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Authors

Steve Harrison

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Steve Harrison

AIA

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Personal Homepage:
http://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/
Current place of employment:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Design is a central element in my career: I am an architect (registered in California), I study the practices of design, I have created tools for design collaboration, and I am an award-winning designer. In fact, design has shaped my approach to teaching and research. My research has been to apply the methods, lessons, and ways of seeing and acting of design to the realm of industrial research.

This unique approach produced the seminal computer supported cooperative work system known as the media space and contributed to the development of a number of shared drawing tools, culminating in the Drawstream Station, all of which employ video in novel ways. Being a student of media, as well as design, has led to instrumental applications of media, most recently in developing exhibits and the overall program for “XFR: experiments in the Future of Reading”. These have been reported in numerous technical publications and conference proceedings, as well as the popular press.

The studies of process and the technological interventions I’ve created have resulted in a number of novel insights; “RePlacing Space” (Harrison and Dourish, 1996) is an oft-cited paper on the behavioral framing of real and virtual space.

This interwoven design and research approach continues with a study of the practices of design review in many disciplines. The goal is to provide local tactics for design review practitioners and strategies for designing more effective design reviews. It is also the central organizing idea I use to teach human-computer interaction. HCI is rapidly changing with new paradigms of technology and use, the only way to teach students for life-long adaptability is for them to understand how they can design the process of de-sign. I am currently leading an effort to establish an International Journal of Interaction Design that will provide a scholarly venue to publish in-depth articles relevant to this approach.

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Publications by Steve Harrison (bibliography)

» 2008 «

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Baecker, Ronald M., Harrison, Steve, Buxton, Bill, Poltrock, Steven and Churchill, Elizabeth F. (2008): Media spaces: past visions, current realities, future promise. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 2245-2248. Available online

“Established researchers and practitioners active in the development and deployment of media spaces review what seemed to be promised twenty years ago, what has actually been achieved, and what we might anticipate over the next twenty years.”

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Otitoju, Kunmi and Harrison, Steve (2008): Interaction as a component of meaning-making. In: Proceedings of DIS08 Designing Interactive Systems 2008. pp. 193-202. Available online

“Using a multi-media work of art, SenSpace, we investigate the relationship of meaning making and meaning-understanding to interaction. SenSpace is a multimedia installation that uses visual, audio and tactile cues to convey the Greek myth of Narcissus to the user. As opposed to books, audio-books, oral literature and other traditional means of conveying a story, Sen-Space embeds the myth within a physical space, engaging the user in an exercise in meaning-making that can involve multiple senses at the scale of the human body. The SenSpace installation uses projections, water reflections, sound, and distorted visual imagery to present a scripted experience of fixed duration. Following a visit to SenSpace, visitors were surveyed on their expectations and interpretations to help us answer the following research questions: (1) how and to what extent does interaction with the work of art encourage engagement with ideas and interpretation? (2) how and to what extent does content ambiguity encourage engagement and interpretation? (3) does social interaction encourage interpretation?”

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Harrison, Steve and Tatar, Deborah (2008): Places: People, Events, Loci -- the Relation of Semantic Frames in the Construction of Place. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 17 (2) pp. 97-133

“The central point of this paper concerns the way the particular contexts of people, events and loci constitute places through the pragmatics of being and acting in physical space and how this can give designers traction over place design. Although we focus here on meaning associated with the concept of "place", unlike some thinkers, we also believe that spaces have meaning. Our point is not to engage in a competition between phenomenologies, but to develop a rich description of the contribution to place of the semantic tangle of people, events, and loci as an aide in locating design alternatives. The semantic tangle consists of situated, mutually constituting resources. Patterns of moves and contexts that define and utilize those resources constitute different forms of place construction; in this paper, we focus on three: the linguistic participation of place, ritual, and ephemeral places. Approaches to CSCW may profit (1) from designing technology for multifaceted appropriation, (2) from designing specific places for specific people engaged in specific events in specific locations, or (3) by commutation, that is, a method of meaning making similar to detecting "just noticeable differences" by iteratively and self-consciously substituting related meaningful moves and contexts into the system of meaning.”

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Harrison, Steve and Tatar, Deborah (2008): Places: People, Events, Loci -- the Relation of Semantic Frames in the Construction of Place. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 17 (2) p. 135

» 2001 «

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Back, Maribeth, Cohen, Jonathan, Gold, Rich, Harrison, Steve and Minneman, Scott (2001): Listen Reader: An Electronically Augmented Paper-Based Book. In: Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel and Jacob, Robert J. K. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2001 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 31 - April 5, 2001, Seattle, Washington, USA. pp. 23-29. Available online

“While predictions abound that electronic books will supplant traditional paper-based books, many people bemoan the coming loss of the book as cultural artifact. In this project we deliberately keep the affordances of paper books while adding electronic augmentation. The Listen Reader combines the look and feel of a real book - a beautiful binding, paper pages and printed images and text - with the rich, evocative quality of a movie soundtrack. The book's multi-layered interactive soundtrack consists of music and sound effects. Electric field sensors located in the book binding sense the proximity of the reader's hands and control audio parameters, while RFID tags embedded in each page allow fast, robust page identification. Three different Listen Readers were built as part of a six-month museum exhibit, with more than 350,000 visitors. This paper discusses design, implementation, and lessons learned through the iterative design process, observation, and visitor interviews.”

