text (standard display, 3-D display, powerwall, interaction and navigation devices) need to be considered. Focus and context of the human visual perception ...
ENABLING FLOW — A PARADIGM FOR DOCUMENT-CENTERED PERSONAL INFORMATION SPACES Bertin Klein and Stefan Agne Knowledge Management Lab German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI GmbH Kaiserslautern, Germany email: klein,agne @dfki.de
ABSTRACT We introduce a futuristic vision of a Document-centered Personal Information Space. However, even without the futuristic part of the vision, the underlying paradigm can instantly improve the conditions for a phenomenon at work, called flow. Flow provides those who enter into it, with a high efficiency and satisfaction at work. The vision and its required preconditions are considered a paradigm, for which a corresponding framework is provided, broken down into a structure of four main elements. KEY WORDS Man-Machine Interfaces, Adaptive Intelligent Systems, Data Mining, Cognitive Science, Information Visualization, Pervasive Computing
1 Introduction Human thinking and knowledge work is heavily dependent on (sensing) the outside world. E.g., it is well-known that our visual knowledge disclosure — that is, our ability to think, abstract, remember, and understand visually — and our skills to visually organize are extremely powerful. We are envisioning an individually customizable virtual world (comprising a users Document-centered Personal Information Space), which inspires the user’s thinking, enables the economical usage of his perceptual power, and adheres to a multiplicity of personal details with respect to his thought process and knowledge work. In the visualization community (which, here, consciously goes far beyond vision), such efficient manmachine interaction in manipulative virtual environments is called ”immersion”(cf. [1]): a frictionless sequence of operations and a smooth operational flow, integrated with multi-sensory interaction possibilities, which allows an integral interaction of human work activities and machine support. When implemented to perfection, this approach enables a powerful immersion experience: the user has the illusion that he is actually situated in the artificial surroundings, the barrier between human activities and their technical reflection vanishes, and the communication with the
This work is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the project @Visor (# 01 IW D01).
Achim Ebert and Michael Bender Intelligent Visualization and Simulation Lab German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI GmbH Kaiserslautern, Germany email: ebert,bender @dfki.de
artificial environment is seamless and homogeneous. As a result, not only are visually driven thinking, understanding, and organizing promoted, but the identification and recognition of new relations and knowledge is facilitated. We believe that as a result knowledge workers and analysts will work more efficient and effective, just as the industrial revolution made manual laborers more efficient and effective. If I had all my paper documents from my writing desk easily available as PDF documents, then I could save them all on a USB stick and have them with me at all times. Imagine further, it was history, that it is much more convenient to work with paper documents than with PDFs. The documents need not be on a USB stick, it could also be a small future computer. Soon such computers will no longer be any larger than a mobile phone. Wherever I were, I could plug it to a display — perhaps a futuristic projector or my stylish glasses — and spend a few seconds or longer at my writing desk. Note, that all my todo-lists, my calendar, my notes, my documents, are there, my entire writing desk.
Figure 1. A typical Document-centered Personal Information Space is ones writing desk. The instant advantages of an electronic Documentcentered Personal Information Space (without futuristic elements) can perhaps be motivated with a comparison of a classical ”Post-It” and a sketch of an ”intelligent contentdriven Post-It”: Electronic ”Post-Its” can be retrieved, e.g., by its creation time, ”this morning”, and with a mouse click one finds the document to which it refers. ”Post-Its” can also refer to several documents and thus establish commented links. They can also include links to appointments,
todo-lists, etc. With our idea of an ”intelligent contentdriven Post-It” it is also possible to popup a required document at a specific time and at a desired text position depending on automatically extracted information about the document. Paper ”Post-Its”, on the other hand, lack these features. Figure 1 shows as a graphical sketch, a first idea of our vision of a ”non-wooden writing desk”. Even though this is only a manually created, two-dimensional drawing, it already incorporates not yet readily implemented visual elements like document viewers, document stacks, Post-Its, meta-information (links), and a calendar tool with strongly enhanced fisheye technology, and active links to documents. In the remainder, we discuss the phenomenon of ”flow”, our notion of a ”Document-centered Personal Information Space”, and the notion of the ”hermeneutic circle”. We then motivate the metaphor of an electronic writing desk, the ”Virtual Desktop InfoSpace”, and observations of writing desk work are used to sketch the requirements on such a tool. We close with the introduction to the framework for realizing the requirements, structured into four main elements.
