David Modjeska: PERSONAL Space: Workshop on Personalised and Social Navigation in Information Space

As information environments increase in size and complexity, spatial and navigational metaphors become an attractive technique for representing and interacting with information. Such metaphors are implicit in the language of Web users (e.g., "going to a site", "getting lost") and explicit in the environments of virtual online communities. Navigation in information spaces has both personal and social aspects. Personal issues include the sense of place and the quality of experience; social issues include representation of identity and presence (e.g., avatars), and collective norms. As information spaces acquire greater longevity, the extent to which they should be designed or merely evolve is an open question.

The preceding topics (among others) were addressed at a recent workshop organised by the PERSONA project (Napier University in Edinburgh and SICS in Stockholm), and sponsored by i3 net (European Network for Intelligent Information Interfaces) and IFIP working group WG13.2. Further information about the workshop is available on the Web:

http://www.sics.se/humle/projects/persona/web/workshop

John Waterworth and I attended this interdisciplinary event. I presented a talk entitled "Spatial and Textual Structures in Virtual Reality", describing my current PhD research, and John spoke on "Spaces, Places, Landscapes and Views: experiential design of shared information spaces". In the seminar, I will revisit my presentation in the light of comments and discussions at the workshop. We will also report on the workshop and related issues, which are of broad general interest to the field of Informatics. David Modjeska

Välkommna!
Kenneth Nilsson