Jason Hong's Confabulations

Here is the accompanying report we had to go along with our scenario of World of Workcraft. This report outlines some of the technical and research challenges. As before, credit should be shared with Rick Wash and Michael Bernstein. Blame should go to me. Introduction We envision a future comprised of a highly flexible workforce, where people with appropriate skill sets can be quickly and easily brought together on demand into flash teams to complete projects of varying sizes, difficulties, and time scales. These projects will also function as apprenticeships for people, helping workers to continually learn useful skills that will enable them to actively participate and adapt to changes in the dynamic knowledge economies of the twenty-first century. We are starting to see early glimpses of this kind of future work force. For example, many graphic designers and programmers are hired on a consulting basis, working with short-term project teams that are dissolved once the project is compl...

A while back in 2010, I attended a CCC/CRA workshop in Ultra-Large-Scale Interaction . The goal of the workshop was to set out a broad research agenda for having thousands of people collaborate together on hard problems. A lot of the discussion focused on crowdsourcing, and how to apply crowdsourcing techniques to enable new kinds of work in the future. Below is a scenario that Rick Wash , Michael Bernstein , and I put together for our vision of how crowdsourcing techniques for skilled workers might pan out in the future. We jokingly called it the World of Workcraft , since we drew some of our ideas from that popular game. For example, in WoW, the game records your skill level as well as achievements demonstrating that you have some level of mastery. The game also has ways to facilitate assembling people based on their skills (e.g. tank, damage, healer), having these people operate in short-term groups to achieve specific objectives. We felt that some of these same ideas might be appl...

Bill Buxton has a YouTube channel with some amazing videos of old sketch-based systems, it's a great resource. Thanks to Gabe Johnson for pointing me to these. http://www.youtube.com/user/wasbuxton

I posted a new article on Communications of the ACM's web site about the increasing ridiculousness of stricter password policies .

I've written up a summary of a recent NSF workshop on improving computer science research between the US and China .

Larry Tesler gave a fantastic talk at CHI for his Lifetime Practice award . He presented a summary of his work in helping to develop the modern GUI, and focused specifically on modeless interactions and cut-copy-paste. It was really fascinating listening to all of the subtle issues and design challenges in something that we now take for granted. One example that really struck home was a description of how modes worked in Engelbart's NLS system . To delete a word, first you might hit "d" to put the system into delete mode. Then you might hit "w" to put it into select word mode. Then you could use the mouse to select the text you wanted. Then you would hit an accept button on the mouse to confirm the action. Compare this verb-noun approach to the noun-verb approach we use today, where we simply move the mouse to the right place, select the text (ie the noun), and then hit delete. Much simpler, less error-prone, and fewer clicks. I also liked Larry's takeaw...

This problem needs a higher pagerank, so I figured I would post the solution here. If your Toyota Camry trunk won't open, one possible reason is that it is set to valet mode. Valet mode means that you cannot open the trunk using the release lever inside the car. To set valet mode, you put the key into the trunk lock and turn it counterclockwise. You will know that your trunk is in valet mode if the lock is horizontal rather than vertical, and if you cannot open the trunk using the lever near the driver's seat. Of course, a problem is that sometimes the Camry can get stuck in valet mode, such that you can't use your key to get out of it. (You can see how I spent part of my Sunday morning ...) The solution turns out to be WD-40 . Spray some WD-40 on your key and on the lock. Put the key in, and jiggle it around, and happiness ensues. From an interaction design perspective, it sort of makes sense to have a valet mode. After all, the point of having a valet key is to limit the...