2 Removing Barriers, Improving Flow The aforementioned ”immersion” is not the same as ”flow”, but it supports flow, e.g. through the ”vanishing of barriers between human activities and their technical reflection” (this is quoted from above).
2.1 Flow It happens that one starts a day in the office at ones writing desk and suddenly one kind of wakes up, and it is two hours later. One has achieved a lot, but cannot easily tell what in detail one has done. This phenomenon is called ”flow”. Flow is a very interesting phenomenon because it enhances individual work, especially where creativity is involved, and yields to the efficiency and satisfaction of individuals in their work. Flow was first treated by the Chicago professor Csikszentmihalyi [2], who was in 2000 awarded ”The Thinker of the Year Award”’ for his life’s work on flow. Flow is preferably described by its amazing, perceivable symptoms (loosely based on: [3]): amalgamation of action and consciousness; fade of everything else in the background; no notice of time; achievement of challenging goals with ease; returning from flow it is hard or impossible to explain what one has done to achieve the goals.
Flow, its mechanisms and effects are not yet understood in depth. However, ”15% of people say they have never experienced the flow, 15-20% say they experience it every day (or several times a day), with the rest in between.” [4] Further, recent studies (cf. [5]) were able to show that flow-experiences occur more often in working settings than in leisure. Thus, flow is ubiquitous and an integral part of every day life, and especially also in business. One precondition for flow is the absence of barriers that suddenly require conscious attention, and so interrupt the flow. A strategy towards flow is thus the identification and removal of one barrier after the other (with every removed barrier possibly enabling better and better experience of flow). A sketch of our framework for a paradigm for computer work providing the preconditions of flow is as follows: 1. The focus is on activities typically performed at writing desks (a widespread instance of a Documentcentered Personal Information Space). Wooden writing desks are still required, because computers lack important elements, which one needs and one is used to at ones writing desk. 2. Many barriers can be easily identified. E.g., one can grasp a stack of some documents and skim through them, in order to find a specific passage; computers are lacking comparable features. The elements of writing desk activities, which computers lack, are barriers to be overcome with specialized software modules or features.1 3. Then, a further step is in close reach. Once a certain amount of elements is newly supported by computer applications, so that many document-based activities can be performed on the computer, then one can additionally open up the tap to exploit the traditional strengths of the computer. Freeing the user from delegable (dumb?) tasks, this is another boost for the easiness at work and for flow. In the following we elaborate on our account of a Document-centered Personal Information Space, the above framework, and the elements to enable flow.
2.2 Document-centered Personal Information Space A person’s collection of documents2, plus the meaning in these documents that the person has understood and has at her disposal3 , in other words the information stock of a person, based on documents, is what we are focusing on, and 1 Referring to researchers who have analyzed and technically reproduced the water repellent effect of the Lotos-flower, we like to call this the ”Lotos-research”’. 2 The collections are typically structured, e.g., sorted into heaps or folders. 3 The meaning of the documents to the person comprises the topics, statements, conclusions, interrelations, and implications he has discovered in the documents.
what we call the Document-centered Personal Information Space. We consider a typical Document-centered Personal Information Space to be a person’s writing desk. Based on documents like books, folders, reports, notes, a calendar, todo-lists, as well as electronic documents on computers one organizes one’s information, in order to fulfill ones daily work. When one has worked for a while with a collection of documents, one will have a fairly good understanding of them, and be able to store them in an archive and efficiently work with them. It is not, that one knows everything, but that one knows how to find, what one needs. Computers can be very useful here. They allow to replace paper based archiving of documents, by means of databases, allowing for structured archiving and retrieval. However, every day new documents arrive.
