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.
As many know I am completing a MS in Human-Computer Interaction Design (or HCI/D for short) in the department of Informatics in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. I am also applying for several PhD programs for next year. Even though I have my short list of places to apply to, I still dabble in my searches for other programs when I have a few extra minutes.
Kevin Makice has thoughtfully defined Informatics and I think I agree with him. In the Masters program we are immediately taught most of the standard methods in what most people call UX or IX design (User eXperience & Interaction), but it is sometimes called usability, user-centered design, or more properly as I learned yesterday, human-centered design. What brought me to IU was the unique nature of the program and that I have a passion for making technology better for everyone, and that it can make our society better if used properly.
That being said however, as early as November or December of last year (sometime after my midterm in 501) I started to consider the value of our program to be “critical thinking about technology”. I have started to really think about the philosophy of technology lately, not that I’ve had a choice with my selection of theoretically and philsophically dense readings (thank you Jeff Bardzell & Erik Stolterman).
Take all of that background and then mix in this argument: Technology in the developed world, and even to large extent in the developing world is almost everywhere and has a hand in almost every aspect of our lives. Each of us use technology to change the world around us, whether that be to make a phone call and save ourselves from walking over and talking to someone or making fun videos on YouTube, this is the case. Now here’s the premise that many of you may disagree with; When we design and use technology we are implicitly forwarding or promoting a philosophy about what the world should be like. If that is true then some scholars should be making that philosophy explicit, and this should be a consideration when designing new tools, platforms etc for use.
I take this argument to be true and therefore started looking at the philosophy of technology, and thought to myself “surely there is a PhD program somewhere that focuses on the philosophy of technology.” NOPE, not a one. There are several great books out there, and like I said it’s being talked about in some of my classes, usually obiliquely, but I just thought that maybe I would see some courses being taught on the grad level somewhere on this, or perhaps a minor, or track within a program on this. Very few. I managed to find a course that was taught last spring at UNT on the philosophy of technology.
There MUST be scholars out there thinking about these issues, if there is anyone who knows about them, please point them my way!
Coming soon a resource page of books, articles and people, please contribute to it by commenting or emailing me aaronh (at) gmail [dot] com.
This is a repost from a course blog from Interaction Culture.
I was struck quite forcibly by G. Smith when she said that the fifth imperative was to design for sociability. She follows this up by saying,
“When IT systems fail to support the social aspect of work and leisure, when they dehumanize, and de-civilize our relationship with each, they impoverish the rich social web in which we livea nd opperate, essential for both well-being and efficiency.”
When you think of the first few generations of “office” programs for PCs (this was not the case for mainframe/client structure though, but these didn’t have the much in the way of office software) they were designed for, almost without exception, just a single user. After the advent of the BBS and later the accessibility of the internet and email these programs continued, and still continue to treat the user as if she were the practically the only person in the universe. This is a great example of how this medium is still incredibly immature. When we work we usually work in groups, teams, and often nested within a hierarchy. Our applications are single user centric, and so we must email copies of things around, try to track changes, and control versions. It’s maddening, and I’m sure we’ve all run into these kinds of issues. Yes we have started to address this with some different add-ons, such as Sharepoint and other kinds of examples, but these are add-ons, and often expensive ones at that.
The problem is that we took another medium, the physical office with it’s typewriters, desktops (you know the horizontal surface, talk about a word that has been co-opted), and other 10-key calculators and directly translated it into the digital, completely forgetting that PEOPLE work in offices. People who work together. It is essentially a radio show being performed on TV, ridiculous, but a necessary first step.
Yes we must design with a connected, social world in mind. This CANNOT be an add-on, an extra service, something that you try to include initially that is buggy that you work out in the first few patches (if the user is lucky).
If we talk about efficiency in the work place like Smith does at the end of that quote, then we can think about how much time we waste on these kinds of issues because M$ Office, and not even Apples new iWork has really addressed these issues well. Google Docs is a small baby step in the right direction, but not exactly revolutionary.
Yes we are social animals, and we’ve ignored that for way too long.
A few caveats on this issue. I don’t blame the initial designers for the way this is too much. I mean most PCs were stand alone machines with cool tape drives, 5.25 inch disks and later if you were lucky you had a 2 MB hard drive. (I laughed so hard the day I threw out our old IBM clone with dual 5.25 drives and that 2MB hard drive that cost us something like $750 back in the day). The problem is we’re stuck in this kind of thinking 25 years later.
I’ve finally done it, I’ve gotten the HCI/Games group going. It seems that there is very little out there that talks about Usability, User Interface, Human-Centered Security, and the many social aspects of games out there, so we now have a google group for it.
http://groups.google.com/group/hcigames
I called it HCI/Games because of the program I’m in right now. It’s called HCI/Design, so we look at Human-Computer Interaction and focus on how design fits into that. Well this group is focusing on how games fit into HCI.
If there is anyone involved with Microsoft’s efforts on usability in games (which I have heard is significant and pretty darn good) who would like to contribute to our discussion I welcome it.