One thing that I noticed in the comments on my “designing for the collective” post was that I have been using Latour’s term “collective” in an extremely fuzzy way, where I change what I mean by it depending on the point I’m trying to make. This got me thinking as to whether this was an […]
Category: thoughts
Skinner as self-manager
I’m not sure how I came across it, but I saw a link to a paper on B.F. Skinner’s self-management skills. Skinner is well-known as the father of behaviorism and for developing operant conditioning, where people simply respond to the environment around them, thus leading his critics to accuse him of denying the existence of […]
Designing for the Collective
After reading Dav’s post about the Future Commons event, I was inspired to start thinking about what my own Theory of Everything would be. I’ve been following up on a bunch of different threads recently, and I was thinking about ways I might tie them all together. One issue I have right from the start […]
Where the Action Is, by Paul Dourish
Amazon link This book is an attempt by Dourish to develop underlying design principles for user interfaces that take into account the situated nature of interaction. I’ve been mentioning Dourish’s book recently (e.g. here, here, and here), because I really like a lot of the concepts that he mentions throughout his book. Dourish is explicitly […]
Solving hurricanes
As the second hurricane in a month is building up power over the overheated Gulf of Mexico, this is my projection as to what President Bush may be thinking: Well, the problem is that the water in the Gulf is too warm. Too warm. Too warm. Hrm. How do we cool water that is too […]
Interfaces as building blocks
Even though it’s late and I’m tired (I went to Dorkbot this evening, which was surprisingly disappointing), I’m just going to keep on trucking, because I sketched out another post while driving to work this morning, picking up on one of the threads I left hanging at the end of yesterday’s post, which is the […]
Conversational interfaces
I mentioned in my comment on yesterday’s post that “the user interface is a negotiation between the designer and user”, an idea which was definitely inspired by reading Dourish, who makes a similar point in saying that “Computation is a medium”. An interface can also be seen as a conversation, as Suchman describes. So the […]
More on feedback
So, although it will look like this is a response to Jofish’s comment, I had actually sketched out these ideas this morning before I read his comment, and just didn’t have time to write them up until this evening. One nuance that I glossed over in my discussion of feedback is one that Jofish rightly […]
The importance of feedback
As previously noted, I’m reading Paul Dourish’s book, Where the Action Is, in which he explores the branch of philosophy called phenomenology as a possible theoretical basis for embodied interaction. In particular, he mentions the work of Heidegger, about which I know nothing but a couple brief summaries I have read. But the concept which […]
Plans and Situated Actions, by Lucy Suchman
Amazon link Subtitled “The problem of human-machine communication”, this book debunked the prevailing philosophy in artificial intelligence at the time it was written in 1987, which was the belief that people worked by making a plan, and then executing it. Suchman examines this seemingly common-sensical idea and pointed out several of the flawed assumptions associated […]