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Harrison, Steve, Minneman, Scott, Back, Maribeth, Balsamo, Anne, Chow, Mark, Gold, Rich, Gorbet, Matt, Donald, Dale Mac, Ehrlich, Kate and Henderson, Austin (2001): Design: the what of XFR: eXperiments in the future of reading. In Interactions, 8 (3) pp. 21-30

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Harrison, Steve, Minneman, Scott and Balsamo, Anne (2001): Methods & tools: how to XFR: "eXperiments in the future of reading". In Interactions, 8 (3) pp. 31-41

» 1997 «

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Moran, Thomas P., Palen, Leysia, Harrison, Steve, Chiu, Patrick, Kimberg, Daniel Y., Minneman, Scott, Melle, William van and Zellweger, Polle T. (1997): "I'll Get That Off the Audio": A Case Study of Salvaging Multimedia Meeting Records. In: Pemberton, Steven (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 97 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 202-209. Available online

“We describe a case study of a complex, ongoing, collaborative work process, where the central activity is a series of meetings reviewing a wide range of subtle technical topics. The problem is the accurate reporting of the results of these meetings, which is the responsibility of a single person, who is not well-versed in all the topics. We provided tools to capture the meeting discussions and tools to "salvage" the captured multimedia recordings. Salvaging is a new kind of activity involving replaying, extracting, organizing, and writing. We observed a year of mature salvaging work in the case study. From this we describe the nature of salvage work (the constituent activities, the use of the workspace, the affordances of the audio medium, how practices develop and differentiate, how the content material affects practice). We also demonstrate how this work relates to the larger work processes (the task demands of the setting, the interplay of salvage with capture, the influence on the people being reported on and reported to). Salvaging tools are shown to be valuable for dealing with free-flowing discussions of complex subject matter and for producing high quality documentation.”

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» 1996 «

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Harrison, Steve and Dourish, Paul (1996): Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 67-76. Available online

“Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of "space" and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between "space" and "place". While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of "place" which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how "place", rather than "space", can support CSCW design.”

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Moran, Thomas P., Chiu, Patrick, Harrison, Steve, Kurtenbach, Gordon, Minneman, Scott and Melle, William van (1996): Evolutionary Engagement in an Ongoing Collaborative Work Process: A Case Study. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 150-159. Available online

“We describe a case study in which experimental collaboration technologies was used for over two years in the real, ongoing work process of intellectual property management (IPM) at Xerox PARC. The technologies include LiveBoard-based meeting support tools, laptop notetaking tools, digital audio recording, and workstation tools to later access and replay the meeting activities. In cooperation with the IPM manager, both the work process and the tools were continuously evolved to improve the process. We supported and observed over 60 meetings, leading to a rich set of empirical observations of the meeting activities. We note some practical lessons for this research approach.”

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» 1990 «

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Harrison, Steve, Minneman, Scott, Stults, Bob and Weber, Karon (1990): Video: A Design Medium. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 21 (3) pp. 86-90

» 1989 «

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Harrison, Steve, Minneman, Scott, Stults, Bob and Weber, Karon (1989): Video: A Design Medium. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 21 (2) pp. 62-66

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Changes to this page (author)

13 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Steve Harrison's author page.
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28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography

Publication statistics

Publication period:1989-2008
Publication count:12
Number of co-authors:26

Productive colleagues

Steve Harrison's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Paul Dourish:79
Thomas P. Moran:60
Ronald M. Baecker:58

Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Scott Minneman:7
Bob Stults:2
Maribeth Back:2

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Learn more about Steve Harrison:
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- ACM
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Conference Calendar

Mar 16

Science meets Arts: Leading scientists and designers explore the impact of developing technologies on society

Mar 21

WritersUA Conf. for Software User Assistance

Mar 22

UX People

Mar 14

“ The computer can be thought of from the perspective of its technology [...] from the field of computer science. Or it can be thought of as a social tool, a structure that will change social interaction and social policy, for better or for worse. It can be thought of as a personal assistant, where the goals and intentions of the user become of primary concern. It can be viewed from the experience of the user, a view that changes considerably with the task, the person, the design of the system. The filed of human-computer interaction needs all these views, all these issues, and more besides. ”

-- Stephen Draper and Donald Norman. In "User Centered System Design" (1986) p. 1 ”

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Steve Harrison

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Publications by Steve Harrison (bibliography)

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» 2001 «

» 1997 «

» 1996 «

» 1990 «

» 1989 «

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