Another informative presentation last night by Dr. Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, sponsored by our local Puget Sound SIGCHI.

Personally, multitasking is a subject I find compelling, especially as it relates to running a small business. Somehow, I'm able to keep a lot of small details relating to projects I'm working on in my head and prioritize them. It often seems that other people on the team have a much harder time doing that. It's as if they can only keep one thing in their register stack at a time. Seems personality type has a lot to do with it, according to the Myers-Briggs intelligence types.

The question then becomes one of learning style, hard wiring in the brain, adaptability or some other yet-to-be discovered factor. How to design an interface that works for everyone?

Dr. Czerwinski presented some interesting videos of how her group's interface design templates worked for controlling the way multiple windows are displayed and manipulated.

But her answer to a question I posed about whether certain people are better at multitasking than others opened a whole new set of questions about how all this is changing the way we function in the world. She mentioned that that younger people in her study were comfortable writing code while listening to music and text message at the same time - with a possible slight drop in IQ.

My kids do the same. Well, maybe not the code writing. I'm amazed to walk into my son's room to find him reading a textbook, chatting online with classmates, checking his mySpace page, emailing, listening to music, watching TV and scratching the dog behind the ear - and still get good grades.

Is all this multitasking the cause of so much ADD/ADHD or a symptom? Then there's the research on how playing certain video games make for better laproscopic surgeons, as heard the other day on NPR.

The message is about how we can help people be in control - of their tasks, time, access and lives.

I've been impressed with the quality and scope of research going on at Microsoft, and appreciate the effort of folks like Dr. Czerwinski to create user interface systems that make life a little less frustrating for all of us information workers.