Hi everyone,

We’re excited to invite you to the September session of the Dynamic Abstractions Reading Group!

🔍 Topic

Intelligent Interfaces are Boundary Objects
Boundary objects are knowledge representations that admit multiple readings. Boundary objects are abstractions, in other words, which mediate between two or more disciplinary languages and their attendant sense-making strategies. I'll recount my research collaboration at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab that relied on this theory to make sense of Marstime operations scheduling. We'll cover rigorous qualitative methods such as content analysis and grounded theory which can help us evaluate boundary objects in participatory design studies.

🎙 Speaker: Jasmine Otto
🗓 Date: Friday, September 19, 2025
⏰ Time: 12 pm EST / 9 am PST
📍 Zoom Link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86025285129
📎 Add to Calendar
- Google Calendar
- iCal (see attached)

👩‍💻 Speaker Bio
Jasmine is a visualization researcher. She was most recently a visualization developer at JPL. She develops intelligent tools used by close-knit groups of domain experts, and has published at selective venues including IEEE VIS and AAAI AIIDE. She holds a PhD in Computational Media from the Design Reasoning Lab at UC Santa Cruz, an MS from the University of Illinois at Chicago in applied mathematics.

📖 Reading
Maps, schedules, presentations, and repositories are all examples of boundary objects. The full typology is explained in Star 1989, a 16p. chapter in Distributed Artificial Intelligence (Vol 2.). If you've built an interface used by more than one type of stakeholder, then you've already made a boundary object. If you also got frustrated by different stakeholders using different terms and definitions, then Ribes et al. 2019 (listed below) is a useful piece. Finally, Jasmine will cover her VIS 2024 workshop paper (listed below) in the talk, if anyone wants to read ahead of the session.

• Star, S. L. (1989). The structure of ill-structured solutions: Boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. In Distributed Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 2).

• Ribes, D., et al. (2019). The logic of domains.

• Otto, J., & Davidoff, S. (2024). Visualization Artifacts are Boundary Objects. (VIS 2024 workshop paper)

This session will be a great opportunity to reflect on how we design intelligent interfaces.

We hope you’ll join us!

Best regards,
Sangho on behalf of the Dynamic Abstractions Team