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My name is Allison Druin, and I'm the director of the
Human-Computer Interaction lab at the University Of Maryland.
And I'm also an associate professor in the college of
information studies.
The mission of the college is actually to transform that
connection that people have with information.
The mission of the lab is to make that transformation
better with technology.
Now, the mission of what my own research is, where I lead
teams of faculty, staff, and students, is actually to
transform that connection with information for
people that are short.
Children, you've heard of them, right?
Well, the purpose of this talk is to convince you that Google
needs to transform its mission.
It needs to transform from Google to Giigle.
And hopefully by the end of my talk, you will-- it will not
be an if, but it will be a when.
So now let me begin with a question.
How do you think kids could help Google?
Well, I never start with questions with a
room full of adults.
Sorry.
I only work with children and adults together.
And so in fact I have a team of children in our lab, two
days a week, in the afternoons during the school year.
And two weeks during the summer.
And these children, they're seven to eleven years old.
They're with us a minimum of a year, a maximum of five years.
And they are design partners in all that we do.
So in fact, when I said I was going to go to Google, and I
was going to talk to you about children, I asked this
question to the team.
How do you think kids could help Google?
And in fact, those are pictures of
some of the team there.
Right there.
And so what one child said, oh, not a shock.
OK, we could help Google because we're
today and future users.
And of course that goes with all the stats
about who users are.
And, granted, you've got more than enough users.
You really don't necessarily need them right now.
But, anyway the stats are all saying that six to eleven
year-olds are actually among the largest user
groups on the internet.
So you're not necessarily going to be convinced by that.
And so we said, all right, well what
else can we tell them?
And, well, Google, hey, we can bring parents to Google.
And that actually goes with the literature having to do
with, in fact, European and American households.
If you look into their houses with computers, children are
more likely to have computers in the household versus
households that don't have computers.
And they don't have children.
So, but, you guys, you don't really need users, do you?
So who cares about that?
So, well we got the next comment.
And that was an interesting one.
And if I can get there, we're be all set.
And kids could make Google giggle.
All right, so what did this kid mean?
She meant that kids help us think differently.
It's not about efficiency.
It's not about how fast, how small, how much money.
It's about laughter.
It's about creativity.
It's about cool.
It's about what's next.
And kids help us think about things very
differently than adults do.
And an example of giggling, if you will, is the International
Children's Digital Library.
And that was started out as a research project funded by the
National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and
Library Services.
It is now also a nonprofit foundation.
And, essentially, it is not your grandmother's digital
library, let me just tell you that.
It's a digital library where you don't see necessarily the
shelves of books.
It is a digital library where, if I want to find all the
books that have red covers, that are picture books, that
can make me happy, there you go.
I dare you to do that in Google, my friends.
And actually, I generally get cheers from audiences.
But this is a different kind of audience.
Anyway.
Because people have a hard time with visualizing Boolean.
And guess what?
Kids know how to visualize Boolean.
They helped us do it.
This is a digital library.
It is the most frequently used digital library in the world
for children.
It represents books in 39 languages, I think, with an
interface in 13 languages.
It has books that will make you laugh and make you cry.
They have been donated from around the world either by
publishers, authors, national libraries and so on.
Now, say I actually want to actually read
something in here?
OK.
So I go and click on this particular lovely book.
And, and not a shock, these books have been reviewed by
other kids.
Go even figure about that, OK?
And so Jose Raul in Honduras tells me about the book.
The book's about a girl who wanted to have
a room of her own.
And how does it make him feel, happy.
He gives it five stars.
And even draws you a part in the book that's his most
important part in the book.
So you should make sure that you go and
take a look at that.
And if you want to find out about how cool is and what
other reviews he's done, so there you have Jose Raul, he's
drawn himself.
He's reviewed these other books.
And so on.
So, you're getting the idea that this digital library has
ideas in it, and has been designed with
kids and for kids.
