On the empirical side, we have published a series of user studies: use of digital tools by graphic designers, collaboration between designers and developers of interactive software, use of computational notebooks by scientists, use of document processing systems by legal professionals, use of desktop tools by sight-impaired users, use of LaTeX by users inside and outside academia.These studies have led to a better understanding of these users' needs and grounded the design of novel digital tools. This work was reported in several articles, including in flagship conferences (ACM CHI, ACM CSCW) and journals (ACM TOCHI) and received several awards.
On the theoretical strand, we have published, in collaboration with researchers from Telecom, work on a deeper understanding of interaction based on the concepts of information theory. This work has received a Best Paper and and Honorable mention awards at the flagship ACM CHI conference, as well as a Best Thesis Work award from Université Paris-Saclay and a Best Thesis award from Telecom Paris. We also revisited the relevance of a major law from psychology (Hick’s law) to Human-Computer Interaction, and published novel models for analyzing and predicting pointing performance. We have also advanced our deeper understanding of human tool use and how it applies to digital environments, and the development of the conceptual model of instruments and substrates, based on the concept of interaction as a first-class object. These concepts underlie most of the work conducted in the Engineering strand. Finally we have published a foundational paper with two other ERC grantees on the concept of Generative Theory of Interaction, to appear in ACM Transactions on CHI.
On the engineering strand, we have created various prototypes, including Enact for supporting designer-developer collaboration, Montage for video prototyping, Touchstone2 for experimental design (ACM CHI Best paper award), Tangler for a novel model of malleable software, VideoStrates for video production and editing, CamRay for remote collaboration across wall-sized displays, Textlets for text processing, FileWeaver for file management, iLaTeX for LaTeX editing, or Argus for a priori power analysis of experiments. These functional prototypes include novel interaction techniques based on the principles developed in the project and have been successfully evaluated them with users. This work was reported in numerous papers and presented in demo sessions at various conferences.
The PI has presented the project in keynote talks in France (DYSTOPIA conference, CNRS Humain & Numérique en Interaction, DATAIA-JST) and abroad (12th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter, ACM UIST Vision talk), and in a number of invited seminars (Wellesley College, Univ. British Columbia, Univ. Aarhus, Univ. California San Diego, ETH Zurich, Univ. Zurich, Stanford University, MIT CSAIL). The PI has also co-organized a workshop on “Rethinking Interaction” at the flagship CHI 2018 conference.