The MSM Framework: A Design Space for Multi-Sensori-Motor Systems

One of the new design goals in Human Computer Interaction is to extend the sensory-motor capabilities of computer systems to better match the natural communication means of human beings. This article proposes a dimension space that should help reasoning about current and future Multi-Sensori-Motor systems (MSM). To do so, we adopt a system centered perspective although we draw upon the “Interacting Cognitive Subsystems” psychological model. Our problem space is comprised of 6 dimensions. The first two dimensions deal with the notion of communication channel: the number and direction of the channels that a particular MSM system supports. The other four dimensions are used to characterize the degree of built-in cognitive sophistication of the system: levels of abstraction, context, fusion/fission, and granularity of concurrency. We illustrate the discussion with examples of multimedia and multimodal systems, both MSM systems but with distinct degrees of built-in cognitive sophistication.