But let me go back to the presentation before I show you
how to read a book here, for a reason.
So that's another reason how kids can help Google.
You want to be creative, I got ways for you to be creative.
But, another child--
come back here--
another child said, now if you're not
nauseous by this time--
if Google really wants to change the world, because she
heard all the press you guys put out about Google wanting
to change the world, well than changing a
child's world helps.
As you've all heard, if you want to change the future
change one child.
Well, there it is guys, you can do it.
You can do it with kids.
And it came home for me when we worked with children in
four countries.
We've been working with children in New Zealand,
Honduras, Germany, and inner city Chicago.
And when we first started designing the digital library,
we went to these kids.
At the time they were seven years old, we worked with them
for four years.
We asked them if they could wave a magic wand over the
library, how would you change it.
Well, this child in inner city Chicago asked me, what's a
magic wand.
Turns out that his mother never read to him.
He had learned to read by reading People Magazines in
the beauty shop that she worked in.
He'd never gone to a public library,
never gone to a museum.
Well, I said, OK, let's try that again.
If you could change the library, how would you do it?
Well he said, oh, that's easy.
I'd put grass on the floor of the library.
Because I have never felt comfortable or safe sitting in
the grass and reading a book.
And I have always wanted to.
All right.
Well.
Granted, we could not put the grass on the floor of every
library in the world.
But, from that experience, we also heard from children
around the globe about not search.
Sorry, guys, I know I'm standing in Google and I'm
saying not search.
They talked about use.
They talked about, when I have that relationship with the
stuff after I find it.
So, I cannot sit on the floor of my
concrete library in Germany.
I can't, we have stairs in our library.
And so the girls in my class in a wheelchair can't get up
the stairs.
These are the things children talked about.
And so what this did was, granted, as I said, we could
not change bricks and mortar.
But we could change how children read
books on the screen.
And so now, if I go back to the digital library, I say to
you, this is not Adobe.
This is not your Adobe reader.
Basically, children that we worked with not only said, we
need to see the book in a different way than
we've seen it before.
And I don't know how many of you have ever watched a kid
read a book.
But, especially the younger ones, they
usually want to start.
Oh, I want to start in the part where it's the family
that's all you know hanging out and
doing really cool things.
So, I want to start in the middle.
Or the kids actually--
I can't tell you how many times kids just flip through a
book because they're trying to select it.
And so, we have multiple book readers.
Because kids have different reasons for
looking through a book.
There is no digital library in the world today that has
multiple book readers.
They haven't watched people really reading.
So, this happens to be--
now, some kids love it, some kids hate it.
This is like reading a book on a merry-go-round.
I warn you, so for those of faint of
heart we'll go slowly.
But, anyway, what you're doing here is you're flipping
through, many kids will not read a book, And then I want
to zoom in on that book so I can actually really look at
the pictures and so on, and really look at the text, I can
do that too.
But many kids actually had different
purposes for reading.
And the way they go about reading these books.
So, we have multiple book viewers.
And we found that it's pretty evenly split as to what they
use and when they use it.
And that's why we continue to have it.
In fact, we actually had originally looked at these
multi-book viewers and sort of said, well, which
one's going to win.
Because that's the one we'll put up there.
And, ultimately, none won and none lost. And then we
realized they used them for different things.
And that's where we went with it.
Back to this.
So, I think you're getting the idea that children are not
short adults.
They see the world very differently.
In terms of their challenges and their opportunities.
They don't see abstractions, the way we do and understand
hierarchies.
And they don't have the ability to keyboard the way we
all think everyone was born from the womb to do.
And their diverse motor skills.
You cannot even imagine how painful it is to watch a five
year old that knows exactly what they want on the screen.
And they're searching, and you're browsing, and they
can't hit the target because the silly
buttons are too small.
So, we've done a lot of research in how big the button
should be and so on.
but there's also varying abilities in terms of search
and browse and I'm sure you've all figured out that kids
don't necessarily search in certain ages.
