Design strategies for global products

Design Management Journal,  Fall 2001  by Cai, Yang

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Self-configuring robots are still in the prototype stage,2 but they certainly have potential in interface design for global products-imagine being able to reconfigure the shape of a car to fit into the congested parking spaces of Asia.

Interface design

The design for global products creates a new arena for software interface agents that facilitate the processing of complex information across global boundaries. These tasks might include translating languages, scheduling a meeting with colleagues overseas, checking network security, brokering information, or understanding aesthetic expressions from other cultures.

Interface agents can be envisioned as soft robots, or as personal software assistants with authority delegated by their users. They are computer programs that simulate a human relationship-that is, they do what another person might otherwise have done. For decades, researchers around the world have been trying to build intelligent agents that could be employed in the interface to delegate certain computer-based tasks. More recently, several computer manufacturers have adopted this idea to cast their vision of the interface toward the future. Apple, Microsoft, and IBM are developing such applications.

Language agents

Language is still a significant barrier for global products: Around 42 languages are frequently used online. For half a century, machine translation has attracted the attention of researchers around the world. In its early years, the focus was on general-purpose translation, and the results were far below expectations. Recently, with the development of the Internet, pattern recognition, and speech recognition, the focus has been shifted to translation tasks that are more application-oriented. Readworld.com,3 a Web-based translation agent, can translate any Web page from English to Chinese (figure 5), though the quality of the translation is not yet perfect. (For example, the phrase "Spring DMI Journal" on the DMI Web page translated to "Spiral-Bound DMI Journal" in Chinese.) However, it is helpful for people browsing the Web and enables them to grab highlights that may lead to further investigation.

Professor Alex Waibel, associate director of the Language Technologies Institute4 at Carnegie Mellon University, is one of the pioneers of machine translation. His project JANUS, a German Travel Agent, is a speech-to-speech system that translates from English or German into English, German, and Japanese in real time (figure 6). Speech-to-speech translation, however, is a technology that's still under development, because it involves three complex problems that haven't yet been completely solved-speech recognition, machine translation, and general knowledge about the world.

Security agents

The boom in electronic commerce has triggered public awareness of network security as consumers find that their privacy can be threatened by hackers. To make matters worse, hackers, like the rest of the Internet, know no national boundaries. For various applications, the security agent can protect confidentiality and integrity over the Internet by using the technologies of encryption and digital signatures. How to apply this scheme to resolve the problems of international network security is still a major challenge for the security community.