Itsme

itsme: interaction design innovating workstations Giorgio De Michelis*^, Marco Loregian*^, Claudio Moderini*° {giorgio.demichelis, marco.loregian, claudio.moderini}@itsme.it * ITSME srl, viale Sarca 336-F, 20126 Milano (Italy) ^ University of Milano – Bicocca, DISCo, Viale Sarca 336, 20126 Milano (Italy) ° Domus Academy, Via Watt 27, 20143 Milano (Italy) Abstract. In the last 30 years there has been little innovation in personal computing. The desktop metaphor became the standard user interface, with its pros (e.g., ease of learning) and cons (e.g., interaction constraints for skilled users, lack of context awareness). In this paper we present itsme, an Italian initiative to design the next-generation workstation. Interaction design is the basis of the project, as well as the involvement of a wide community of contributing users. The early design phases of the project lead to the definition of a new metaphor for personal computing, based on stories and venues. The metaphor is being adopted for the development of a novel front-end for the Linux operating system, aimed at fulfilling the needs and desires of knowledge workers.

Keywords. Interaction design, design case presentation, innovation, personal computing, stories and venues.

Introduction and background Giorgio De Michelis and his colleagues (in the first phase at DSI, University of Milan, later – from 1998 – at DISCo, University of Milano-Bicocca) participated in the emergence of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) field from its very beginning1. They presented a prototype of coordination system – CHAOS – at the first CSCW conference at Palo Alto in 1986 (De Cindio et al. 1986) and they became then active members of the European CSCW community, designing several prototypes of systems for supporting collaboration, workflow management systems and knowledge management systems. Like many other members of that community they explored adjacent research fields like Ubiquitous Computing, Social Computing and Computer-Human Interaction and experienced multi-disciplinary collaboration with social scientists, psychologists and designers (Binder et al. 2004). In the meantime they reflected on the emerging aspects of their design activity (De Michelis 2003b).

Claudio Moderini and his colleagues at Domus Academy (DA) begun in the early nineties – Marco Susani was at that time the head of the research center in DA – to look at how the design 1

Selected publications, from which collaborations can be seen: http://www.informatik.uni-

trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/m/Michelis:Giorgio_De.html

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culture and discipline could contribute to the design of computer-based systems serving people: they were also among the designers of the I-cube2 European call and participated in three projects financed by it. Later they continued participating in projects where designers not only were drawing the interface of computer-based systems but contributed also to the overall concept of systems providing new and effective interaction possibilities to their users. They also started, among the first in Europe and with a largely international audience, to give courses on Interaction Design (Preece et al. 2002) – under the direction of Claudio Moderini.

It has been not casual, therefore, that DISCo and Domus Academy (both in Milan) started collaborating both in research and teaching. The collaboration has progressively expanded (De Michelis et al. 2000) extending its focus (e.g., in the new emergent area of business design) and generating a shared reflection on the nature of Interaction Design and on how the creative design culture of the architecture and design tradition could meet the participatory design culture, thus permeating responsible technologists as those who had given raise to CSCW. When, at the beginning of 2008, the idea of an innovative workstation – going beyond the desktop metaphor, and named itsme3, – became a start-up with adequate capitals and a concrete work-plan, it has been natural for DISCo and DA to become the two major pillars of its team.

As the reader will see, the adventure of itsme can also be seen as the challenge of bringing Interaction Design in the real game, revolutionizing an established and widely diffused technology: personal computers.

We are well aware that this is a rather risky and difficult challenge: even if assume its responsibility entirely, our design process is open to the community of interaction designers as well as to the larger community of the potential users of our workstation. A scientific committee has been created to collect the advice of some senior researchers: the current members of the scientific committee are Alfonso Fuggetta, Patrizia Marti, Roberto Polillo, and Marco Susani. In particular, Patrizia Marti and her research team from the University of Siena are developing methods and tools to involve people in the design process from its (very early) conceptual phase.

In fact, we plan to continuously inform and interrogate a growing community of prosumers about itsme, its technical and market context, its development process.

This paper is both a presentation of the concept of the new itsme workstation we are developing and a description of the way we are doing it. We think that its uniqueness deserves the attention of the readers, since it lively illustrates some aspects of Interaction Design in Italy.

