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 […]
The age of the Google Man is upon us! Great work by Michael Wesch (of The Machine is Us/ing Us fame), shows how search (and search literacy) has altered the landscape and shattered hierarchies.
http://www.youtube.com/?v=-4CV05HyAbMInformation R/evolutionTags: search, information, netculture, cyberpunk, anthropology, ethnography
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 paper “Hidden aspects of the Anaesthesia Chart” has been accepted by the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (to appear soon).
The paper is concerned with our research in the domain of anaesthesiology and the anaesthesia chart in particular. The most important insight gained was the fact that constraints outside the worksystem that have nothing […]
This book by Caitlin Zaloom is an anthropological study of markets and traders’ practice, that also investigates the effects of digitization has had on the field. It is a very interesting and deep study of a field that seems to have reached a local optimum. It shows how the physical configuration of space hindered the development […]
In an interesting article in boxes and arrows, Michael Beavers gives tips on stakeholder interviews. What I found extremely interesting is his representation : very information rich and useful for any organizational investigation.
This 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 […]
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 […]
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