ABSTRACT
Information overload has increased the tension of two thirds of managers worldwideand is often complicated by illhealth, poor decision-making, difficulties in memorizing and remembering, and reduced attention span (Reuters 1996). A similar survey indicated that 61% believe information overload is present in their own workplace, and 80% believe the situation will get worse before it gets better (Reuters 1999). Rather than information overload, the benefits of information technology should be greater information assimilation, retention, and recall. Such expectations have been expressed by visionaries such as Engelbart (1963), who suggested that human-computer symbiosis should augment human intelligence and extend human cognitive abilities. Yet such intelligence augmentation has so far proved elusive for interactive system developers, likely in part because they have tended to solely leverage, and thereby overload, the human visual channel. New human-system interaction paradigms are needed that transform user interaction from a primarily visual experience to one that fully leverages human capacity for multimodal interaction.