The next section presents the scenario from which itsme was born; the basic elements of the ‘stories and venues’ metaphor are presented in the third section; the industrial plan for the itsme project is presented in the fourth section, before giving some concluding remarks in the last one.

The scenario In 1984 the Apple Macintosh has set the interface standards for all the workstations that would be offered on the IT market state in the years to follow. The user interface was based on the 2 3

Intelligent Information Interfaces, 1996 www.itsme.it 2

desktop metaphor, originally designed for the Xerox Star by Alan Kay (1977, Barnes 2007) and others: a replica of the surface on which users work, a plane supporting and containing several distinctive tools, documents and objects of different types, a folder cabinet, a trash basket, and so on.

The success of the desktop metaphor stems from its ability to reproduce the arrangement of tangible things, a common experience for any user: it has been a success factor in times when professionals were beginning to use computers, and needed help to understand how to interact with them. The desktop metaphor provided the right analogy at the right time, and Microsoft completed the diffusion process with its Windows operating systems through the '90s and the early years of this century.

At the same time, also following Moore's law, the IT marked experienced a terrific growth of entry-level computing and storage capabilities as well as the diffusion of networking thanks to the Internet, and especially to the affirmation of email as a global communication medium and of the Word Wide Web as an information sharing platform.

In recent years, the Web started providing even more services than the original ones, i.e., hypertext browsing: downloading files became easier, – when not superfluous thanks to streaming technology for multimedia contents (e.g., YouTube videos), – enabling the creation and the full exploitation of collaborative information (work-)spaces. The Web 2.0 revolution shifted the border even further, towards social computing (and networking) thanks to the establishment of practices derived from user-generated content publishing.

The personal computer (PC) has been unable to evolve at the same pace, and today it seems natural to think of the future of PCs in terms of empty network nodes provided with ubiquitous broadband access to the Internet, and thin-client applications to interact with online resources (services) and file repositories only through a Web browser – the so-called netbook PCs. The reasons supporting the netbook perspective are mainly due to: • the current dispersion of files across different hosting providers and services: shared calendars and workspaces, document management systems, networked repositories, and instant messengers have all enriched the set of options that workstations offer to users, but the way in which services and objects are organized has not yet been significantly updated since the introduction of the desktop metaphor, and they are all disjoint (like different tools on the same desk) instead of being integrated; • the need to deal with information overload (Eppler and Mengis 2004), as users are constantly addressed by many sources and information flows (e.g., email, RSS feeds); • the inadequacy of local file systems with respect to equivalent online services – which lead to the diffusion of add-on tools like google desktop.

These facts lead to a casual and incomplete divide et impera strategy to manage personal information and online knowledge: users juggle between different services and repositories to find what they need and carry their work on (Oulasvirta 2008). The trend is sustained by the convergence of mobile technologies with traditional personal computing, with laptops that more and more resemble mobile phones and vice-versa.

Are traditional PCs still needed? Is it reasonable to design new interactions for them, and for their operating systems and applications, or are they destined to be netbooks? Before answering with our concrete proposal, let us point out some problems preventing the netbook solutions 3

from being ideal, or even a viable option for many kinds of user. First of all, online computing is not yet ubiquitous, and in many geographical areas is far for being (for many different reasons); secondly, traditional personal computing offers what the Web is still not able to, e.g., privacy and security (no data is being transmitted while working on it), control over data ownership (data is safe on a desk, not on a remote and uncontrolled server), and specific applications that, at the present time, cannot be replicated on the Web and that still define the professionalism of some kinds of users.

Moreover, PCs are ‘personal’ in the sense that users should be able to customize them, and to tailor interaction according to their (work) needs and desires.

In a more specific sense, workstations should nowadays be PCs that are able to assist users in their professional practices in a natural way. But what can the workstations for the near future be like?

We are embodying what we have learnt about knowledge work by designing a new product for people who think that what they do has a value. Our way to tackle the issue is by trying to reduce or avoid the dispersion of files in workspaces. Practically, we are defining a new interaction metaphor based on stories and venues – details in the next section.

