaknesses of each approach have been 
understood well enough to make the comparison among the 
approaches. And yet, no formal forums have been offered to 
discuss the possibility of integrating the approaches.

GOAL

The goal of this workshop is to develop a conceptual map for various
supporting techniques for the user interface design process. Rather
than applying a single technique, designers can use this map to decide
which combination of supporting techniques is appropriate for their
current task.  During the process of constructing this map,
opportunities and limitations of the technical combination of
different approaches will be explored. In this workshop, rather than
trying to find "the best approach," we use the assumption that
combining the approaches increases usefulness as a pre-requisite.  No
discussions about :which technique is better" will be allowed.

KNOWLEDGE-BASED SUPPORT FOR THE DESIGN PROCESS

User interface design is a knowledge-intensive task. Design
requirements for the application to be constructed are given as some
type of specification. Based on this specification (which is often
changed during the course of a project), user interface designers have
to take into account several types of design knowledge including:
recommendations or quasi- standards of the application domain;
corporate-specific user interface guidelines or styleguides of both
clients' site and software developers' site; a set of general user
interface guidelines; user interface standards if draft versions are
already in use. Required knowledge differs from one application domain
to another, and the body of knowledge is subject to constant changes.

Using all this information, user interface designers have to deal with
very diverse aspects during the design, including the layout of the
interface, dynamic behavior during usage, choice and combination of
media, and the appropriateness for different cultural backgrounds.
With the types and the amount of such knowledge, user interface
designers cannot be expected to manage the complete set of knowledge
that has to be considered during the user interface design process.

In response to the problem, in the recent past different
knowledge-based approaches to support the user interface design
process have been proposed. On the one hand, there are "passive"
approaches, where the design information that will be necessary during
the user interface design process is stored in a large database or
knowledge-base. Designers can access the design information when they
need it in a way similar to database queries. This "passive" approach,
however, poses a problem because it assumes that the designers know
which information is relevant in the current situation and how to
access it. This is not very likely, considering the amount of
information and its diversity.

To address this problem, "active" ways to support the design 
process have been developed. A constraint-based design 
environment prevents designers from making design moves 
that are inferred invalid by the system according to the set of 
predefined rules. This approach is not applicable in general, 
as not all design decisions can be classified a priori as right 
or wrong, good or bad, either at all or at the point of time the 
decision is made.

This problem is addressed by a critiquing system that evaluates and
critiques a partial design during the design process using predefined
rules. Different from the constraint-based approach, designers are
allowed to violate rules or recommendations by not responding to the
critics. But again, this is not the perfect solution because it is
sometimes much more efficient to avoid errors before making them than
pointing them out after the designing action.

Such active interaction techniques can be embedded in a
domain-oriented design environment. A user interface tool- kit and the
knowledge-based design support techniques (such as constraint-based or
critiquing components) are complemented by other types of design
support, including an argumentation tool that allows the designer to
capture the design rational and a catalog to provide examples for
guidelines or previous designs.

The obvious solution to the problem seems to be the combination of the
different approaches, at least those described above but there might
be even more. The goal of this workshop is to get a deeper
understanding of what the strengths of the different approaches are
and how they can be combined to make them most useful for user
interface designers.

RELEVANT QUESTIONS

The development of the conceptual map and the concept for 
a technical combination of the different approaches can be 
guided along the lines of the following questions:

*	What type of support is useful in different design situations?
*	What are the strengths and weaknesses of each individual 
	approach?
*	Are individual approaches better in specific design
	situations? 
*	How do the approaches deal with problems of
	-	laying out the interface
	-	designing the dynamic behavior
	-	choosing media 
	-	considering cultures (localization &
	internationalization) 
*	Which types of design knowledge/information is best 
	addressed by which approach?
*	What combination of approaches can overcome which 
	problems?
*	What does combination mean?
*	What parts are application domain specific?
*	What techniques can be used for knowledge-presentation 
	and interaction of the designer with the supporting component?
*	Can a combined approach rely on a single knowledge-
	base? What are the requirements for a knowledge
	representation? 
*	What does a framework or architecture look like?

It is not expected that this workshop will deliver the solutions to
the above questions. Instead, the goal is to establish a community
that develops a shared understanding of the problems and of the
existing approaches, and will help one another in contributing to a
better combined approach towards a system to support the user
interface design process.

ORGANIZATIONAL FRAMEWORK

The length of the workshop is 1.5-days.

Participants will be selected based on the organizers' reviews of 3-5
page position papers that have to be submitted. The most important
review criteria are the relevance with respect to the workshop topic
and quality of submitted papers. We anticipate a maximum number of 16
participants. We expect submissions from researchers and practitioners
with different background knowledge, including but not restricted to
user interface toolkits, design environments, critiquing systems,
constraint-based design, styleguides, standards.

Prior to the workshop, organizers will prepare a questionnaire and
hand it out to those who submitted position papers. The completed
questionnaire has to be submitted shortly after the notification of
acceptance. The purpose of the questionnaire is to gather information
on what approaches people know about and how they characterize these,
at the same time allowing participants to focus on their own
work/position in the position paper. The organizers will use the
submitted position papers and results from these questionnaires to
produce a draft taxonomy and will refine the organization of the
workshop activities accordingly. Both the draft taxonomy and the
accepted position papers will be distributed to the participants.

During the workshop, we intend to discuss the goal of the workshop
very briefly. Next, we will try to identify the most relevant issues
to address. In order to make this most effective, it might be
appropriate to have a few selected very focussed presentations by
participants. This will be decided based on the submissions and the
questionnaires. Most of the time will be spent in smaller groups,
discussing the selected topics. After the reports of discussion
results in plenary, new groups will be formed to discuss possible
solutions and future research directions. For all group discussions,
the organizers will provide design scenarios, in order to keep
discussions on a concrete and relevant level.  Finally, the results of
group work will be summarized and an outline of a paper, reporting
these discussion results, will be produced.

TIME TABLE

The time schedule for pre-workshop activities is as follows:

January 31	Deadline for submission of position papers

February 5	Distribution of questionnaires

February 28	Acceptance notification to participants and
		distribution of accepted papers 

March 10	Deadline for questionnaires

March 31	Distribution of draft taxonomy and workshop 
schedule.

After the workshop, the results of the discussion will be submitted as
a paper to the SIGCHI Bulletin. Additional papers may also result from
groups of participants in same subareas or discussion groups. If there
is enough interest among the participants, the publication of a
special issue of a journal or even a book can be considered.

-----------------------

If you have any questions, contact one of the organizers.

  Kumiyo Nakakoji (SRA Inc., Japan & University of Colorado)
   tel: +1 (303) 492-3912
   fax: +1 (303) 492-2844
   E-mail: kumiyo@cs.colorado.edu
           kumiyo@sra.co.jp
  Uwe Malinowski (Siemens Corporate R&D, Germany)
   tel: +49 (89) 636-2969
   E-mail: malinow@zfe.siemens.de
  Jonas Loewgren (University of Linkoeping, Sweden)
   tel: +46 (13) 281482
   E-mail: jlo@ida.liu.se