Notes on papers, books and blogs about Cognitive Ergonomics, HCI, philosophy of design and everything interesting
Boxes and Arrows investigates the unintended uses of technology.
No matter how hard we try to create designs for certain uses, people will always utilize them in their own way. These unintended uses can be strange, even brilliant. In the end, you have to tip your hat to the ingenuity. Our Way: The Ingenuity of Unintended […]
I’ve uploaded the short (following Guy Kawasaki’s rule) presentation I gave in OpenCoffee IV. It was an interesting event and the presentations showed that something IS moving. Onic’s especially was inspiring even for me, a conservative non-entrepreneurial kind of person.
Thanks to the OpenCoffee Athens organizers for the great event!
Tags: opencoffee, greek, athens, conference, […]
Bruce Nussbaum writes about the apparent failure of the One Laptop per Child project. I think that the problem is not in the failure of the project per se, but the fact that so many people were blind to its inherent limitations.
The fact that the project was designed top-down without significant research into the usage […]
Intel has launched an ethnographic research into Russian dachas (country homes) in order to design new solutions for the Russian lifestyle (via Putting People First). Intel has understood that in order to be successful globalization must be localized. And not only that but the local can also bring global insights (i.e. real innovation).
technorati tags:ethnography, design, […]
The Bloomberg interface is a cognitive artefact which is a part of any stockbrocker’s life. Unfortunately, it’s interface is still stuck in the 80s:
Notice the stark contrast of the terminal’s ultramodern design with the clunky interface. The people at Portfolio noticed this too, and asked three design firms to explore the redesign of the Bloomberg interface (via UX magazine). […]
Another example of how constraints can shape design comes from the story of how the pentagon got its shape. The initial design was dictated by the shape of the tract, but it persisted even after it was decided to build the Pentagon on another location.
The original rationale for Bergstrom’s pentagonal design was gone. The […]
Jitterbug is a cell phone designed for the aged. There are too models: one with regular keypad and one without. The decision to limit the number of keys (simplicity) leads to some obvious usability problems (”press the No key repeatedly to see call history”). An interesting feature is that in the interest of subtraction, the designers […]
The history of the mouse wheel (via Coding Horror) is quite revealing concerning the opportunistic nature of the design process and shatters our illusions about the analysis>synthesis, theory>practice sequence.
The design and function of the mouse wheel (atfirst zooming, then scrolling), altered during the course of the project by observing users and forging Latourian coalitions with Microsoft divisions and Office Project teams.
Experimenting with new hardware features (wheel as a button) led to new software features (panning):
Around this time, we also made the wheel a button — you could press it as well as roll it. I remember David Jones, an […]
“You have to listen to the users” is the mantra we constantly hear and preach. But what if the users don’t know what they really want? Apart from the usual examples in workplaces, I recently came upon the case of “quicksaves”. Users demand a quicksave feature, but are not above abusing it, as this post shows:
Being […]
Suchman 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 […]
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