2.3 Hermeneutic Circle To really understand a document takes time. Typically, one has to read it several times. This process, the incorporation of the meaning of new documents into the mind, is scientificly called the ”hermeneutic circle”. Here, computers not only offer little support, but also hamper. The phrase ”hermeneutic circle” refers to the circle of interpretation necessarily involved when understanding some work [...]. This is [...] a way of explaining and expressing how understanding and interpreting a work [...] is an ongoing process which takes time. As more information about the work is acquired, an interpretation gradually changes to incorporate that.[6] So, newly arriving documents, require a while of reading and rereading them before they are well enough understood, and their relation to other documents and things like current projects are clearer. Only then one can archive them and has their meaning present. That is the reason why writing desks exist and are mostly filled with documents and reminder notes. Their meaning has not been fully incorporated into the mind of the person. This process of gradually understanding and interpreting is a major issue in the treatment of human and artificial intelligence: Discussions of the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence increasingly refer to hermeneutics, [here understood as] a branch of continental European philosophy concerned with human understanding and the interpretation of written texts. ([7]) The metamorphosis of an unread document, to a meaningful representation in a persons mind, sorted into the other knowledge known by the person, and meaningfully linked to this knowledge, is a procedure which computers cannot yet mimick today. This makes our work interesting on a larger scale. Further, it reemphasizes the strategy to leave the human tasks to the human, and make the computer only support the human with tasks, the computer is really good at.
3 Replacing the wood Focusing on the writing desk is not by accident. A writing desk is the classical and historically well-known real environment to deal with documents. The transfer of it to the virtual computer world, i.e., replacing the wood of the writing desk with ”virtual matter”, creates a Virtual Work Desk InfoSpace(ViWoDIS). This is a simple step to follow, so that it reduces user acclimatization time to a minimum, and yields the most convenient emotive situation; both preconditions for flow. This metaphor has numerous further advantages. Positive aspects of real-world writing tables (e.g., the working area) can be transferred to and emulated by the ViWoDIS, while negative ones (e.g., the limitation of the working area or of the working dimension) can be set aside. Realizing the ViWoDIS as a virtual reality environment enables the mapping of complex, personal, document-based information spaces to rather simple, concrete spatial information management and the various facilities this model affords. The ViWoDIS is virtual and practical at the same time. The metaphor is broad enough to allow the specification, declaration, and exploration of all theoretically possible document management actions, while at the same time, discrete manifestations (i.e., implementations) can be derived straightforwardly from this model. The ViWoDIS is also a natural expansion of the desktop metaphor. Through the ViWoDIS, the connection between the human’s and the computer’s actions becomes natural; this was earlier labelled an aspect of immersion. The visual abilities of a human (e.g., structuring, ordering, remembering) can be readily performed in the virtual environment with its technically driven visualization and interaction possibilities. Moreover, the user interface to standard document techniques can be realized very smoothly. The inherent nature of human knowledge structures as a mix of statistical and formal structures easily fits together with a virtual (graphical) environment. The ViWoDIS allows easy adaptation of the methods the user habitually employs for specific document tasks. The ViWoDIS’s support is provided on a ”can-have” basis. This means that the user can choose whether he simply wants the emulation of ”natural” behavior and assistance, or whether he wants to make use of the system’s advanced virtual functionality. Depending on the individual hardware implementation (laptop, 3-D display, mobile information space device, etc.) the Virtual Work Desk InfoSpace can be available everywhere and every time. The Virtual Work Desk InfoSpace model is not simply an extension of the real-world writing desk but its surroundings, too. This means that peripheral storage and organizational devices like shelves, racks, calendars, trash cans, and search engines (e.g., Google) are also parts of our virtual world. In fact, some of these additions might not even have any real-world equivalents.
4 Observations on Writing Desks Working at one’s writing desk, one can see and do things, some of which one can and some of which one cannot analogously do on the computer. In order to motivate our approach to the elements that the Virtual Work Desk InfoSpace requires, we have to sketch our account of tasks done at writing desks.
4.1 Tasks at Writing Desks In one’s day-to-day dealing with documents, previously absorbed knowledge about the documents is used to organize the work. Documents are organized and sorted on the basis of the work that has to be done. Stacks of documents are created which contain, for example, documents that are already read, documents that have to be read, and documents that have to be edited. At any time, and for many reasons, the stacks might occasionally be rearranged. Documents are categorized and cataloged, for example, according to their contents, to their priority, to the work that has still to be done, or to the new knowledge they can bring. Documents which seem important for the current task context can be supplied with remarks, such as a note on relevant contents. These notes can be subject to subsequent tasks. New knowledge is often discovered in the following way: connections between whole document sets are recognized, relations between documents are discovered, and specific document features are newly learned and classified with a view to facilitating searching and navigation. Data, properties of data, and relations between data and knowledge are usually stored and organized in databases. Among these are ”natural” ones like calendars, archives, todo-lists, etc.
the overall contents of illustrations and images very fast. A principal benefit of this is that we can use them as searching and navigation anchors when leafing through documents. Visual attribute metaphors, such as colored ”Post-Its”, with or without additional information on them, can also simplify the retrieval of information and knowledge. In our daily work with documents, humans often have to undertake mindless and repetitive tasks. One such common, menial task is searching in a document or in a whole stack of documents to find a concrete text passage.
