the impact was suddenly phenomenal. As I recall, everybody talked about it, and at least 10 separate people shared the video link with me. Research strategies were reformulated, future scenarios rewritten, and whole new families of commercial products were developed and released in record time. Today it’s difficult to believe that the idea of multitouch smartphones was more or less unknown only five years ago.

At press time, Han’s 2005 paper has been downloaded almost 12,000 times from the ACM Digital Library, and it is cited 500 times, according to Google Scholar. These are very strong numbers for a five-year-old scientific paper. The TED2006 demo video, on the other hand, has been viewed nearly 350,000 times on YouTube alone (it is also available on ted.com and other servers).

What the multitouch case suggests is that video can play an important role in the communication of experiential knowledge within our field. Interaction techniques, the temporal dynamics of interaction, multimodal interfaces, and complex real-world use contexts are a few examples of research fields where text plus a few images does not do full justice to the knowledge constructed in the research process. This is, unsurprisingly, better understood in the communities of design research and artistic research, where there is a lively and ongoing discussion on different ways to incorporate the artifacts as parts of knowledge contributions.

But hang on: Didn’t I communicate (or try to communicate) the experience of the giant insect vehicle at Burning Man in my second paragraph, using text plus an image? No, not really. I verbal-

• Image 1. One of the numerous vehicles roaming the desert at the recent Burning Man festival. Still from a video by Mads Høbye.

 

• Image 2. Jeff Han
demonstrates his
multitouch screen at
TED2006. Still from
video freely
available at http://
www.ted.com/talks/
jeff_han_demos_his_
breakthrough_touch-
screen.html
interactions