The Danish Center for Human-Machine Interaction (1998-2003)

The center includes participants from Ålborg University, Risø, The Techni-cal University of Denmark, Danish Maritime Institute, and Århus University. Its purpose is to develop methods for design of human-machine interaction, based on analyses of domain, organisation and tasks. Ålborg University participates in one of the three sub-programs, "Elastic systems". This program focuses on the maritime domain and aims at designing flexible interfaces that can deliver information appropriate to the current maneuvering situation. This means the interfaces must be adaptable with respect to the combination of information, the information type and the medium. The project includes three major activitites. Empirical description of tasks, cooperation and communication in the maritime domain. The fieldwork in this activity is concluded and has resulted in a large collection of video material, field notes and photos. Analysis and theory building. This includes two major areas: development of a semiotics of instruments, and a topology of control situations. Prototyping. One exploratory prototype illustrating the relation between tasks, tailoring and interfaces has been built and published. Two new ones are being designed in 2002, both of them with a theoretical content. One embodies a typology of control situations and its relation to information needs, and another one experiments with using linguistic case-theory as the basic data-structure in highly "verbalizable" systems. Reports and publications can be found on the Center's web-site. http://www.cs.auc.dk/~pba/ElasticSystems Professor Peter Boegh Andersen Department of computer science /Center for Human Machine Interaction Aalborg University, Fredrik Bajers Vej 7E, 9220 Aalborg Øst, Denmark