Erik Pukinskis
HCID Theory Notes 2006-01-12
Information Technology
- human
- computer -> traditionally we think about personal computers
- interaction
- design
Professions are sometimes defined by the material in use. Carpenters are defined by the fact that they work with wood?
So then what is the material in HCI?
- information?
- well... all knowledge workers work with information. this doesn't narrow it down much.
- digital material. anything we can turn into bits.
- leads to huge "bit pool"
- HCI is the interaction between a person and the bit pool.
digital - things can't be two things at once, and things can't be almost something. They are either or.
- we've been digitizing things forever. Language, time, etc.
Question for Stolterman: Is the bit pool continuous or does it have islands?
Stolterman: I don't know... sometimes things are temporarily disconnected.
Me, in my head: Yeah, but sometimes things are never connected.
Question asked by Jim: Where do you draw the line between bits and non-bits?
Follow-up by someone: What about the data->knowledge pyramid?
Thought by me: If no interaction happens in absence of a semantic component, is it valuable to think about HCI in absence of the semantics of bits?
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The music industry didn't understand what the implications of their decision to go to CDs were.
My thoughts: it wasn't really their decision. If they had stayed with an analog medium, people still would have digitized them. Back in the age of 1x CD-ROM drives, they were indistinguishable from analog.
But he's right that we don't really understand what music is now.
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Interesting: story about the crane company that started making cranes, move to digital control systems, and then to harbor design. Suggestion that by digitizing as much as they could, they created a bit pool that could be used for other things. This is interesting because in my research I have been thinking of digital information as less flexible in a certain sense from physical material. But I have to keep in mind that theoretically, digital information is much more flexible. It's only the practice of software design that has made it seem so rigid.
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Originally, we didn't know what to use the phone for. The phone companies tried to use it for music.
Phones didn't have on/off switches.
Cell phones have changed the first question from "who is this" to "where are you"
Even when you have technology that can do stuff, and there is a use for it, that use might not occur unless the proper preconceptions are there.
Now add the surrounding context:
And this system is changing over time. This is TRANSFORMATION:
This situation is not stabilizing. Other technologies (engine, etc) stabilized over time. With Information Technology, however, things were more stable before, and they are less stable now.