- 10 December, 2008 01:35 PM EST
- Happy Birthday to the Mouse - and I Don't Mean Mickey!
One of the great things about being a Gartner analyst is that we get to spend time doing research and seeing some really cool stuff. I had the chance to do just that on Tuesday by attending the Program for the Future conference held in San Jose, CA. The conference was celebrating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart giving the "mother of all demos" (see http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html). This demo was done in 1968. I would encourage you to watch this video if you haven't already.
The conference content focused on "Collective Intelligence," a concept that states that shared or group intelligence emerges from the collaboration of many individuals. Hiroshi Ishii presented his work at MIT Media Laboratory with tangible user interfaces. ("Guided by the Tangible Bits vision, we are designing tangible user interfaces, which employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information." See http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/.)
He had several examples, but most interesting was a device called the I/O brush. This is a drawing tool equipped with a video camera and touch sensors that "picks up" a representation of the objects it is exposed to and lets the artist draw with it. For instance, you could hold it up to your mouth moving and then take this moving mouth image and "paint" it onto a digital canvas - in moving video (see http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/iobrush/).
As many of you may know, I'm not in love with the two-dimensional modeling that seems to be central to BPM. I envision a different interface and believe a more intuitive approach will drive much better adoption and collaboration. After spending the day at the conference, I believe that my vision could one day be true. Here it is:
Imagine you could capture work activities with a "brush" that digitalized the working environment. (For an example of this environment check out http://oblong.com. Their work was used in the movie "Minority Report.") The work activities would be captured and be analyzed and optimized in a truly simulated environment - where all the activities, environment, workers, information, etc. are in context. Non-value added work could be tagged by the workers and redundant steps identified. New ideas could be tried out and experimented with before implementing. The environment would be used for training and knowledge transfer. Everything would always be in the context of the whole. It would be a realistic and natural extension of work.
I was encouraged that my vision, while perhaps still a ways off, is a step closer to getting some teeth!
I know there are some examples out there of using these sorts of environments for training and design. I would love to hear from you.