They really are doing an extended browse.
Because actually left to their own devices, the children who
most frequently browse than anything, and certainly their
selection criteria is so different than ours.
How many kids do you know of at six go and say, hey, this
is the author and the title and the ISBN
number and all that.
No, it doesn't exist No.
I want to find the purple book and it's happy, and I know
there's a character--
One of the things we, actually, from our research
we've seen is that the interface must age itself.
That these children search very differently by age.
And so, yes, 35 to 45 year olds, they don't care the
difference between the interfaces.
But there is such a difference in ten years of children that
you can't actually have the ability for kids to
search the same ways.
And they don't want to.
So, younger boys and girls will primarily look for things
in a physical, looking for the physical
properties of the book.
Whereas older boys in general will look by genre and by the
way the characters are.
More on that later.
Now, how do we know what we know?
It's not because we stuck a microphone in a kid's mouth
and said, hey, talk to me, kid.
It's not that way.
We actually partner with children.
And we've been partnering with them for many
years, almost a decade.
And what we have done is adapted the co-design and
participatory design methods of our Scandinavian
colleagues.
And here in the United States to work with children.
We call it cooperative inquiry.
Got lots of papers on that.
We'll talk about that later.
But, and we've worked with many companies as well as
organizations.
And other universities have picked this up as well is the
notion of, how do you work with kids in a way that's
appropriate that gives them a voice in the design process.
I'm going to touch on a few of those things.
Sorry that my colleague Shelly isn't here to
see my design processes.
Because she would see some similarities and some definite
differences.
We work with kids not after the adult had the great idea
and say, so, what you think?
Huh?
Good color?
Isn't that a nice thing to do?
No.
We work with kids for the moment we start a project.
From the moment we start ideation.
And we do this in a number of different ways.
So, if we just focus on that, yes, we use
sticky notes with kids.
We do that.
With kids and adults.
Because it's about the elaboration process of
understanding.
Because kids understand certain things but adults do
too, so we don't want to leave the adults out.
It's about that partnership together.
And so what we do is many times a company will come in
and say, we need a feedback loop on this.
And so we'll ask our kids and adults in the lab.
We generally have six to seven kids in the lab.
And generally four to five adults as well.
Whether they be graduate students or staff or faculty.
And we say, OK, likes?
What do you like about this stuff, what do you dislike,
one idea per sticky note.
And also if you have any design ideas.
We never, ever, have what we call a sticky note session
where nothing clumps.
Somehow, it's amazing, adults, kids together, we
start to see trends.
Always.
and actually this does work with adults too.
So those people that really don't want to care about kids,
we've just done this at the US Holocaust Museum.
And had been working with them on a full lab experience.
So, I'll tell you about that another time.
Anyway.
Then we might go into what we call low tech prototyping.
Bags of stuff.
Art supplies.
Sketching ideas.
Kids, adults, we all know how to do this.
And what we do is, we don't just sit back and say hey,
kid, do all the work.
And I'll figure out what you've got there.
What we do is, we build these things together.
We sketch ideas together.
We do it with crazy things like cotton balls and pipe
cleaners and so on.
Why?
It frees our brain waves.
And, again, we've done this with adults only, and we've
done this with kids and adults.
But it's something where everybody can have a voice in
the process.
Then we get to the big ideas.
And so what happens is, we'll present these ideas.
And in fact they are talking to a screen right now.
Our virtual companions.
We videoconference all the time.
One of the companies we work with.
And so we're presenting our ideas.
And as we present our ideas, one of us starts writing down
what we call the big ideas.
What are the ideas that are coming out of each of the
prototypes?
And then what we'll do as a group is to start to circle
some of the things that is the same between, we'll generally
have two to three groups working at any
given time on a project.
We'll look at those trends, and then we may redo the cycle
another time.
So what you're doing is you're looking at an upside down cone
of information.
