Video artifacts for design:
Bridging the gap between abstraction and details

Wendy E. Mackay, Anne V. Ratzer & Paul Janecek

University of Aarhus
Dept of Computer Science
Aabogade 34
8200 Aarhus N - Denmark

mackay@daimi.au.dk

Proc. ACM Designing Interactive Systems, DIS 2000,
New York (USA), August 2000, ACM Press, 2000, pp 72-82.

Abstract

Video artifacts help bridge the gap between abstraction and detail in the design process. This paper describes how our use and re-use of video artifacts affected the re-design of a graphical editor for building, simulating, and analyzing Coloured Petri Nets. The two primary goals of the project were to create design abstractions that integrate recent advances in graphical interaction techniques and to explicitly support specific patterns of use of Petri nets in real-world settings.

Using a participatory design process, we organized a series of video-based design activities that helped us manage the tension between finding useful design abstractions and specifying the details of the user interface. Video artifacts resulting from one activity became the basis for the next, facilitating communication among members of the multi-disciplinary design team. The video artifacts provided an efficient way of capturing and incorporating subtle aspects of "Petri Nets In Use" into our design and ensured that the implementation of our design principles was grounded in real-world work practices.

Keywords:

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© 2000, Association for Computing Machinery

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