Notes on papers, books and blogs about Cognitive Ergonomics, HCI, philosophy of design and everything interesting
Dreaming in Code chronicles the troubled history of a software project (an innovative PIM application). It’s a very interesting book, both as an inside look of the development process, and as a great piece of journalistic writing. The team faced many problems and even now 4 years after the initial release, the 0.7alpha4 version is […]
Another paper submitted for the alt.chi 2007 conference. This comes from PARC and is a study of the del.icio.us website using metrics based on entropy.
Their results are interesting:
The efficiency of social tagging is decreasing. The efficiency of social navigation affored by the tagging system is decreasing Users overlap in places they visit more strongly than before
These results […]
According to techdirt an English village installed “ignore your sat nav” signs, after truck drivers -blindly following their units- found themselves stuck in a 2m-wide road.
Some commendators place the blame entirely on the drivers, but it is not so simple: a voice instructs you to turn left, then to the right, then KABOOM!! When using […]
In the insightful pasta and vinegar blog is an interesting discussion about the role of theory in interaction design based on the relevant discussion in a book by Nardi & Kaptelinin.
The problem is the one between reductionist, analytical approaches to practice and theory heavy, ethnographic approaches. The first translate easier to design and can be […]
A Strategy and Experiments in Mapping Sociospatial Practices
Mounajjed N, Peng C, Walker S
This paper in the relatively new journal Human Technology is about the use of ethnographic methods by artists. Ethnography is used as a tool for a growing number of disciplines, something that is essential for its prosperity (Marcus, 2003 cited in this paper). On the other hand it notes the increasing use […]
Gender and Design Cultures in Information and Communication Technologies (Oudshoorn et al., 2004)
 This paper describes the design of two “digital cities” in the mid-nineties, one in the public and one in the private sector. The focus is on how the designers’ conception of the user is shaped by their own identity. Both projects aimed at […]
I recently came across Jan Robert Leegte’s installations, and I’m hooked! There’s something about this materialization of the digital that fascinates, and maybe tells us something abou the nature of affordance (maybe not in the Gibsonian sense, but closer to Norman). What else to do but manipulate the scrollbars? Doesn’t the “selections” installation give a […]
This book by MIT Media Lab genious John Maeda is about simplicitly. On first glance, it’s uncontroversial: everything is better when it’s simple, right?
It appears that things are more complicated-even worse: complex-than that. The central problem is stated in the first law:
How simple can you make it? vs How complex does it have to be? I […]
Paper reviewed for the alt.chi 2007 conference An introspective HCI paper dealing with the notion of “failed” research. Successes are reported, failures swept under the rug. The paper discusses the limitations of quantitive approaches, especially in providing novel explanations, because of their strict structuring. Qualitive approaches are by definition more open-ended, but the initial expectations can […]
What I found interesting in this paper is Verillon’s exposition of the notion of instrument and its relation to the artefact.
The first interesting distinction is that between Piaget’s “epistemic subjectâ€, which is concerned with the generation of new knowledge and the “pragmatic subjectâ€, which is concerned with altering the world. In essence this distinction by […]
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