billpapa.org Reading (b)log

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 […]

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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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In 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 […]

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A recent post in pasta and vinegar, touches the subject of delegation, namely the fact that pretty much most solutions to a problem include delegating it to a human or machine. He cites a very interesting article by Latour which points out that in the act of delegation, we equip artefacts not only with the […]

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Technology was relatively neglected in classical Greece, because according to Ihde it was constrained by the Greeks’ aesthetics and also I think due to the platonic split between logos / techne, where the first was considered primordial over the latter. There was considerable technological development in hellenistic times because it was freed from such constraints […]

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