We are designing a new front-end where all documents, urls, people contact details, information sources, and tools that are (potentially) useful for what the user is doing are presented altogether. Today, users are continuously performing searches to collect what they need – according to Web interaction paradigm (Norman 2007) – but this habit leads to distraction for their core intentions, even with optimal search engines. Moreover, additional effort is required to put things in place when and after work is performed: e.g., saving files with a proper name and in a suitable folder.

What we actually observed in our previous research (Agostini et al. 1996), and from ethnographic research on work practices in general (Harper 2000), is that what people do actually emerges from their relations with other people – actions and interactions. Actions and communication are strictly intertwined, due to the need of collecting stimuli and information, first, and propagating the outcome of work, then. Besides being situated in space and time, actions exist in the story in which they make sense. Stories are more than just sequences of events; they can be defined as selective viewpoints on actions and interactions. The different stories people live are not disjoint: they have elements in common, and often a story begins by spinning off a previous one. While people are naturally able to live their own stories by understanding what happens to them in the real world, personal computers are still unable to provide support accordingly – because their being limited by the desktop metaphor (Baker et al.

2007), which is only useful in a spatial dimension, prevents them from untangling such complexity of work environments.

Stories and Venues Our research on context awareness (Agostini et al. 1996, De Paoli and Loregian 2006) has brought us to conceive a new structure for the interface of a workstation, according to stories and venues. Everything users do is in the context of the different stories they live with other people (sometimes, alone). Any of these stories is populated by all the items (objects of different types, people’s addresses, relevant URL’s, exchanged messages) created or imported 4

during the experience and users need to have them ready at hand, in the venue associated to the story within which they are acting or interacting.

In our previous research we revisited the language/action perspective (De Michelis and Grasso 1994) claiming the importance of conversations (Winograd and Flores 1986), and these same concepts are now the bases of the novel approach we are proposing: • A conversation defines a context that is represented by a venue; • Venues aggregate related objects, that should then be managed altogether, being them constituents of a context; • New venues are created as new conversations begin, from scratch (i.e., by replying to a new message) or spinning off existing ones (e.g., when the topic of a conversation changes or multiplies); • Users can modify venues sorting the objects they contain, merging different venues, creating sub-venues, deleting them (different policies can be characterized), and so on; • Objects only exist within a venue: an object can be accessed through replicated references, if it is referred by different conversations.

A special venue is the one containing all other venues (called home), which can be used to move elements from one venue to another through a transit space.

Both the concepts of story and venue have been investigated through a highly iterative design process aimed at transposing the conceptual framework of itsme into proper design requirements and specifications for the operating system interface.

The on-going design activity indeed alternates phases dedicated to the investigation and development of specific design topics with phases dedicated to the refinement of itsme conceptual framework and assumptions and to the exploration of technical requirements and implications.

More in detail, the process follows a macro plan that starts with a Problem Setting phase, followed by the definition of an Interaction Design Model, the exploration of Interaction Paradigms and Preliminary GUI by means of schematic representations, to achieve a detailed design of the look and feel of itsme visual interface.

Given the complexity of the general task, the process is continuously evolving and adapting: a number of micro-activities and workshops involving both the design team, potential users and the community of interest and stakeholders are organized in relation to the emergent needs.

From an interaction design perspective, itsme can be defined as a dynamic, adaptive and supportive system whose dialogical qualities are emerging in relation to the interaction with, and by, its users. While supporting the users in the creation and sedimentation of their personal stories, itsme is manifesting its own identity, acting more as a partner than as a tool, providing to user both the context and the rationale for the manipulation of documents, applications and resources.

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The interface model (Figure 1)4 is based on three main layers: - the interaction layer, in which both the basic interaction paradigms and the metaphor for the exploration, creation and manipulation of visual elements within the representation space are defined, taking into account the characteristics of both hardware and software configurations and, in particular, to the adopted physical/virtual controls and input devices (e.g., mouse, keyboard, touchpad, touch-screen); - the visualization layer, where the visual characteristics of the interface elements (e.g., icons, pictograms, panels) are defined, taking into consideration both aspects related to visual consistency and affordance, as well as content transparency; - the information structure layer, in which the correlations between interface elements (venues, objects and resources) and the information architecture are managed by means of metadata that allow monitoring and managing time/space relations and conversations.

