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60 Chapter 2 Understanding and conceptualizing interaction

amine a web browser interface and describe the various forms of analogy and composite
erface metaphors that have been used in its design. What familiar knowledge has been
combined withnew functionality?

Comment Many aspects of a web browser have been combined to create a composite interface metaphor:
a range of toolbars, such as a button bar, navigation bar, favorite bar, history bar
tabs, menus, organizers
search engines, guides
bookmarks, favorites
icons for familiar objects like stop lights, home
These have been combined with other operations and functions, including saving, search-
ing, downloading, listing, and navigating.

2.5 Interaction paradigms

At a more general level, another source of inspiration for informing the design of a
conceptual model is an interaction paradigm. By this it is meant a particular philos-
ophy or way of thinking about interaction design. It is intended to orient designers
to the kinds of questions they need to ask. For many years the prevailing paradigm
in interaction design was to develop applications for the desktop-intended to be
used by single users sitting in front of a CPU, monitor, keyboard and mouse. A
dominant part of this approach was to design software applications that would run
using a GUI or WIMP interface (windows, icons, mouse and pull-down menus, al-
ternatively referred to as windows, icons, menus and pointers).
As mentioned earlier, a recent trend has been to promote paradigms that move
"beyond the desktop." With the advent of wireless, mobile, and handheld technolo-
gies, developers started designing applications that could be used in a diversity of ways
besides running only on an individual's desktop machine. For example, in September,
2000, the clothes company Levis, with the Dutch electronics company Philips, started
selling the first commercial e-jacket-incorporating wires into the lining of the jacket
to create a body-area network (BAN) for hooking up various devices, e.g., mobile
phone, MP3, microphone, and headphone (see Figure 1.2(iii) in Color Plate 1). If the
phone rings, the MP3 player cuts out the music automatically to let the wearer listen
to the call. Another innovation was handheld interactive devices, like the Palmpilot,
for which a range of applications were programmed. One was to program the Palmpi-
lot as a multipurpose identity key, allowing guests to check in to certain hotels and
enter their room without having to interact with the receptionist at the front desk.
A number of alternative interaction paradigms have been proposed by re-
searchers intended to guide future interaction design and system development (see
Figure 2.11). These include:

ubiquitous computing (technology embedded in the environment)
pervasive computing (seamless integration of technologies)
wearable computing (or wearables)