Who's Wants To Be Prototyper?

The End-User Does - A Subversive Perspective for HCI


Paul Pangaro, Ph.D.

Abstract

Thankfully, the discipline of software development has evolved away from the original "waterfall "model - design, implement, deploy - and moved to the prototyping model - design, use, re-design, re-useŠ, deploy. But Paul Pangaro thinks that's only a half-way point. He says that HCI must recognize that the end-user is also constantly prototyping - that is, iteratively converging upon specific goals, not just executing pre-defined tasks. Why doesn't the software help?

Sure, search engines let us refine queries, but they don't help us evolve an understanding of what we find - which presumably is why we search. Word processors allow easy editing of text, but don't provide tools for adding rigor to that text - conciseness, completeness, and consistency, which are the goals of the editing process.

In developing user interfaces for animation, content management, browsers, and search tools, Pangaro has focused on features that encourage end-users to be prototypers in the context of their own process. With examples from work at pre-Media Lab MIT, during the heights of AI mania, and now in HTTP and HTML, he proposes ways of minimizing the clumsy interactions we suffer every day at the screens of our browsers, using dumb search engines and someone else's taxonomies.

Biography

Pangaro's career started with a B.S. degree and research staff positions at MIT (including in Negroponte's research group before it was called the Media Lab). He left academic research for real-world problems in the context of a software company that he founded in 1981. Under US and UK government contracts, he and his team developed hypermedia information browsers in the mid-1980s that responded to every mouseclick based on the user's personal knowledge and focus. While moving this technology toward commercial applications, he extended the company's perspective to strategy engagements with Nynex, Du Pont, Xerox, and Lotus Development Corporation. In a long-term collaborative relationship with a research fellow at Du Pont, Pangaro and colleagues demonstrated the requirements for technology to mediate the creation of wholly new products and services, in an approach called "Conversations for Design/Design for Conversations", defining a superset of the relationships and capabilities now called "e-commerce." Recently, Pangaro did two stints as chief technology officer for startups, both with a heavy emphasis on user context and metadata as critical components for revolutionizing the user experience. He is currently president of Pangaro-Volz Group, a consulting firm that provides product and strategy consulting for startups and for established companies developing new products or entering new markets (www.pangaro-volz.com). He is currently developing a prototype of a "spreadsheet for ideas."