The Iconic Communication project commenced in 1992 as an investigation as to how the use of screen-based icons might be extended. Several ideas have been pursued.
A computational linguistic approach was developed by Colin Beardon which used Schank's Conceptual Dependency as a basis for the structure of iconic sentences. The main ACTs were represented as short animations, the various cases were represented as the slots for the partcipants in the animations, and the slots were filled with particular icons which corresponded to the PPs and PAs. A dictionary of icons was provided, with short animated descriptions of the intended meanings. However, no restrictions were placed upon users who could use any icon in any context or introduce new icons if they wished.
A small experiment was conducted in which eight iconic messages were developed and given to colleagues without introduction. They were asked to write down what they thought each message was trying to say. The results indicated that it took about ten minutes, on average, for aperson to understand the "logic" behind the messages but that, once they did so they could then quickly and accurately read messages. What tended to happen, though, was that detail was sometimes lost.
A later development of this approach attempted to explore conceptual relations in a more thorough manner. This required five types of screen, representing the:
Icon Dictionary
Picture (i.e. the equivalent of the nounphrase)
Simple Conceptualisation (i.e. the equivalent of the simple sentence)
Conceptual Relation (i.e. the equivalent of the complex sentence), and
Envelope (i.e. the context of the entire message).
Claire Dormann produced her PhD thesis in 1995 on the role of visual rhetoric in animated help. This work commenced with an exploration of the role of animated icons for providing help to users (i.e. by clicking on an icon the user can get a short animation within the icon frame that explains some aspect of it). It developed to look at the use of animation to provide more general help and pointed to the need to go beyond a simulation of the interface and to employ rhetorical techniques derived from the graphic arts and animation.
Clickhere to download an early demonstration of CD-Icon which was developed in 1992 and runs on HyperCard 1.
Also in AISB Quarterly, 83/84, 61-70. ISSN 0268-4179.
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