You're going from the most general--
anything in the world is great--
and then you're going to more specifics.
And then, yes, we actually do build things like these guys
here in wonderful places.
We also do observation.
However, it depends on the project whether or not we do
observation.
One of the projects we worked on was actually creating a
collaborative storytelling tool for children.
In fact, I'm using it right now.
And I'm sure you've figured out I'm not using PowerPoint
at this point, right?
Anyway, it's called KidPad.
And essentially we worked on it.
It was supported by the European Union.
And with colleagues in Sweden and England, and essentially
we started off by trying to understand what were the
problems with kids storytelling on the computer.
And so, we went and we did, I don't know how many of you are
familiar with Karen
Holtzblatt's contextual inquiry.
We do a bastardized version of hers.
I in fact gave a talk with, we gave back to back talks
recently at NIH in Washington DC and the two of us looked at
each other and said, ooh, this is going to be interesting.
Because we don't do the same kinds of things.
But anyway.
So essentially, we collect the raw data whether it's
videotaped or not.
Where they were sitting right there, someone's
looking at the quote.
Somebody's looking at the activities.
So in this particular case, Fatima is saying, no, you're
only erasing all the time, Lena, stop.
And then Lena says to the adult, can you help me, I'm
trying to draw a circle.
And Fatima says, wait, I know how.
And then Lena says hello, I want to move it here.
And Fatima says, get the red and into it.
So they're killing each other.
They're really killing each other.
So the activities that are going on here is that,
essentially the adults are there but Lena is trying to
take the mouse from Fatima.
It's not pretty.
And so on.
Then we go to do data analysis.
And this is what's different about our contextual inquiry.
We're looking for less granular kinds of things than
Karen would look at.
We're looking at the activity patterns.
And the activity patterns looked at the struggle for
ownership--
shock--
and control of the input device.
And seeking help.
We looked at roles to see what was going on here.
And yes, leader, learner, leader.
And then what we do is we have a column of design ideas.
And we start to note the kinds of things that we think might
support this.
And multiple input devices.
Collaborative software came out very strongly and making
ownership options.
Unfortunately, our colleagues at Microsoft have since locked
us out of the innards of the operating system so we cannot
do the kinds of things we did back in `99 and
2000, but so be it.
It was an interesting exercise.
But, meanwhile, you say to yourself, what are the kids
doing in the lab.
The kids are observing other kids.
Yes, we have the inmates observing each other.
So what we do is, the kids are actually drawing.
In fact, they are creating cartoon kinds of things.
And what you get from the kids is a spotlight on the most
important things.
You must do it like this.
I don't want to.
And so that's--
so what we do is we get multiple points of view of the
same experience.
So, challenge, yes.
Is this easy to always work with children?
Well, yeah.
It's a challenge.
Why?
Well, because, kids don't really want to believe you.
That you're really going to do that.
This is not an exercise.
There's no right answers.
We don't teach that to our kids anymore, do we?
Do we tell them that there's a right answer and you must be
drilled on this.
The other thing is for the adult side of the world, is to
try and truly convince them they need to partner.
There are some adults that talk over the kids.
And you want to sit there and say, there, hey let them be a
part of it.
It's the elaboration process.
Actually, though, we've had many colleagues come and try
and learn the process and sit back and observe.
And they don't understand that it is a partnership experience
between the kids.
The goal, it's elaboration.
I have a good idea.
Then you are going to elaborate on it and say hey,
wait, we could also do this.
And then she's going to say, but if we do that,
then we can do this.
The goal is to not know whose idea ultimately it was.
A few examples besides the one I'm using right here to
demonstrate--
I really bored the heck out of her, didn't I?
It's good, they're a packed house.
At least for you guys.
Anyway.
So here's a couple more examples of the kinds of
things we've done.
We've been partnering with the National Park Service.
And in thinking about not just what happens when people go
home from a park experience, but what happens--
how can technology enhance that park experience as we go
along in the park?
