Re: [kidsUI] About me

[Sanjay Chandrasekharan <schandr2@chat.carleton.ca>]

Hey folks,

Great to see things moving here!

I think I need to elaborate a bit on my interests and the way I ended up
in this list.  As I mentioned, I am interested in software agents. What
exactly a software agent is is still quite unclear, just as it is
unclear what exactly a human agent is. However, there seems to be a
general agreement that the agent concept is useful as a high level
programming abstraction. This is the same story as with objects. No one
really knows what an object is, but everyone finds it quite useful in
programming.

So far so good. Now, if you look at desktop interfaces, you can see that
they are organised as objects. Programs sit around till someone does
something to them. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, agents have a
property that goes against this intuition. They do stuff on behalf of
the user. Simply put, they are not idle, and they can change their
characteristics over time. This makes them kinda hard to represent on
the interface using the conventional object method.

Cut to the much-hated MS Office Agent. I hope everyone knows this guy.
It is the animated character that comes up when you do stuff on MSWord
and other office software. Unfortunately, this irksome character is the
epitome of agent technology as people perecieve it. And people just hate
it! (Just like MS to screw things up!) It asks stupid questions and does
stuff that insults people's intelligence. But, interestingly, people
hate it even when it gives them the right advice!

I wondered why this happened. People are quite comfortable with animated
characters on screen and love them as desktop pets and stuff like that,
but they hate when it an animated character starts giving them advice.
My reasoning was: right now we perceive the machine environment as
consisting of dumb things that sit around until we want those things to
do something. The character was working against that protocol; it acted
on its own volition. It was this that people hated. It was doing things
that went against the mental model the user had of the machine
environment.

So my reasoning was: the only way an agent can make sense on the desktop
is to change the whole desktop idea, and replace it with an environment
where agents can exist, an environment where the general metaphor for
programs is not objects, but active entities. The user will then be
intercating in the true sense of the term, like you do in a video game.
Obviously, you can't do this with Windows and Mac interfaces. The only
option available was Linux. I figured Linux was a good candidate for an
agent-based operating system.

Remember, I am not saying that we should replace the components of Linux
with Agents! I am just saying that the interface for Linux could be
organised in such a way that people would perceive it as being
agent-based, instead of object-based. Just think that we are animating
the OS -- people will see it as having a penguin inside it.(Refer to my
earlier posting about the file transfer animation).

I talked to someone about this in some detail, and this person was
invited by Doug to join this list. She couldn't, join, but she forwarded
the mail to me. I saw that the kids UI idea fitted perfectly with what I
was thinking. Kids don't come with preconceived notions about what an
interface should be like. So I decided to push for "my imagination in
long threads about the revolutionary idea" as Kojima put it! :-)

I have a feeling that people haven't really bought the idea. Since I
don't have anything much to bring to the group besides my revolutionary
idea, maybe I should now shut up, instead of wasting bandwidth. :-) So
now I will be lurking for sometime, for a change. Mostly because it is
term paper time!

All the best,

Sanjay


-------------------------------------
Sanjay Chandrasekharan,
Ph.D Student (Cognitive Science),
Carleton University,
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada K1S 5B6
Phone: 520-2600 ext 1568

http://wabakimi.carleton.ca/~schandr2