From a structural point of view (Figure 2), the interface of itsme can be described as a continuous virtual space where the x- and y-axis correspond to the visualization area on a PC screen, while the z-axis corresponds to a timeline. The venues, as main interaction objects, are automatically disposed along the time axis, following the chronological order of their creation, but can be freely organized by the user on the screen surface that, as a sort of digital trompel’œil, displays both the recent and active venues.

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Note for the reviewers: Compressed pictures have been used for this version of the paper, high-quality illustrations will be used for the final version 6

Figure 1 The itsme interface model

Figure 2 The itsme interface architecture

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Figure 3 The itsme home The main space for visualizing the venues is called “Home” (Figure 3). On the home are presented only the venues manifesting some activity and the ones that the user wants to keep in the foreground in order to facilitate a quick access to their contents. Venues not visualized in the home are stored in an “archive” space and can be retrieved by means of specific interaction mechanisms, e.g., a query in a specific search area or browsing the archive using a timeline navigation bar.

From the interaction and interface point of view, venues (Figure 4) represent the main context for personal information management and for content administration: a venue is a digital

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representation place where the user can manage the complexity of her personal information flow and communication patterns.

Each venue can contain different objects: contents (messages, documents and media), contacts and resources. Within a venue there are different channels, each represented by a specific tab.

Each channel is both a way to easy access to a specific category of objects and a quick way to create new objects under each category: the “messages channel” contains emails and conversations; the “document channel” contains editable files and; the “media channel” contain audio-visual files; the “people channel” contains the contacts referred to the specific venue and the “resources channel” contain bookmarks, widgets and applications that are contextual to the tasks, activities and stories supported by the venue itself.

Figure 4 Detail of a venue One of the main features within a venue, based on the use of metadata, is the possibility of visualizing the correlations between different files activating a so-called “highlight” mode that starting from a specific object (e.g., email) shows all the contents related to the selected object such as the conversations (chain of send/reply), the attachments and the related contacts such as sender and recipients of the message itself. Starting from a document a user can highlight the author, editors, and so on, the versioning and the possible correlated messages this allowing for a quick and efficient way of retrieving and managing personal information and contents.

Besides the venues and the home, a set of dynamic panels (Figure 5) disposed on the peripheral area of the screen, provide easy access to all the general features and interface elements that must be available and accessible at any time, independently from the current visualization (e.g., home, venue) within the main screen area.

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This panels include a system menu, an “open item” area that visualizes the tabs related to both active venues and open documents and some sliding panels containing all “cross venue” features such as: - the “contacts” panel that combines both the address book and synchronous communication features; - an “inbox” panel that allows for monitoring asynchronous communication flows and to access to messages contained in the different venues - the “shared resources” panel providing access to all applications both local and remote; - the “transit space” and “limbo” panels, respectively the space where user can temporarily place items (i.e., for passing them from one venue to another) and the space where non-organized, non-categorized files can be stored.

Both spaces are limited in size, in terms of file quantity, and time. After a predefined period of time or some trigger event a dialogue box asks to the user whether to transfer the files from transition space to the limbo, to attach them to a venue or to trash them.

Figure 5 The limbo and transition panel

From Concepts to Innovation: Design and Development Like the desktop metaphor started spreading when the Macintosh hit the market in 1984, the new metaphor of stories and venues is being developed for, and is going to be launched with a dedicated workstation, called itsme. ITSME is also a company started in March 2008 as a spinoff of the University of Milano-Bicocca to practically develop the research plan. The first prototype release of the new workstation is scheduled for Spring 2010.

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As it can be easily understood, itsme is a rather ambitious and risky project from many viewpoints. First of all, we are trying to create something radically new in a vast and in some sense mature worldwide market: its chances to be successful depend therefore, besides the quality of the machine we are designing, on our capacity of reaching and attracting a large number of people from all over the world. Secondly, even if and when the users of current workstations are not satisfied by the computers available on the market, what we propose with itsme is going beyond what they request in terms of workstation innovation: we need, therefore, to convince them that itsme has a great value for them and that switching to its new paradigm is not a heavy cost. itsme is a challenge, we are facing barriers that are not easy to overcome: the same cure we dedicate to the design of its software and hardware must be paid to its communication plans and to its development strategy. We consider these last issues of our endeavor as an integral part of the design we have to do: we are trying to keep a strict coherence between what we design and how we implement it, on the one hand, and our industrial plans and our communication strategy, on the other.

