The Instrumental Interaction Paradigm

The goal of this 5-year fellowship is to develop a new paradigm for interacting with computers based on the concept of Instrumental Interaction. Tools or instruments are a natural way to interact with the real world, and will serve as a powerful metaphor to interact with on-line information. At the empirical level, the project will study why and how instruments can be natural and efficient, based on the psychological theory of affordances. At the conceptual level, it will create a general framework for interaction in distributed environments featuring multiple devices, interactive surfaces and users. At the engineering level, it will develop the appropriate programming abstractions and software architecture to develop a full-scale prototype validating the key ideas of the project.

Research activities

Participants