Awards

Each year the ACM SIGDOC gives out two prestigious awards, the Rigo Award and the Diana Award. The Rigo Award is made to an individual who has made an outstanding life-time contribution to the field of user documentation. The Diana Award is made to an institution or organization that has made an outstanding life-time contribution to the field of user documentation.

The Rigo Award: Don Norman

The 2001 recipient of the Rigo Award is Don Norman. Dr. Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, an executive consulting firm, and an executive at Unext, a leader in distance education. He is Prof. Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and former VP of Apple Computer. He is the author of numerous books, including "The Design of Everyday Things," and "The Invisible Computer." His Rigo Award presentation is called The Design of Everyday Things: The Sequel.

The Design of Everyday Things: The Sequel

In the interim between writing The Design of Everyday Things (AKA POET) and now, things have gotten much better - and simultaneously much worse. Some designs are wonderful, some perfectly horrid. The advent of the web page and html has set back the field about a decade, and the advent of new devices for mobile usage will make matters already worse. (Will? Why am I talking about the future - they already are worse.)

Hence the need to revisit The role of Design, especially human-centered design, and the way a human-centered development process should unfold. My strong recommendation ten years about -- and still my recommendation now - is first write the user manuals and documentation, then use that as a specification for product design. make the programmers and engineers conform to the documentation, not the way it is today. And of course, try to write documentation so simple that it isn't even needed.

About Don Norman

Don Norman calls himself a "user advocate." Business Week calls him a "cantankerous visionary" - cantankerous in his quest for excellence. Dr. Norman is Prof. of Computer Science at Northwestern University and cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, an executive consulting firm that helps companies produce human-centered products and services. In this last role, he serves as advisor and board member to numerous companies. Upside Magazine named him to the their "Elite 100" list for 1999.

Dr. Norman is Prof. Emeritus of both Cognitive Science and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, former Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group, Apple Computer, and an executive at Hewlett Packard and Unext, a leader in online education.. He is a fellow of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society, the American Psychological Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received an honorary degree from the University of Padua (Italy).

Dr. Norman is the author of "The Design of Everyday Things," "Things That Make Us Smart" and most recently, "The Invisible Computer," a book that Business Week has called "the bible of the "post PC' thinking."

The Diana Award: Robert Horn

The 2001 recipient of the Diana Award is Robert Horn of Information Mapping, Inc. Robert E. Horn is a political scientist, ex-CEO, scholar, and consultant with a special interest in communication and knowledge management (especially the dynamics of highly complex problems such as organizational strategy). He is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and a member of its nominations committee. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a recipient of the Outstanding Research Award from the International Society for Performance and Instruction (ISPI).

What Kinds of Writing Have a Future?

Yes, of course, writing has a future. But what kind of future? For what kinds of writing? For what purposes? Those are some of the questions that writers should be asking themselves. The past 40 years have seen a larger number of innovations in writing than perhaps the entire history of writing. Certainly the spread of the innovations has been orders of magnitude more rapid than in the past. I will survey a group of these innovations in which I've participated in various ways, and talk about their future. In covering this history and suggesting scenarios for the future, I will examine some of the key properties of these innovative forms of writing. Among these key properties are (1) what to put in and what to leave out (there are some kinds of writing where you leave the most important portions out!); (2) how thoughts stick together (and how to organize this stickiness); (3) what writing should be linear and what should not; (4) how your big screen will affect writing; (5) when to tightly integrate words and images into visual language; (6) what may be the future of metawriting.

About Robert Horn

For the past 7 years, Robert Horn has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. His career has been widely interdisciplinary, leading a team that developed an information system covering 400 federal programs on education and training (in the 1960s); editing a standard reference work that evaluated over 1,500 educational simulations in 35 academic disciplines (in the 1970s); and creating, while he was a research associate at Columbia University, a widely used methodology for the analysis of any complex subject matter. In the 1980s, he turned this research into an international consulting company, specializing in knowledge management, called Information Mapping, Inc., which he founded and was CEO of for 15 years. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, and Sheffield (U.K.) universities.

His recent development of visual argumentation mapping has resulted in the publication of the Mapping Great Debates series, which in the past year and a half has received a full-page review in Nature, as well as being hung in a museum in The Hague as part of an exhibit on information design as a fine art.

For the past several years, he has been leading a project exploring the possibilities for using highly visual cognitive maps to aid the policy-making process (especially for science and security matters). His most recently published book is Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century (www.macrovu.com). At Stanford he continues his research work in public policy, knowledge management, and information design. His consulting clients have included Boeing, Lucent Technologies, Principal Financial, AT&T, HP, and other Global 1000 companies.

Last modified October 28, 2001 by Scott Tilley.