The PC market: beyond the ‘black model T Ford’ phase The PC market worldwide has been characterized up to recent years by a great stability and a low growth rate: Microsoft Windows has dominated the PC operating system market5 (about 90%), while others had smaller shares (Apple about 8% and Linux about 1%). In the hardware sector, a bunch of companies provide machines for the dominating software system, while Apple relies on branded hardware for its operating system; Linux has been mostly installed autonomously by users on machines – even if the adoption of Linux for netbooks is increasing thanks to its customizability and price. This situation is changing under the pressure of different factors: first of all, competitors appear willing to find ways to find/create market segments free from the standardization of the software system running on most PCs, where competition is based (instead of on price) on the qualities of the product, its brand, and so on. Secondly, the perception of the inadequacy of the systems based on the desktop metaphor is growing and some examples of systems moving away from it are appearing: some of the Linux-based netbooks offer a simple interface for browsing, emailing, accessing, publishing and exchanging multimedia files, at the same time, netbooks are also pushing all the data towards Web servers, leaving on the workstation only the support for interfacing them; the team working in the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative have released a new system – originally designed for cheap hardware – based on learning activities (Martinazzo et al. 2008); various research initiatives are exploring new ways for organizing personal information management systems – e.g., Bardram’s works (Bardram et al. 2006) based on evolutions of Activity Theory (Engeström 2000).

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Note for the reviewers: various sources have been checked for this approximate figures (e.g., Gartner, Yahoo!, Net Applications). Updated figures will be added prior to publication.

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It seems to us that there are now the conditions to overcome the ‘black model T Ford’ phase6 of the PC market and that we can propose a workstation going beyond the desktop metaphor, if we design it for users with a distinctive identity, and if we convince them of the value it can offer them.

itsme target users Who are the PC users mostly affected by information overflow and dispersion of files? Surely they are not those who use the PC for up- and down-loading multimedia files, for browsing the web, chatting and emailing: these people are perfectly satisfied by existing PCs and netbooks.

The confusion in the workspace is a problem, it is the problem, of a different class of users: those who use the PC for doing things, for working, for developing long-lasting collaboration with other people. The study of work practices (in particular the over 20-year long research performed within the Computer Supported Cooperative Work field) helped us choosing and identifying a particular group of potential users giving us hints on their behavior while managing knowledge during their actions and interactions. The target users of the itsme workstation are all the knowledge workers that think that they are creating value by doing what they do. For example: managers and professionals, professors and researchers, teachers and students, architects and designers, writers and journalists, and similar profiles.

It is a large class of people that is interesting from two viewpoints: from the market one, because they value what they do and can appreciate the benefits a new workstation can offer them; from the design one, because they are the most demanding users defining, in some sense, the most strict requirements for workstations.

The ‘stories and venues’ metaphor we have described in the previous section along with the way we apply it in itsme, is such only for people whose stories play a relevant role in their life, i.e., for people doing things and attributing value to them, like the knowledge workers we have listed above. Moreover, the way we implement our metaphor is open to changes: the first release of itsme is going to be only a first step in a process of improvement that will be deeply influenced by its technological (how hardware, software applications and services will evolve) and human (how people will appropriate itsme and the needs and desires they will express) context. Having users with a well defined profile as a target allows us to keep a conversations with them alive, to listen to their requests and to learn from their practice: our plans for future improvements of itsme beyond its first release are open to be able to encompass what we get from them.

An open source project Both the fact that we are developing a new workstation for a particular class of users (other users may be satisfied by other workstations, both adopting the desktop metaphor or not) and the fact that we want to develop it in collaboration with the users, listening to their needs and desires and conversing with them on our design choices, has brought us to choose the Linux operating system as the basis of the system implementing the ‘stories and venues’ metaphor.

