Multiscale Zooming Interfaces: A Brief Personal Perspective on the Design of Cognitively Convivial Interaction

Ideas are like people, in that the more people know about their history, the better they can appreciate them. The author provides a highly selective and personal history of the development of zooming or multiscale interfaces. When the author formed the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media research group at Bellcore in the early 1990s, he created an opportunity to further explore what he thought of as cognitively inspired interfaces -- interfaces designed to exploit what they understand about cognition. This approach was derived from his earlier experiences designing a series of dynamic interactive graphical systems: Steamer, Moboard, and Human Interface Tool Suite. The author would now argue that there is an important impedance match between zoomable, multiscale interfaces and human cognition. Because of the nature of vision and people's experience with the world, it is natural to move closer to an object to see it in more detail and to move away to see the larger context.