And so we start out, as we always do, sitting around with
our partners talking about it.
And one kid says, I think better when I
see trees and sky.
The big ideas just want to come out.
So in other words, guess what?
Kids don't think just when they're in the classroom.
Or when they have to do the homework.
It actually has to do with when we're outside.
Another one said, I want to help the adults know what I
want to know.
We could show them the cool places and then they could
tell us what we didn't know.
Think about that.
Another one said, what if we could send secret messages to
other people in the park.
So these were some of the beginning
ideas we came up with.
Outside of showing you the whole design process, this was
partially supported by Microsoft.
We use tablet PCs.
And the idea was that we had a network outside.
An outside network.
A wireless network with tablet PCs that we developed.
This is Gene Chipman's dissertation work that he's
been leading.
In fact, he'll defend it on Monday.
He's ready to kill me because I'm here right now.
And basically, Gene developed an RFID
reader into the tablet.
You have multiple kids or families with tablets.
And they are wandering a path.
And it's not just about who else put tags on things.
It's, these kids have the tags.
They put them on things.
And they start to draw about something.
But, you're saying to yourself, so big deal, I've
seen tagging before.
It's the notion of collaboration.
It's the notion of creation, right there in context.
That these kids don't have to go back to a classroom or a
house to actually think about what they've just done.
They're doing it in context.
So, Jonah might draw the leaf.
But then he's gone.
And someone comes along, swipes his tag and sees that
the park ranger actually asked, why is
this leaf still green.
And so somebody actually answers it.
And it's saying, it's still growing.
Another one comes along and notices and said, but it's
always great.
So they're having this kind of collaborative talk going on.
We actually piloted this to the greater public in Rock
Creek National Park.
And so there you see, Diane actually she's
talking about that leaf.
And what she did was that once the kids were done with what
they were looking at on the trail, then she went and gave
a specialized tour of the trail based on what the kids
said and elaborated on that.
But, just like everyone else in the world, we have gone to
mobiles and handhelds.
I'm shocked, right?
It is the computing platform of the 21st century.
And it is the notion of keeping up with kids.
So this is the dissertation work of Jerry Fails.
And we were at Fort McHenry National Park doing what we
call mobile collaboration.
Now, mobile collaboration is the notion that, guess what,
collaboration doesn't just happen asynchronously
distributedly.
It can happen when I have a mobile, you have a mobile.
And that we may want to share information.
Not sending it back and forth.
We want to content splitting, or we want
to do content sharing.
And so in the national park, we can
create stories together.
Mobile stories together, in context.
So we're not going back from a field trip and having
to deal with that.
This work has definitely motivated us when it comes to
the digital library.
And so we are trying to understand, and we have
actually put in some proposals to actually work with children
in developing countries.
Because, guess what, those are the things they have. They
don't have these, they don't have tablet PCs.
They have mobiles.
And what happens if they want to actually
read a book on a mobile?
What does that look like?
How do you share a story together?
And in fact there are many, many ways we can do it, that
we've been exploring.
Now.
Needless to say we've learned a great deal from our design
experiences in terms of what to create.
But we've also learned a great deal from our research of the
impact of these new technologies on
children and their use.
These are just some examples of the kinds of things we've
been learning.
And, obviously, everything's in press, so
that's to be expected.
But, anyway, in terms of mobile devices, Gene found
many results from his work, but what was quite telling was
that he did a comparison of a paper version of these tablet
PCs, comparing the paper to the actual technology.
And he found that the paper was more personal but the
technology was collaborative.
What do you mean by that?
As soon as they got paper, they wrote their name on it.
They didn't write their names on things.
When it was on the computer.
And guess what?
There was very little of kids writing on
each other's papers.
Haven't we beaten that out of them?
Now, you say to yourself, oh, yeah, well, a seven or
eight-year-old's not going to do that.
He did this with kids that were four and five years old.
