This project focuses on the creation of novel user interface building tools that help designers create interactive behaviors. The designers using these tools are not professional programmers, but have training in Interaction Design, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, or an equivalent. Focusing on interactive behaviors, means a focus on what an application does as opposed to how it looks. Today, interactive behaviors are often programmed by designers using scripting tools, or else designers collaborate with developers who implement the designs in conventional languages. Exploring interactive behaviors today requires programming, and the techniques available to designers are too difficult to use, and do not adequately support the designers? fundamental need to explore. The intellectual merit of the project is an understanding of how designers think about and create interactive behaviors, and the invention of new methods, models and representations that allow designers to more naturally and creatively design behaviors using computers. A novel programming environment that explicitly supports creative exploration of alternative versions and fosters collaboration is the outcome. The broader impacts of the tool will be to enable designers to explore more interactive behaviors and be more creative, which will ultimately improve the user interfaces that they create and that we use every day.
