ProjectProposal-RamyGhabrial
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Introduction
For my project, I envision a complete overhaul of written "at-a-distance" communications as we know them today. Less generally, I aim to effectively bridge the gap between snail mail and email. Snail mail is too slow for today's world, and yet letters, envelopes and stamps are ubiquitous in less-well-developed parts of the world. When in Kenya, for example, I noticed that inhabitants of remote village huts and bustling cities alike responded to "how can I contact you later?" by offering me a mailing address. This is obviously due at least in part to paper's low cost and ready availability; however, I believe the bigger part of the appeal of paper letters is that computers present an unintuitive and clumsy interface that scares people away before they can learn its affordances. In effect, many people use snail mail simply because, never having grown up with computers, they are unaware of the alternatives.
Target User Group
I am particularly concerned with providing a solution for people who neither know nor want to learn how to type. This could, as in Kenya, simply be due to poverty or lack of education. It could also, however, result from language barriers: my Egyptian relatives have never learned to type in Arabic because most decent laptops have English keyboards; as a result, our communications are crippled until I see them in the summer.
Accidental beneficiaries of my project might include people who desire greater portability than a laptop can provide, or the more personal touch that handwritten letters provide as opposed to typewritten emails, or users of the various higher-level features that might result from brainstorming my idea further.
Problem Description
- 1) Assume I live in Kenya. I do not own a computer or know how to use one. For communicating with the outside world, I go to the nearest post office and mail or receive letters. These letters take a long time to reach their destination. In the case of an inefficient or isolated local post office, letters frequently spend months in transit.
- 2) Assume I am an Arabic speaker. My keyboard or system settings force me to type in English. Learning English is not a viable option. To get around this, I use a modified alphanumeric alphabet (consisting of english letters and numbers) to communicate with other Arabic speakers in faux Arabic.
Problem Context and Forces
In either case, I am assuming access to the necessary infrastructure or at least the feasibility of building it. For example, to operate in Kenya, there should be at least one post office with a computer with an internet connection nearby. Kenyans might still have to walk to the nearest post office, but subsequent basic communication should be much faster if my project is implemented. I expect that if it catches on, more post offices will acquire basic computers and connections wherever possible.
Secondly, I am assuming literacy in at least one language. This is not a simple assumption and is the biggest limitation to the extent of my target group.
Solution sketch
My solution has 4 parts so far. I am sure most of these have been thought of before, but quick searches do not reveal a comprehensive solution that incorporates them all in the manner I am thinking of. In particular, a quick search for my phonebook idea somehow did not reveal any existing or even similar Anoto projects. My solution is a bit ambitious, but I think any one of the parts could be blown up into a semester-long project. The parts follow:
- 1) The obvious: email form / chat / fax functionality.
Printed digital paper of various kinds and formats. Common to all these papers, however, should be "To" and "From" fields and a "screen" checkmark.
- In the "To" field, should be able to write down an address, number, email address or name. These will be recognized by OCR. If address, the document should be sent to the correct post office by a postal network system, which then prints it out, bypassing transit time. If number, the document should be sent to a fax machine. If email address, the document should be sent by email. If name, the system should check the user's phonebook and respond accordingly.
- If "screen" is checked, the user is declaring that he has access to the screen of the computer receiving the pen and paper data. This would allow for a chat interface to be launched with the recipient, assuming the recipient is an email address or name. It should not drastically limit the target audience either, assuming simple terminals with screens and Anoto pen docking points can be provided.
- 2) Phonebook.
This is the cornerstone of the project and should prove particularly useful for people who do not wish to use computers. It should serve as both a physical and digital repository of known names, or perhaps usernames, along with any accompanying useful data such as addresses or numbers: basically a phonebook, printed with digital paper. The idea is that this gives users the flexibility of selecting any person to contact, based on the user's own personal phonebook, without having to look at a computer screen. The major technical hurdle I see here is deriving the right phonebook from the "From" field and pen ID when necessary. There will probably eventually need to be a DNS-like or email-like worldwide directory of registered phonebooks/pens/usernames for this to ever really take off, but the functionality should be simple to implement in a small network for testing purposes.
- 3) Business cards. Related link.
Perhaps personal cards would be a better term. These cards would not necessarily have any writing on them, so long as they were printed with the correct page id and were linked to the correct phonebook. Upon receiving a personal card, I could simply mark it with my pen and thereby add all its information to my own digital phonebook. Of course, this is a lot more complicated than it sounds and depends on the specifics of Anoto page IDs, which I am unsure of at the moment. At the very least, this poses the same technical hurdle as my phonebook idea: how to link a scrap of digital paper to the right phonebook/person -- I expect the solution to be related and perhaps shared. One cool potential aspect of this idea is that business cards will no longer be static: a card I printed years ago should theoretically generate current information about me if you use it today, depending on how card lookup operates.
- 4) Personal space.
Blog, messages, pictures, video. This is related to the business card/ personal phonebook ideas and is obviously inspired by myspace and facebook. While we assume a personal digital space for each person and his papers is possible, why not add functionality for pictures, videos, simple messages and blogs (via diaries printed out on digital paper). User-limited sharing of phonebooks could provide the basis for friends networks. This is a higher-level set of features and would obviously require a screen for most actions.
- Here is a rough sketch of how my solution's various parts might come together:
Obstacles
The biggest obstacle, aside from the technical aspects of linking papers to people, is security. There are plenty of opportunities for malicious users, hackers and governmental or postal systems to exploit. These will have to be taken under consideration for any commercial or otherwise serious extension of this project.