5 The Framework The trend in information systems research today is towards the integration of more and more insights into human needs and the nature of human information processing — important aspects which have been historically overlooked. These insights can typically be classified into one of two main categories: first, the content shall not only be collected and retrieved any more, but be organized. Second, to emphasize that the traditional techniques focused on too few aspects, the new approach is often called holistic. This leads to the following structure for the systematic approach of identifying and removing barriers, depicted in Figure 2. The four structure elements are explained in the following sections.
4.2 Human Writing Desk Strategies Another important observation at writing desks, is how humans proceed in order to use their natural capabilities the best. Namely, the human ability to deal with documents is marked primarily by our visual perception apparatus. This has immediate effects on the aforementioned ways we deal with documents (structuring, ordering, memorizing, accumulating, etc.). The below observations may motivate some requirements on the features of a Virtual Work Desk InfoSpace. Humans organize documents according to certain criteria we have in mind. Typically, we build visually meaningful organizational units such as stacks or trays. These units can themselves be spatially organized to visually reflect existing relationships. Relations and even attributes of individual organizational units can then be recognized and/or recategorized at a glance. For many documents, humans are able to visually identify the genre of a document simply by its form or its layout. In this way newspapers, books, papers, and magazines can be easily distinguished. Humans have the ability to visually collect and evaluate
Figure 2. Structure of the framework
5.1 Holistic content organization (structuring, ordering, accumulation) It is known that many people prefer to print documents to work with them. Some of the reasons for this are the ability to make notes on paper documents at any time, the ease with which one can scan through a whole stack of paper documents, and the ability to spread documents on a table, move them around, and organize and reorganize them easily. Not only do modern systems lack the capacity to do these things, the ”technicity” of the systems requires users to consciously think about the operation of the system, significantly reducing the attention they can give to the real task.
Content organization accesses the document collection in order to inform the other aspects of information visualization: The content must be prepared on different abstraction levels, adequate for different content-sensitive visualization foci. Specialized, context dependent structures need to be delivered to support immersion and to enable navigation. Note that the content is a strongly interlinked structure of statements (or sentences), paragraphs, chapters, documents, books, folders. The content organization needs to be holistic, i.e., all the aspects of the documents that humans potentially use, need to be maintained by the system. The system needs to, e.g., combine the features of a directory structure explorer with metadata structures based on parameters of the physical appearance of documents, and their location, with parameters based on their textual content, and with parameters based on contained icons, graphics, and images [8]. Documents must be able to be ”taken” and manipulated. It must be possible to manipulate different parallel structures of documents with ease and flexibility, either purely manually or with machine agency. The system must provide the facility to enter annotations relating to a single document, relating two or more documents to each other, or relating documents to sets of documents. Such annotations induce structures in their own right, possibly linking to calendar items and the like. The user might want the system to use machine methods providing him with an assessment of documents in comparison to different sets of other documents and support him in the maintenance of his information space. We are providing machine tools to calculate and direct users to: 1. similarities among apparently unrelated documents in different sets 2. documents which have not been accessed for a while, including the personal archive 3. potentially useful, internal structure inside a set 4. possible reorganizations of structures Some methods he may want to trigger manually, while others he wants to run continuously in the background and inform him when changes occur. When we have control of a user’s information manipulation tools, it is also possible to make educated guesses on his tasks, goals, and work context, and automatically adjust the system environment accordingly [9]. However, the user may at all times overrule the system’s suggestions and dictate its behavior. The user will want to use the structures constructed by him and the machine to find information or documents. (Information and documents are often not the same.) To ”find” might mean to retrieve a piece of information the user knows to exist somewhere. But genuinely new problems might be solvable with transferable information in his space, which will most likely not be found with the same
searching strategy. For instance, the user may search for information in support of some hypothesis of his. Or he may aim to discover new or hidden information of a different sort.
