kuniform

At some point in the afternoon when I’m done working but before my daughter wakes, I turn a bit of time to AJAX and pattern languages for interaction design. This is the final paper I need to work on for my graduate thesis at De Paul University’s School of CS, Telecom and IS . A few of acronyms there, but none of note.

Anyhoo, I wish I had blogged more about my previous research, which dealt mostly with multimodal communication, abstract user interface definition languages (AUIDLs) such as UIML, and accessibility. In the mean time, I’m really enjoying Michael Mahemoff’s Ajax Patterns and Jennifer Tidwell’s UI Patterns work. As I do more research I’ve slowly started to move from areas that kind of got mined out already and had some interesting research done and have been moving more into pattern languages. Eventually, my goal in this new paper is to combine some of the research going on with Interaction Design Pattern Languages and their markup systems like PLML and Multi-modal UIDLs to create cool new forms of docs and apps. That sentence ended w/a bit of a wimper as opposed to a bang, I suppose. But that is it—if the pattern, markup, communication system can’t create cool new forms—enable a team to create a flickr, a flock, a del.icio.us, then what is the point?

Finally, whatever it does, it must do it in such a way that the context it creates for the user is such that it displays a state fully aware of other users’ activity in the system in the past and currently. Software that does otherwise behaves in a manner ignorant of history. That is not how humans or other creatures process information. Why should our software be any different?