Paper Reading 13 – D-Macs: Building Multi-Device User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions

Comments
Paola Garza
Zachary Henkel

Reference Information
D-Macs: Building Multi-Device User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions
 - Jan Meskens, Kris Luyten, and Karin Coninx
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

Summary
D-Macs is a system that allows for the recording and sharing of design action sequences.  As in, if someone on a design team made a specific GUI design choice, the actions leading to this choice could be recorded and shared with the rest of the team.  There are many benefits and features to this system that the designers point out.

How the D-Macs system shares and handles its various functions.

One is the automation or repetitive design actions.  This can save a lot of time when creating multiple iterations of a design that have similar portions to them.  And similarly, the system gives feedback during automation so the designer can see how these actions are being replicated.  If some of the repeated designs can be generalized by D-Macs, then they can also be used in other projects requiring similar actions.  The system can also provide contextual cues to help show when repeated actions can and can’t be used to the desired situation.  And the system also allows designers to view and share design choices so everyone can benefit from other work and help guide other designers.

In future work, the designers plan on finding more ways D-Macs can be used in general-purpose GUI design projects.  They would also like to automate the connected community of designers better.  The current iteration requires designers to search for sequences and decide which ones apply to what they are trying to accomplish.  The creators of D-Macs would like to employ some sort of automation that can recognize similar sequences and make recommendations.  They also plan on conducting a full study and releasing D-Macs as free open source software for everyone to experiment with and help design.

Discussion
This seems like a brilliant idea.  But I think it can also be applied to non-GUI related work as well.  Take video editing or photo editing for example.  Sometimes there are sequences of actions that need to be done over and over again.  D-Macs might be able to recognize and record these sequences of actions as well.  I am sure there might be scripting systems built into much of this software for this purpose, but D-Macs seems like a great tool for it also.  Or it could be applied to everyday work as well.  Some sort of repetitive sequence of actions could be converted into an automated script simple by monitoring the actions.  This seems way beyond the scope of D-Macs perhaps, but with the software becoming open source who knows what might happen with it.