Amazing.
Now, the technology side of things.
Oh, they were writing all over each other's stuff constantly.
But one kid may put their name on a drawing.
But almost nobody.
Almost nobody actually wrote her name and saw it as a
personal thing.
In terms of digital libraries, we've just finished our four
country study in working with these kids in Honduras, New
Zealand, Germany and the United States.
And we've seen that over time, that yes, the digital library
is very motivating for reading.
Especially for kids that are reluctant readers.
We've seen, there is a strong cultural awareness that books
from different countries can bring.
It doesn't matter if they can't read the text, they
start to think about the stories of other people.
They start to try and understand what these people
are saying.
And certainly we saw a wider, wider variety of books read.
And in terms of search, you'll recognize the
person's name here.
Hillary Hutchinson, who was our star graduate student that
you stole from us.
Anyway--
yes, yes.
Maybe I spelled it wrong.
I don't know.
But anyway, Hillary got her Ph.D with us and in fact that
interface of simple search is actually the work of Hillary
and our team.
And one of the things she saw was that flat interfaces are
much better for children's search.
And she can probably give you tons of detail more about this
than I can.
But, anyway.
And in closing, lessons learned.
There is no such thing as a K-12 interface.
Sorry.
It doesn't exist. Anyone that does research and tells you,
this is great for K-12.
In fact, we are disabling our children by creating one
interface for them to use.
And, in fact, Google you're doing a great job of disabling
the world's children.
Because--
yes, that's absolutely true.
You've got a lot of kids whose parents say, let's Google it.
And they can't type.
Or they can't spell it.
Or they don't even understand, what do you mean.
They can't read it.
But they know they can search it.
And so the interface you create for a three to
five-year-old has got to be different from an interface
for a six- to eight-year-old.
In fact, we have at least four ways to search
in the digital library.
I did not show you all those ways, but we have
a globe that spins.
The youngest children just spin the globe.
They click on a place, and then they've found books.
And then it's somewhere around third grade it starts to
congeal on simple search.
The interesting thing is that somehow the adults don't
necessarily go to the adult interface.
They seem to stay in simple search.
Anyway.
We definitely see that taking learning experiences wherever
the children go is absolutely important.
It's not-- again, it's not about going back to the home
to create something.
It is, we are mobile, we are active, and that is the
computing platform.
And so if we expect people to plug their things into
computers, that's not happening.
That's not going to happen.
One of the things we've seen again and again, even when we
were looking for it, is that children
want to come together.
They want to collaborate.
They are not just wanting to-- they're social beings.
And certainly we've all heard about distributed
collaboration.
But that shoulder to shoulder collaboration.
Children clump in front of technology.
It is a known experience.
And so we need to bring kids together.
And the idea of kids understanding each other's
cultures, understanding where they're coming from.
absolutely critical.
Because maybe that a kid from one country's going to
understand that I have some of the same feelings and I have
some of the same fears that another kid from another
country has.
And that's critical.
The way we should be doing this is not dragging children
into the world of computers.
It's not OK to make automated toilets for children.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that anyone that's been a mother or father that has
seen a poor potty-training child sit on a toilet and be
absolutely fearful that they would be sucked in because of
sensors that we have created that are appropriate sensors
for adults.
That's what we're doing.
We are making automated toilets with our computing
technologies for adults.
Could I say it any stronger?
And, lastly, so how do we do it?
We need to drag computers into a child's world.
And when we do this, guess what?
It may be good for the adult kids, all of us.
It's like sidewalk cut-outs.
We did it for wheelchairs.
But able-bodied people do drag their groceries
over sidewalk cutouts.
You know what I mean by sidewalk cut-outs?
And bikers use it.
We did it for the disabled, but it's good for all of us.
And so what I would contend and what I would ask all of
you that's left in the room to consider, is that Google
really can become Giggle.
And absolutely go beyond much more where it is today.
Not only for children, but for the whole world.
