Surreal Intersection…
Friday, March 30th, 2007Via Spinuzzi’s blog (Old media helps out new media):
How much more surreal could our lives become? Who needs friends when he’s got friendsters?technorati tags:web2.0, social, surrealism
Archive for March, 2007
Tracing Genres, Making Sense of How People “Make Do”
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007Some notes on Spinuzzi’s excellent book “Tracing Genres Through Organizations” (MIT Press, 1993), written on my desktop computer as the laptop ist kaputt.
Spinuzzi’s work is very close to what I did in my PhD albeit from a different perspective. He follows what I perceive to be a postmodern approach to interpreting work, that attempts to […]
Normative Technology Production
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007Suchman explores how different perspectives (e.g. feminist) can be incorporated in technology production:The discussions on which I propose to draw involve, among other things, a shift from a view of objective knowledge as a single, asituated, master perspective that bases its claims to objectivity in the closure of controversy, to multiple, located, partial perspectives that […]
Complexity Science in Sociotechnical Systems
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007The use of Complexity Science to serve the study of sociotechnical systems began in the 90s, mainly through the work of Pavard (2003) and the COSI Training Network. This line of work was pursued by colleague and friend Nikos Zarboutis, who presented this paper co-authored with Peter Wright in 2006. Because of my military tour […]
Perpetual Intermediates and Features: Who should we design for?
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007Khoi Vinh discusses the trade off between features and ease of use. Using Cooper et al (2003) curve on the distribution of experience of users (i.e. most users are perpetual intermediates), he posits the problems users face with products heavy on features:
On the other hand, products designed to map closely to the needs of experts […]
Professional Vision
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007This interesting paper by Goodwin is concerned in the ways professionals perceive and structure their environment.
…investigates the discursive practices used by members of a profession to shape events in the phenomenal environment they focus their attention upon, the domain of their professional scrutiny,into the objects of knowledge that become the insignia of their […]
Six Views of Embodied Cognition
Monday, March 19th, 2007This paper attempts to disentangle the messy notion of embodied cognition. Different authors tend to mean different things by the term, and the author analyzes it to six claims:
Cognition is situated Cognition is time pressured We off-load cognitive work onto the environment The environment is part of the cognitive system Cognition is for action Off-line cognition is body based
There is […]
Norman and Autonomous Agents
Sunday, March 18th, 2007In an interesting lecture, Don Norman extended his human action cycle model, by including a second “intelligent” machine action cycle. This gives rise to three new gaps:
Goal Gap: Goals of Machine and Person can be different Action Gap: The actions taken (or want to undertake) […]
Eyetracking surprises
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007An interesting article on an eyetracking study of news websites conducted by Jakob Nielsen, confirmed what usability gurus were preaching all along (tighter writing, more spaces, no unnecessary images). But there also is a big surprise:
Interestingly the researcher noted that men tend to focus on anatomy of animals too! So the usability guideline is: show […]
Positive Feedback
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007In a recent article in Wired, Momus is concerned with marketing segmentation and how it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy:
It’s been called by some social and cultural geographers ‘the automatic production of space’; the idea that in fact these descriptions reside within software that sorts places in terms of where new stores are, where new […]
