Interactive Paper: A Whirlwind Tour of Tangible Computing from the Digital Desk to Music Composition

Abstract

Interactive paper is a form of tangible computing that allows people to take full advantage of their existing cognitive and physical skills, and encourages us, as designers, to explore novel strategies for supporting creativity. This talk traces my own history with interactive paper, based on participatory design projects with creative professionals who successfully combine paper and computers. I begin with Pierre Wellner's ground-breaking Digital Desk in the 1990's and continue through to Phillippe LeRoux's Quid Sit Musicus in 2014, which used interactive paper both during composition and as an integral part of the live performance. The insights we gained from these projects has led to a new way of thinking about interaction design. Our concept of co-adaptive instruments is based on instrumental Interaction, which treats interaction as a first class object and co-adaptation, which helps users both learn (adapt to) and appropriate (adapt) interactive systems. By taking cues from how people interact in the physical world, we can create less brittle systems that are easier to learn and appropriate, and support a wide variety of creative activities. Wendy Mackay is a Research Director, Classe Exceptionnelle, at Inria, France, where she heads the In|Situ| research group in Human-Computer Interaction at the Université Paris-Sud. After receiving her Ph.D. from MIT, she managed research groups at Digital Equipment and Xerox EuroPARC, which were among the first to explore interactive video and tangible computing. She has been a visiting professor at University of Aarhus and Stanford University and recently served as Vice President for Research at the University of Paris-Sud. Wendy is a member of the ACM CHI academy, is a past chair of ACM/SIGCHI, chaired CHI'13 and recently received the ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Acheivement Service Award. She also received the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for her research on co-adaptive instruments. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed research articles in the area of Human-computer Interaction. Her current research interests include participatory design, creativity, co-adaptive instruments, mixed reality and interactive paper, and multidisciplinary research methods.