5.2 Context- and content-sensitive visualization The information visualization has to reveal the relationships and differences within and between collections of information to the user. A variety of techniques have been developed to handle both structured and unstructured data, especially for scientific and industrial tasks. All of these are based more or less directly on real-world phenomena, yet none of them explores in depth the potential of virtual reality as a medium to represent abstract information or even multi-dimensional document spaces. Empirical studies show that users tend to interact repeatedly with small clusters of information, a property known as locality of reference [10]. As a result, information workspaces tend to exhibit a certain cost-structure of information: a small amount of information is organized to be available at very low cost, larger amounts at moderate costs, and large amounts at high cost. The n-dimensional information on document sets, needs to be mapped to a 3-D visualization space. The individual user context, the task context, the environment context (standard display, 3-D display, powerwall, interaction and navigation devices) need to be considered. Focus and context of the human visual perception need to be adhered to. Visual metaphors — configurable by the user — need to be developed to represent information about documents. So as not to overstress the user, the visual metaphors should closely be related to the real world. For example, we are thinking about visualizing document groupings as stacks, where the user can recognize the group’s category at a glance. Here, different document types can be presented by different thicknesses (metaphor for papers, journals, books, etc.), the categories by adequate cover sheets, and so on. Another issue is the visualization of metainformation, structures, and relations. A nice metaphor for indicating additional document features and relationships between documents is a post-it. These post-its pop up as soon as an appointed time is reached, and support the user by giving additional notes, interactively fading in links to related documents or document stacks, taking on different colors (which as well are representatives for a topic in the information space), and so on. All visualization techniques must be driven by the current context set, which includes the user context (e.g., skill of the user, personal desires of the user, and information access rights), the task context, and the environment context (e.g., availability and features of the input and output devices).
5.3 Immersion through interaction Apart from visualization and virtual reality, multimodal interaction techniques play a very important role in contributing to the immersion experience. If the user cannot ”affiliate” with the interaction controls and metaphors, the immersion will be limited or in the worst case totally lost. What is even more relevant for keeping the user immersed in his virtual surroundings is how interaction possibilities are used and enriched by interaction metaphors. A lot of different input and output devices are available. Besides the common keyboard-and-mouse input paradigm, devices like pens, force feedback joysticks, and data gloves will be taken into account. In addition, the way in which a device can be used is important. (E.g., the user could use intuitive mouse gestures for initiating specific tasks.) Similar considerations apply for the output devices, where 3-D displays and powerwalls deliver a high degree of immersion by providing an impressive three-dimensional look and feel and large projection images. They provide a powerful basis for the development of new and innovative ways for interacting with the document information space. All solutions should be available anywhere and at any time. Where possible, most of the provided functionality should also run on a standard laptop.
5.4 Navigation in manipulative virtual environments Within their collection of documents and applications, users need to manage the placement and size of objects and quickly shift their focus of attention from one object to another. In addition, they need proactive agents supporting the ordering of their information world and therefore the ease of navigation. Animation can be used to reinforce the spatial metaphor. A common problem is that users (especially nongamers) tend to get lost in many 3-D systems that require them to navigate. A widespread solution is the introduction of rigorous navigation constraints. However, in the worst case this can lead to completely lost immersion while navigating with the system. The techniques used to navigate and manipulate the objects and the information environment must not vary in the ease which users can rapidly access local information entities as well as remote regions of the space. Therefore the space must be kept simple, e.g., by choosing a metaphor appropriate for the context. A universally valid navigation paradigm is needed. One important issue is the leafing through a single document. Here, we are thinking of fish-eye-like techniques allowing rapid browsing through the content of a document while still visually providing its key features (formatting, headings, images, etc.) which provide overall knowledge about the document. The faster the user wants to browse, the fewer loci of information will be presented to him. This technique is not limited to one single document — it can easily be applied for browsing through document stacks (in
which case only cover sheets and different document thicknesses will be presented to the user) or presenting a calendar or desk planner. Furthermore, navigation — especially in 3D — must be related to the context. Here, we are thinking of continuously constraining the user’s navigation possibilities in order to, for instance, simplify the search for task-related documents.
6 Conclusion We have observed real working procedures at writing desks and derived a paradigm for a computer-based, thus virtual, Document-centered Personal Information Space. The framework was structured into four elements, and the requirements on the elements were described.
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