Monthly Archives: October 2007

Philosopy of Technology II, new name?

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Jeff pointed a few resources he quickly found on Amazon and scolded my hyperbole (of course there’s more than 7 people thinking about this).

I had a nice conversation with Heather (a PhD student in Social Informatics) about Philosophy and Technology. She commented how much she enjoyed Dourish‘s book “Where the Action Is.” If I didn’t already recommend it highly enough, let me say that anyone interested in this topic should read that book.

I am, as promised, composing a page on the blog that I will have links and reviews of resources on PhilTech, this is an open call for links and book recommendations, and book reviews.

Also I was thinking about getting a new domain name more descriptive of what I write about rather than my name.name. I’d love to hear what you think.

Hopefully commenting is working again!

HCI/Ludology

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So back to the topic of games, I’ve posted a few times on this… but games are important: we spend more money on online games than music.  Gaming is the #1 online activity.

HCI, or Human-Computer Interaction, studies technology with very different methodological and philosophical bent than Computer Science or it’s many sister sciences, that of phenomenology.  This embodied approach to computing and it’s concomitant commitment to human-centered design and usability is badly needed in most end-user systems.

Currently game designers and developers tend to be, like CS, in the positivist/reductionist way of thinking.  While this can be helpful we need more than that. It’s also pretty clear to me that many games fail, or are less successful, because of usability issues, and I’m not a huge fan of many of the game UIs out there.  For example: ,I’m an avid gamer, and I was bewildered by the WoW interface when I started playing.  I hate to think of a gamer n00bie trying to grapple with WoW.

The study of games, or Ludology (the fashionable Latinate title it goes by now) is in my mind a subset of HCI.  It seems clear to me that video games are a human-computer interaction.  Do I need to back that up anymore?  If so I need to do some more thinking on that issue.

Building on my post from yesterday I think that philosophy plays a significant role here, and of course both HCI and it’s subsets are still working on a coherent language of description and criticism.

At IU School of Informatics we have HCI/Design and HCI/Security (and HCI/Music?), so I think we ought to think about HCI/Ludology or to be a little more layperson friendly maybe HCI/Games.

There has been talk for years that this could be a possibility, and I want it to happen, we could have another first in the US.  First School of Informatics in the US, first PhD program in Ludology, or at least HCI/Ludology right?

Twitter Tracking & Transparency

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So Twitter gave us a new feature recently called tracking, which has yielded very interesting results.

I’m not a Jaiku user, but Kevin, who is, says tracking is like term based self-defined groups. I’ll take his word for it.

Inside your twitter app of choice type “track ____” and then anytime someone tweets with that word you will get a copy. Caveat: Only public tweets can be tracked, but the large majority of tweets are public. Conversely you can untrack things as well.

I’m interested in HCI, Informatics, usability, interaction design, and other things like that, so I’m tracking all those things. So far no hits on Informatics, but I get several on usability each day. Then I use the whois command on the person who tweeted (assuming it looked interesting) and then I check them out, their blog etc. Almost all the people I’ve found through this method are at least somewhat interesting to me, so I’ve then started following them.

What am I looking for? Researchers, bloggers, usability professionals, IX desginers, UX designers and HCI professionals (ok the last 4 could all be the same person with different titles, but you get the picture). People that I can learn from, see what’s happening in industry, who’s looking into what etc.

What is very wrong with tracking? There is no way, that I know of at least and please correct me if I’m wrong, to track what you are tracking. I want to know all the terms I’m tracking. There should be a command to do it like “track _list”. Please twitter add this feature! We need it.

Here’s the twist though: I start to get to know these people in more than just professional ways, and I’m sure that if they follow me, they will get to know more than just my thoughts on HCI. I, and most other twitterers, usually tweet about our personal lives too. Sure I have a group of friends from school who follow me and know me, my wife, my kids, but these other peopel do not. Do they find it weird? I don’t know. I personally don’t mind it. I follow Scoble (despite the amount of his updates, especialy serially) because he is pretty interesting, and arguably fairly influential. Well from following him, I know about his newborn baby girl Milan, how he ends up getting woken up at 3am and the like. Believe me I understand that with a 3-month-old baby in the house.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t know. I know I don’t mind my”met in real life” friends to know about all that, but what about others? I know that a friend of mine sad she doesn’t feel comfortable using twitter because of cyberstalkers. She wouldn’t want someone to know when she is leaving and coming (I often tweet this kind of info and I know some others do too). I talk about transparency a lot in many contexts, and usually it’s positive, security type people warn us against this. What will happen in the long run? Who knows.

What has your experience been with twitter tracking?

Dan Saffer does it again (or at least he did last year)

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That Dan Saffer–I like his work. I bought his book (or won it, I think, at a UPA event), and he had that review of Schoen, which was excellent. Now I see that he reviewed What Things Do by Peter-Paul Verbeek. Verbeek isn’t the easiest read, so having a nicely laid out and thorough review is a big plus in helping get through Erik’s Theory of HCI Design class.

Thanks Dan! You’re making my life easier & better, keep up the good work.