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as Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black". (Ford and Crowther 1922, p. 72) 12

This choice has several advantages: first, it allows us to concentrate our efforts on the front-end of our system and on the layer connecting the it with Linux core, since its open-source software allows for developing new features and functions on top of it; secondly, being other major workstation front-ends based on Linux, we can keep the openness and interoperability of our software at a maximum degree, granting to our users the capability to interact with other people, not using itsme; third, it allows us to develop itsme within the large open source community, discussing within it all the technical issues arising from our design and development process and trying to push it towards innovation so that Linux becomes always more capable (e.g., augmenting the file system with tags, and links) to be the basis for radical changes at the workstation level (e.g., new office suites and applications, new interaction protocols).

In fact, the itsme system is going to be deployed as a Linux distribution with a peculiar front end that will exploit a set of characteristic services: in particular, with a novel graphical user interface relying on and allowing to describe the relationships between the various kinds of objects in the file system (e.g., email messages, documents, contact details). itsme will represent a radical innovation and carry a significant contribution (in terms both of technology and of presence of practitioners) to the existing community.

The affiliation of itsme to the Open Source scene goes beyond the adoption of Linux development as a platform: one of the slogans with which the itsme concept is currently being demonstrated is “let’s team up� meaning that the involvement of people in the project is perceived to be essential.

This idea basically translates to three aspects: 1. the constitution of a community following and providing directions for the project, implementing participatory design; 2. the search for contributions from outside the company: new ideas, concepts, visual design components, code. Community members are also being involved in the evaluation of ideas and the validation of design products; 3. community members are helping us to generate hype on what we are doing, and on the (long disregarded) issues that we are trying to solve. People are helping us to create the market before the real workstation is ready to be sold. In this way, itsme is going to be the fulcrum for the innovation in consumer applications such as productivity tools, web-based and email-based applications.

The itsme Community The people we are trying to engage in our project are more than those in the open source community. We know, or better we foresee, that our target users may benefit from using itsme, since it will avoid continuously searching for the things thy need and it will increase the quality of what they do, since they will have all what they need ready at hands. Moreover they will get these benefits without being constrained in any way: they will be free of choosing the degree of structure of their work-space, by deciding if and when creating new venues or keeping most of their things in the limbo (in the part of the workspace where things are undifferentiated); they will be free to choose if creating small or large venues (small venues encourage focusing on specific activities, while large ones support cross-fertilization among activities).

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But what we know or foresee is not yet what our potential users know or foresee: for most of them, probably, PCs are not subject to change. They can expect to get some new help from new Web-based services, but they do not expect any serious change at the workstation level. We need therefore to convince them that different workstations are possible and that itsme is a major breakthrough in the workstation domain. Communicating with them as early as possible in our design and development process is therefore of paramount importance for our endeavor.

If we recall what we have said in the previous pages, it appears that our choices – (a) to focus our development on users with a particular profile (in agreement with a radical version of interaction design (De Michelis 2003a), we are designing itsme from interactions to functions instead of from functions to interfaces) discussing with them our major choices and (b) to develop an open-source system – call also for the creation of a community accompanying our project.

We are planning to create all the situations – from presentations of itsme in major cities all around the world to a social computing system (Web2.0-like) being the virtual place of the community, from evaluation experiments to focus groups, from University courses to collaborative projects, where a community going from open source developers to interaction designers, from people interested in next-generation workstations to potential users of them can discuss and participate in the design and development of itsme from its very beginning. We are well aware that a community cannot be created from scratch, but that we can only help it to emerge and become strong in terms of identity, of values and of experiences binding its members together. We are, therefore, paying attention to all its members, trying to acknowledge people and groups playing a pivotal role in it. The experiences we are developing with the group of the University of Siena lead by Patrizia Marti who has designed our ‘come design itsme with us’ initiative where users evaluate the concept of itsme as defined in our interaction manual, are good example of the variety of actions we are doing to support the growth of our community: on the one side, we have involved at two kermesses (SMAU –the Italian CEBIT– in Milan and Festival of Creativity in Florence) hundreds of interested persons in the evaluation of our concept, on the other, we have spread information about our work and its progress through several press and media passages, and finally we have enlarged the itsme team to the researchers from the University of Siena.

