We have developed a series of tools, which use spatial positioning of objects as a means of externalizations in designing linear information. They include a tool for collage-style writing, a tool for notes summarization, a tool for multimedia data analysis, and a tool for movie editing. With these tools, linear information design is viewed as a concurrent process of framing parts and determining the order of the parts. In designing these tools, visual interaction design has been a center of our project. Our design priority has been put in minimizing the user's cognitive load in creating and modifying parts in a space, and manipulating them in the space. This paper first presents a brief philosophy underneath the system development, and describes interaction techniques used in the tools, such as how a user distinguishes objects positioned in the space, how a user resizes the space by dragging objects toward one of its edges, and how a user sees a trajectory of the objects the user is moving in the space.

This paper reports our case study on an ongoing interaction-design-centered software development project (ART project) viewed as an evolutionary collective creative process. In this project, a visual interaction designer and an expert programmer have collaboratively produced a series of interactive software tools, including a various types of movie players, innovative 3D visualizations and application systems. Visual interaction design is viewed as a process of seeking for compromises between what are desirable (expressed by the designer) and what are possible (expressed by the programmer). In the collaboration, each of the designer and the programmer collects, represents, interacts with, and reflects on a various types of visual representations. This paper characterizes the visual interaction design task, presents our framework to analyze the creative processes, and reports in detail how their creative processes have been carried out.

Jun is a large open-source graphics and multimedia library. It is object-oriented and supports 3D geometry, topography and multimedia. This paper reviews the development of the Jun library from five perspectives: open-source, software evolution processes, development styles, technological support, and development data. It concludes with lessons learned from the perspective of a for-profit company providing open-source object-oriented software to the community.

Object-oriented (OO) technology has been heralded as a solution to the problems of software engineering. The claims are that OO technology promotes understandability, extensibility, evolvabilty, reusability, and maintainability of systems and that OO systems are easy to understand and use. However, this technology has not been as successful as expected. An analysis of experiences and empirical studies reveals that the problem is not the technology per se but that the technology provides no support to software developers in performing the processes the technology requires. We present a cognitive model of software development that details the challenges software developers face in using OO technology. The model focuses on three aspects of software development—evolution, reuse and redesign, and domain orientation. We motivate this model with a variety of firsthand experiences and use it to assess current OO technology. Further, we present tools and evaluations that substantiate parts of this model. The model and tools indicate directions for future software development environment, looking beyond the technological possibilities of OO languages and beyond the context of individual developers and projects.