Chapter 1
Summary
Buxton's paper,
My Vision Isn't My Vision,
is a reflection on the inspiration for a 1971 paper, entitled
Man-Machine Interactions in Creative Applications.
Buxton recalls his time at the National Research Council of Canada working with a machine that was built to study human-computer interaction through the creation of music. He states that the 1971 paper did not accurately depict the true nature of the project and the influence he felt it had on the field of HCI.
Discussion
Buxton did an incredible job of expressing what the editors described as
HCI before it was called HCI.
I still find it interesting to see how simple and yet how sublime these most influential of ideas can be. I wonder when it'll be
my turn to come up with
the next big thing.
Chapter 4
Summary
In his paper,
Drawing on SketchPad: Reflections on Computer Science and HCI,
Konstan attributes some of the core knowledge and assumptions about computing today to Sutherland's work in 1963, covered by his paper,
Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System.
Konstan describes how Sutherland brought into existence: utilizing a pen-like object to point; rendering lines, circles, and text; modelling graphical constraints; and predecessors to object-oriented programming and data structures. Konstan cites all of these examples as reasons why HCI should be included in any good computer science curriculum.
Discussion
Again, I'm kind of amazind how a simple study on the interaction between humans and computers had brought about so many changes that, as Konstan points out, were way ahead of their time and are still in use today.
Chapter 5
Summary
Ju's paper,
The Mouse, the Demo, and the Big Idea
, is an incremental history of the development of HCI, both in her mind, and for the world at large. She ascribes to the computer mouse the roles of purely a hardware input device, a means for expressing concepts and ideas to people in the realm of computing, and a transcendent idea within computing in and of itself. In doing so she points out the nature of HCI as a multidisciplinary field.
Discussion
I have often felt as Ju does, that some ideas are bigger than themselves, that they imply much more the what we infer from our initial perception. In a strange way, she gives us a way to look at our arbitrary ideas in a somewhat concrete form in order to spur their inception into the realm of computing and HCI.
Chapter 18
Summary
In his paper,
Observing Collaboration: Group-Centered Design,
Greenberg relates how Tang's 1989 paper, entitled
Listing, Drawing, and Gesturing in Design: A Study of the Use of Shared Workspaces by Design Teams,
which documented actual people working on shared workspaces such as whiteboards and tabletops, influenced his design of a groupware system. He makes parallels between the needs of the customer as observed by Tang with exact product specifications that he would need to create.
Discussion
I think that this is an ingenious idea from a software developer's standpoint and an essential concept of HCI, though something of a cursory step in the approach to any other design process. This paper shows that we need not look further than the process we are trying to emulate when trying to conceptualize how we should design software or interfaces. I haven't spent any time in industry, but it would seem that this might be a step that is frequently overlooked or viewed as unnecessary.
Chapter 20
Summary
Fitzpatrick extends the work of Greenberg and Tang (above) in her paper,
Taking Articulation Work Seriously,
by referencing a 1992 paper by Schmidt and Bannon,
Taking CSCW Seriously: Supporting Articulation Work.
She takes a broader look at the field of CSCW by looking at the mechanisms by which people interact, called articulation, and the implications that they have on how people actually interact with systems. It is similar to Tang's paper in that the focus is not on the system but on how people use it.
Discussion
This concept is as interesting to me as the Tang paper. I haven't really thought about observing people using a system as an important aspect of design, though it has clearly shown itself to be so over many papers, and not just recent ones. My design process focuses on what my capabilities are to create, not what the users' capabilities are.
Chapter 23
Summary
Smith writes
Video, Toys, and Beyond Being There
as a response to Hollan and Stornetta's 1992 paper,
Beyond Being There,
which addresses the state of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in comparison with actual face-to-face (F2F) interaction. Smith describes how CMC aided his sick mother to spend time with her granddaughter even in light of their impassable physical distance, and how it can foster academic exploration via metaconversation. He also talks about some of the emotional attachments that had developed between his mother and daughter not to the technology itself, but to the interactions that were based on the technology.
Discussion
This paper was brutal. It's amazing to see how far we've come as far as CMC goes, and I'm glad that he was able to provide some small solace to his mother in her darkest days, but I'm worried about the day when it's not just the interactions with the technology the seem to "aid" us in having an emotional response, but the technology itself. Scary.
Chapter 24
Summary
Schmandt addresses the concept of
evaluating a device before it exists
in his paper,
A Simulated Listening Typewriter: John Gould Plays Wizard of Oz.
He draws on the experience of Gould, Conti, and Hovanyecz, who published
Composing Letters with a Simulated Listening Typewriter
in 1983. The nature of Gould's experiment was to evaluate a user's interaction with a speech recognition system across two types of dictation, continuous and discreet, and two types of composing, draft and first-time-final. Since the speech recognition systems were not capable of accurately recognizing speech at the time, Gould tested these input methods for the machines by having a human type what the user spoke, and having a computer remove the typed words that were not in a given dictionary. Thus his studies of interaction with speech recognition systems influenced their ongoing design.
Discussion
Schmandt says the the legacy of the paper is that Gould's Wizard-of-Oz approach
...is now a well-established and accepted method of evaluating emerging technology...
