Walls at Work: Electronic and Physical
                  Tom Moran, Xerox PARC

Abstract

Walls are critical elements of the physical workplace, not only for 
defining space, but also for displaying and working with information. They 
are prime sites for computationally-supported interaction. The first half 
of the talk is about our experiences with electronic walls. Tivoli is a 
pen/gesture-based whiteboard system for large electronic displays. It has 
served as a platform for exploring many user-interface and meeting-support 
issues. I'll show a video and discuss the "domain object" meeting tool 
facility in Tivoli, which integrates many features of Tivoli. I'll reflect 
on how to fit this kind of technology into work practices, which we have 
been doing for several years at PARC.

In the second half of the talk, I'll back up and consider everyday physical 
walls in the workplace beyond the dedicated meeting room. I'll discuss how 
we can use vision technology to capture the work on these walls and 
integrate it with online work. The ZombieBoard system creates digital 
images of wall-size whiteboards. The Collaborage system captures and 
interprets a collaboratively-created collages of physical elements from a 
large walls. I'll show these in video and discuss the user interface issues 
in these kinds of systems. Finally (if there is time) I'll reflect on some 
issues confronting technologies to support the informal activities in a 
workplace.

Biography

Tom Moran is a Principal Scientist and the Manager of the Collaborative 
Systems Area at Xerox PARC, where he has worked since his Ph.D. in computer 
science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1974. His early work, with Allen 
Newell and Stu Card, on the theoretical foundations of human-computer 
interaction culminated in the seminal book, The Psychology of 
Human-Computer Interaction (1983). He is also the founder and Editor of the 
journal, Human-Computer Interaction, since 1982. In 1986, he led the 
creation of the Rank Xerox EuroPARC lab in Cambridge, England, serving as 
its first Director until 1990.

Moran's research has been in two styles: the development of analytic tools 
and theoretical frameworks in HCI and the design and development of 
innovative interactive systems. His analytic research, in addition to the 
psychology of HCI, includes frameworks on the grammar of command languages 
(1981), task mapping and mental models (1983), design rationale (1991), and 
embodied user interfaces (1998). His systems design work includes the 
NoteCards idea-processing hypertext system (1986), the user-tailorable 
Buttons system (1990), the RAVE media space (1992), the Tivoli electronic 
whiteboard (1993), multimedia meeting capture and "salvaging" tools (1996), 
and whiteboard-embedded meeting tools (1998).