So, with that, I'll take questions.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You said something that intrigued me,
which was that the mobiles and the platform --
reading platform.
Platforms are the future as you said.
And I like the idea that kids might be
reading on these things.
And I was curious looking at the [UNINTELLIGIBLE], do you
see that happening?
That people are reading on mobile devices
in the third world?
And is this the way we are all going to be going.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Didn't say about all, but with us,
there's no other option, so.
ALLISON DRUIN: That's right.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That's certainly in the very
developed context of-- in Korea, they're reading novels
as they [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
it's too easy to say that mobile is just snippets of
information.
And these are technologies kids like to
have in their hands.
ALLISON DRUIN: But the interface, I have to tell you,
the interfaces are wrong, still.
And in fact we're focusing on those interfaces
now in terms of--
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You said you had some ideas you haven't
started, but--
ALLISON DRUIN: We do.
We do.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So reading on a mobile.
ALLISON DRUIN: So give me two phones.
Man, it's red, too.
Watch out that woman.
So.
I have a book.
And I found it on the International Children's
Digital Library.
Shock, OK?
And Robin says, oh, I want to read that book too with you.
Now, it's not just sending the book page.
How can we see the screen?
If we put it together, imagine--
we have double screen.
Now.
Give me your mobile.
You come over here with it.
No, you come over here.
And now we start moving.
Now, you say to yourself, OK, big deal,
we're doubling pixels.
So what else can we do?
Content splitting.
What do I mean?
Text there, picture here, we can hear it all together.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So it's collaborative reading.
ALLISON DRUIN: It's collaborative reading.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And that's because kids do that?
ALLISON DRUIN: Yeah.
In fact, there's a lot of--
if you will watch kids--
OK, I'll give your back your phone.
But yours is much nicer than mine, so I--
anyway.
I'm clearly living in the wrong place.
Anyway.
But, it's absolutely basic.
There are many-- in fact, we developed the initial work and
filed a patent and so on.
But that's why I can say, hi.
Anyway.
But the idea is that the notion of our collaboration in
context, we've got to be much more creative.
Because the screens are only going to get so big.
The content is going to get more and more.
So what can you do with zooming?
What can you do with content splitting?
What can you do with various different things?
And so we've been working on that.
And so this is the dissertation of Jerry Fails.
That essentially our team's been working on.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are you in any way
looking at games in Japan?
ALLISON DRUIN: Games in Japan?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: They happen on small screens, they happen
in sharing, they happen on the train.
ALLISON DRUIN: Yeah.
But a lot of it, it's very interesting, a lot of it is
very distributed.
A lot of it is point to point.
I'm sending something to you, you're sending
something to me.
There is not that notion of, how do we have it together.
Though we do understand that kids will all be on the same
thing at the same time.
And will be literally looking at each other's
screens, kind of thing.
But it is--
I would say that there's a lot to be learned
from the gaming world.
A lot to be learned.
It's just a question of, what can we take, what can we take.
And I guess the other thing, too, is that there's a fair
amount of twitch.
And so the notion of, how good is twitch for certain
constituents, certain types of users.
It's not that simple.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
ALLISON DRUIN: The pressing the buttons.
So certain buttons can do certain things on the games.
And so there are certain users that are much better at this
than other users.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Fast.
ALLISON DRUIN: Faster.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That depends on the game, it's not your
typical Japanese game.
ALLISON DRUIN: No, I understand.
It totally depends on the game.
And it also depends on, and now finally there are more
games that are bringing more genders--
more genders.
There's only two.
But, anyway, bringing--
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you automatically detect
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
an adaptive UI [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
any kind of metrics that someone who's there could use
to let that interface grow?
ALLISON DRUIN: With the proper funding, yes.
Absolutely.
We do have we had a conceptual framework for
thinking about it.
But, needless to say, it's something that's much larger
than what we've been able to do.
Any other?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, it is exactly four o'clock.