Back to tangibility: a post-WIMP perspective on control room design

In today's digital control rooms, desktop computers represent the most common interface for process control. Compared to their predecessors -- manual control actuators -- desktop computers enable quick and effective process intervention but they lack in process-related interaction qualities such as haptic feedback and the involvement of motor skills. Thus, design trade-offs have to be made to combine the strengths of both paradigms: today's processing power with the interaction qualities of former control room interfaces. In this paper related interaction concepts are presented and evaluated. In a control room scenario, participants were tasked with adjusting numerical values -- so-called process variables -- under two traditional conditions (mouse, keyboard) and two post-WIMP conditions (touch, tangible). Task completion time and recall accuracy of the adjusted values were measured. As a result, traditional desktop interaction proved to be faster, whereas control actions could be recalled significantly better using the tangible control elements. We therefore suggest providing both tangible control for process maintenance and traditional desktop interaction in critical situations that require quick intervention.

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