brings many benefits, but also a growing stream of interruptions.
Even though interruptions and the associated fragmenting of
activity are increasingly accepted parts of modern life, a
critical research challenge remains: how to smooth and mitigate
the impact of interruptions and assist in resuming interrupted
activities. Application-specific histories provide some
assistance but are limited since real activities are spread over
multiple applications and across multiple devices. Each
application has access to only a piece of history and typically
captures the result of what was done rather than how it was
done. Building on previous research projects and leveraging our
SelfSpy and ChronoViz software to capture, visualize, and analyze
activity, we are beginning to address not only the crucial and
pervasive problems of interruption and activity fragmentation but
also the challenge of restoring context. This is a new project and
the goal of our presentation is to get feedback about our approach
and motivating intuitions. If there is time, a brief description of the
new Design Lab at UC San Diego and associated Design Fellows
program will be given.