Building on the success of the 2012 conference, the Symposium on Communicating Complex Information (SCCI) explores the relationships between and within the contexts that affect complex information, information design, information architecture, user experience, and usability. It seeks to examine how design choices influence people’s behavior when interacting with complex information, and how the knowledge of situation contexts improves the design of complex information systems. The intention of SCCI is to foster an integrated approach to the design of complex information by bringing together members of the various research and practitioner communities.
Recent scholarship on usability studies has called for a revamping of the methods we use when testing more complex systems or has encouraged us to develop a collaborative knowledge space so that we might better share our approaches and data. Albers and Still edited a book, Usability of Complex Information Systems, which examined these issues in greater detail.
This symposium will continue that discussion and expand its scope.
Keynote address will be by Tharon Howard, Clemson University.
The workshop is being co-sponsored by East Carolina University and ACM SIGDOC and accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
Goals of this symposium are to build upon what we already know about communicating complex information across the spectrum of casual users to domain experts and clarify our understanding of what issues urgently need further research.
The future will see the design of information and communication technologies that serve ever more complex purposes and problems. For these technologies, creating user-centered design is particularly challenging when users are engaged in sophisticated knowledge work and collaborations and do not want to become power users to conduct this work electronically. Quality designs must make usability and human-information interaction simpler, not more complex and difficult. The challenge is figuring out how to “harness” complex phenomena in requirements, design, and testing so that our systems support and enhance the proper level of understanding for open-ended, dynamic knowledge work.
As teachers, practitioners, and scholars, how can technical communicators and interaction designers contribute to such a new approach, to the design and evaluation of more complex systems, to the more open exchange of data and methods, to defining what we mean by usability and user experience of these systems?
This 2-day workshop is designed to maximize the exchange of information and ideas among the participants. The workshop will feature a highly interactive format with each participant giving a 15-20 minute presentation followed by a 20-30 minute discussion. We wish to encourage high interactivity and in-depth discussion about each topic.
Please submit a 2-page position paper about your ongoing work, new interaction designs, opinions or approaches to the problem, or conceptual frameworks or theories. Papers will be peer-reviewed and 12–14 selected by relevance and likelihood of stimulating and contributing to this discussion. Email your paper, in PDF, to albersm@ecu.edu with subject “Symposium Submission.”
Possible examples for paper topics could include but are not limited to the following:
If you have any questions, contact: Michael Albers (albersm@ecu.edu).
2 page proposal due: September 15, 2012
Notice of acceptance: November 1, 2012
Papers for workshop due: February 1, 2013
Workshop dates: February 25-26, 2013