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 […]
David Brooks of the NY Times writes about our externalized cognitive functions. In the beginning it was only the calculator, now it is everything, even things we couldn’t think that would be outsourced:
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.
I click on its recommendations, […]
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
Wired has a nice article about the locus of memory moving from “wetware” to hardware. The fact that it simply is more convenient to digitally store, or altogether bypass low-level pieces of information (like telephone numbers).
Sure, I’m a veritable genius when I’m on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I’m not? Does an […]
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 […]
Viruses are not always digital. AlwaysBeta (via 43 Folders) presents the case of a broken adapter that breaks any connector that is connected to it. An intereseting piece of adaptation in the most static of all worlds: the material.
What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via […]
Futurologist Paul Saffo sings the praises of RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) calculators. RPN is a notation that never caught on, as we got stuck in a local optimum: similarity with pen and paper problem solving. The problem is that when transfered to the digital world, the “infix” (i.e. traditional) notation is very inefficient. It’s like […]
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). […]
The apparent easiness by which people divulge their personal information on the web is causing some serious problems aside from job hunting. According to Techcrunch the CEO of web 2.0 company Plazes was put into a very awkward position by his own product, when he made up an excuse that wasn’t backed up by his […]
Joel on Software describes a new elevator UI which efficiently clusters people going to nearby floors with a small catch: you have to follow the predetermined interaction path -i.e.
SELECT floor GOTO indicated elevator WAIT elevator ENTER elevator […]
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