Development Consortium: Mass Communication

Sunday and Monday, 6-7 April, Chair: Nico Macdonald, Spy, UK

Each year, the Development Consortium sets out to look at issues and directions that the HCI community and SIGCHI should develop in the coming years. This year, the Development Consortium is dedicated to one of the special areas of CHI 2003: Mass communication.

From television and radio to newspapers and magazines, from mobile phones and PDAs to books and journals -- the possibilities for new forms of mass communication are growing exponentially. Yet the initial forms that these possibilities have taken have often overwhelmed or simply confused the people for whom they are intended. Often they have been largely ignored (as was the case with WAP). This is likely to be the case for many 3G-based services. We need to find ways to link together different kinds of information on different platforms. We need to find ways for people to be able to rate and validate information they receive. And we need to find new ways for people to manage information in ways that can enhance knowledge. While the possibilities have been created by information technology, their realization will be facilitated by HCI. This will demand new thinking from publishers, broadcasters and telephone companies. It will require new levels of cooperation, with a view to pioneering the development and acceptance of new interfaces, and greater consideration of standards.

Participants

Nick Bryan-Kinns, Optic Experience Design, UK; Peter Broadbent, UK; Louis Weitzman, IBM Internet Technology Group, USA; Andrew Zolli, Lead Partner, Z + Partners, USA; Giles Rollestone, SBI and Company, UK; Lorenzo Wood, Oyster Partners Ltd, UK; Luke Skrebowski, Oyster Partners Ltd, UK; Norman Lewis, Freeserve.com Plc, UK; Ann Light, University of Sussex, UK; Mark Hurst, Creative Good, USA; Darren Reed, Department of Psychology, University of York, UK; Anxo Cereijo Roibás, School of Computing, Information and Mathematical Sciences, University of Brighton, UK; Riccardo Sala, Politecnico di Milano University, Italy

For further discussion on the Development Consortium themes please go to: http://www.spy.co.uk/Events/Panels/CHI2003/DevCon/.