, and I agree with him. Rather than pour a large sum of money into developing a system and
then testing its reception with its intended users, one can find the most effective interaction avenues and developed a system that will more assuredly be well received. Genius.
Chapter 25
Summary
Harrison writes
Seeing the Hole in Space,
remembering his collaboration with two artists, Galloway and Rabinowitz, after they presented him with their 1980 video work of art,
Hole in Space.
These performance artists had created an interactive art experience that spanned the country by projecting the scene on the sidewalks at Lincoln Center in New York and Century City in Los Angeles to storefront windows at either site. People at both locations were very engaged by their ability to interact with complete strangers across thousands of physical miles. This natural interaction was of great interest to Harrison at Xerox PARC, because they were utilizing a much more limited concept in this same vein to connect their offices between Palo Alto, California and Portland, Oregon. Xerox PARC understood the importance of the artists' idea, but it didn't take hold with the general public until much later, and in a much different way.
Discussion
It was interesting to look at the same project from two different standpoints that may not be as different as Harrison might have let on in has paper: that of the artist, and that of the architect. I feel that, unfortunately, the only thing that made this concept interesting to the general public initially was its novelty, not the implications of effectively eliminating physical distance as it applies to social interaction. Sure, that's what was going on, but the participants in the original art probably forgot it as soon as they walked off. It is unfortunate that this revolutionary idea has manifested in the "commodified results" that Harrison describes at the end of the article.
Chapter 26
Summary
In his paper,
Edward Tufte's 1 + 1 = 3,
Jenson comments on the similarities between the
visual clutter
that Tufte describes in his 1990 paper,
Envisioning Information,
and the
cognitive clutter
that he as an interaction designer encounters. He initially states that removing visual clutter from a design will reduce cognitive clutter as well; he offers some design changes that simplify the intent of elevator buttons, for example. He then goes a step further and states that by removing unnecessary functionality from a design, the cognitive clutter almost disappears. His suggestions to remove functionality have been met with harsh opposition by those who view functionality as the greatest priority over other considerations that they have not made, namely, intelligent design.
Discussion
I am surprised that such a logically presented and practically efficient proposal was met with such offense by the those who create these unusable designs. I think that Jenson's best idea from his elevator example was to remove the door close button to reduce clutter and shorten door close times to compensate for the removal of that oh-so-necessary feature. It's also interesting to think about all of the other design decisions one might make that might bring about the
Chapter 27
Summary
Forlizzi reviews the inception of kinetic typography in her paper,
Typographic Space: A Fusion of Design and Technology,
drawing from the work of Small, Ishizaki, and Cooper, entitled,
Typographic Space.
Cooper's paper identifies typography as an important design element and presented a three-dimensional application called Typographic Space, which ultimately led to her work in kinetic typography. Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) presented single text elements to the viewer sequentially, such that it could be read more rapidly without the necessity for scanning eye movements. Many various emotions and physical characteristics of language can be conveyed through manipulating the visual typographic elements.
Discussion
It's very interesting to me that various physical aspects of a language can be conveyed typographically by manipulating the size, shape, movements, screen position, etc., of the text. It's not really an everyday concept, and some of the implications are interesting, but there must be some reason that this idea never really took hold in mainstream media. On the surface I imagine that it is much more cost effective to continue to utilize such primitive tools as books and static text rather than trying to deploy kinetically capable devices in a widespread fashion.
Chapter 28
Summary
Whittaker writes
Making Sense of Sense Making
in response to Kidd's 1994 paper,
The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker,
in which Kidd addresses the issue of ineffective interaction with computer systems. Kidd states that computers see widespread use as a
memory prosthesis
that store copious amounts of information in ways that are not useful to humans, and that they are not very good at helping us make sense of all the information that is stored on them. Kidd advocates a new approach to information organization, citing how humans organize paper information into piles for easy access, and to serve as reminders of what work is receiving some form of active attention. She also cites the deficiencies of concepts like desktop search in their endeavors to try to help humans organize information in perceptually and spatials relevant ways.
Discussion
This paper is much more subtle than most of the rest, in that it focuses on an issue that seems so simple and yet proves quite perplexing. I really identify with the people to whom this paper is addressed: I have over a terabyte of information stored on my desktop, and a large portion of it is useful and organized in a generally accesible fashion, but I know that there is a sizable portion of objects within that terabyte that are small enough not to take up too much memory but numerous and distributed enough to be supremely annoying when I think about them. I would have liked to see some suggestions from the authors as to what types of spatial and perceptual models might be utilized to streamline the information storage and access process.
Chapter 34
Summary
Muller presents a very interesting article with
Revisiting and Ethnocritical Approach to HCI: Verbal Privelege and Translation.
He draws his influence from Krupat's 1992 paper, entitled
Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature,
in which Krupat details the situation surrounding claims made by Native Americans to sovereign nation status. Muller says that there are surprisingly many parallels between the ethnohistorians that worked with Native Americans and the HCI designers that work with users today. He covers the importance of understanding between two disparate groups of people for the good of both.
Discussion
This is an interesting and very valid perspective from Muller. The situation is fundamentally different but the implications are the same. Besides looking at how users interact with the physical models that we are trying to emulate with technology, it is important to maintain a good relationship with the users to ensure
our continued success as designers of
usable products.
Chapter __
Summary
Discussion
