Human Computer Interaction

by: Binding Designs, LLC

Summary of the most important factors in HCI:

1. Our jobs as interaction designers relates to the "substitution myth" by the fact that we are designing the interactive systems that are getting "substituted" for people.

2. We must summarize the software's role and the human's role in their interaction. We must think of the changes that software systems or people will make to eachother. What responsibilities are people better at and what responsibilities are computers better at and what are the consequences. The process of predicting is a dynamic one. Two dynamic systems interacting with each other could be difficult to manage perfectly.

3. All of the technology overloaded people in the Desert Storm. It overwhelmed them with tasks to have to maange. This result does not surprise me because the soldiers had to think about all the factors they would in any historical war and they would have to think about all the new factors that are brought by technology. I think the original position papers would say that the technologies might not make the situation safer.

4. This is emphasizing the fact that when a new system is created, it will be used to the extreme and create a lot of activity in some field. There will be a reaction to the activity from a new system.

5. Individuals should meet this challenge by realizing that interactive systems are here to stay. There may be evolutionary changes to humans.

Designers will have control of people's actions while they use the systems. A hypothesis should be created and there should be an experiment to support the hypothesis. Or, data about people/organizations and their interactions with the interactive systems from the last 50 years could be studied and cosidered in the design for the interactive systems for the next 50 years.

"This means that designers also function as experimenters—the adaptive response of people and organizations to new systems tests the hypotheses about what would be useful embodied by those particular prototypes or products."

6. The authors suggest using prototype systems to model the activity using the newly created design.

7. A paradigm is a pattern of behavior or traits. A paradigm shift is a change in the pattern.

8. Monitoring the effects of creating new systems and incorporating them in to other systems is very important. Unleashing software systems to humans work and other environments to relieve work on humans is good, but it may have other not so good effects. For example, it would seem giving all these technologies to soldiers in combat would be good, but it might overwhelm the soldier in combat and cause death or injury. I guess the best way would be to quantitively add up all the consequences and measure the good vs. bad to figure out the best amount of technology to use for each situation. For the big picture,this should be measured for long and short term consequences and all should be factored in to the decision of what systems get deployed.