We will distinguish two main focuses of the debate of our community: its background scenario where strong and weak trends in the workstation sector at the economical, technical and social level will be discussed, and its design process, where all the question related to the development of itsme will be at the center of the attention, so that everyone will find the right discussion space to address her interests.

itsme: from hardware design to its place in the net We aim at developing a new workstation and not only an operating system with a new frontend. We have up to now postponed strategic choices with respect to the hardware, in order to leave the largest space to the collaboration with other partners we want to establish on it.

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Without anticipating the choices we have not done yet7, let us figure out what can we envision on this subject. The first release of the itsme workstation is going to be a laptop computer provided with the itsme operating system. This choice is largely conservative, but it can be reasonable if we consider that, being our front-end radically new, it is good policy to avoid scaring our customers with too many novelties. However, this can be our decision for the first release of itsme, but it cannot condition the future developments of our workstation. The aim of the project is to host the new metaphor with the most suitable computing environment for its target users, offering them (sooner or later) a modular system, composed of some mobile and some fixed components. itsme users will therefore have a small tablet to be used for a restricted set of functions and interactions while walking or standing in a bus; the tablet will be supplemented by a portable keyboard to create a small laptop, that can be used wherever there is plane where to pose it; at their main work-place(s) (at home or in the office) the user will have an information rich system, e.g., with several displays, an ergonomic keyboard, disk units, printers, so that they can do what they want with the highest support by itsme in terms of knowledge presentation and access as well as of the capability to browse and navigate among their venues.

Moreover, since professionals are now used to juggle with several devices (Oulasvirta 2008), like cellular and/or smart phones, palm top systems, itsme will be designed in such a way to be easily accessible from them, allowing a seamless integration of the different devices.

This recalls a question that is also well known and debated within the team designing itsme: the choice of developing a new workstation indicates that we attribute a value to giving users the direct control of their information space, avoiding to let them depend on a service provider hosting its content on a networked server. But this is not for responding to an ideological position: rather we want to offer to our users the possibility to get the best from locality and globality, from peer-to-peer and client-server architectures. We plan, therefore, to duplicate, using at best what has been created for the Web, itsme also online, so that the user will have all her content both in her PC and in a networked server. We are confident that technology is going in the direction that online service providers will offer in realistically short times a rich possibility of interactions with their servers, so that itsme will be almost completely coupled on the Web – some temporal dis-alignments will not be a major problem since convergence of the local and the global is in any case ensured in an asynchronous mode.

Despite its being the outcome of an innovative design presenting a new metaphor for organizing the information space of its user, itsme aims at granting to its users the best locality and globality can offer them: it re-launches workstations, without disregarding the advantages web-based services and cloud computing can offer to their users; it proposes the ‘stores and venues’ metaphor, but in a certain sense the desktop remains as its limit case, when users don’t want to enucleate their stories.

7 Note for the reviewers: since the process is continuing, more details could be available for the final version 15

Conclusion This paper has presented an ambitious project – that is still ongoing as an example of the interaction design activities performed in Italy, – in order to offer to the readers the chance to pay attention to the radical shift interaction design is driving to the way we conceive the design of an innovative system.

In fact, Interaction Design is characterized not only by the attention paid to user behaviors and practices, and to the relevance of user interfaces and of the interaction possibilities allowed to users, but also and mainly by the fact that the above mentioned attention imposes a turnaround in the way we do system design. While the engineering tradition, still dominant in our disciplines, conceives a system as a set of functions and/or features with user-friendly interfaces (often designed a posteriori), interaction design starts from the new interaction possibilities the system should offer, in order to implement (later) the functions and features capable to support them.

From the very beginning of the design process of itsme, we have let the creativity of the designers invent a new metaphor to allow users to improve their actions and interactions, and fostered the participation of knowledge workers (the potential users of itsme) to gather requirements from their needs and desires as well as to make them evaluate the system emerging from the design process.

The attention we pay to the growth of a community of people following our project and waiting for its outcome is not only a preliminary action in our marketing strategy, but also, and mainly, a relevant part of the design process itself: informing the public about what we do – through seminars at conventions and universities, and through our web-site – disregarding both an excessive protection of our system and the reactions of those who claim that our communication is not yet based on content, letting them evaluate the concept of itsme as we did after only six months of design work, opening spaces in several social computing spaces are helping us to shape itsme so that its innovative dimension becomes what our target users expect and want.

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