Reading Response Three

All of these readings seem to speak between tensions between certain trains of thought and understanding.

Accounting for System Behavior (Dourish):

“A clear tension exists between the traditional process-oriented view of interface design and the emerging improvisation-oriented view of interface activity, which arises particularly from sociological investigations of computer based work.”

How to make sociological insight “real” in computational design.

Context (Dourish):
HCI and
(1) The mutual relationship between physical form and activity (affects on patterns of Interaction)
(2) Computation as sensitive and responsive to its setting

The tension between the human sociological formations of context and how a computer might begin to simulate that, if it’s even possible.

What I found most useful in these readings was the break down of the different areas of theory in the social sciences.

Positivist Theories: Derived from the rational, empirical, scientific tradition, seek to reduce social phenomena to essences or simplified models to capture underlying patterns. Qualitative or mathematical in nature.

Critical Theories: The nature of human existence is a product of social and economic conditions which themselves reflect the historical distribution of power and control in society,

Phenomenological: Social facts are emergent properties of interactions, not pre-given or absolute but negotiated, contested and subject to continual processes of interpretation and reinterpretation. Turing away from the idea of a stable external world that is unproblematicaly recognized by all, and towards the idea that the world, as we perceive it, is essentially a consensus of interpretation.

This point of view can help us avoid issues like double bind theory and the many pathologies that we face personally and socially because it gives light to the many variables at play in how we build and understanding of the world around us, as well as how unfixed they are.

This comes into play more precisely in the idea of how we develop a notion of context. Context defined in this article by Schilit states:

“Context encompasses more than just the user’s location, because other things of interest are also mobile and changing. Context included lighting, noise level, network, connectivity, communication costs, communication bandwidth and even social situation.”

This situation presented here is two fold. We must first understand how we perceive and how our understanding of context is built before we can build technologies that also perceive in a useful way.

Use to Presence (Hallnas & Redstrom):

“When computer systems change from being tools for specific uses to everyday things present in our lives, we have to change focus from design for efficient use, to design for meaningful presence.”

What does it mean for a computer to disappear in a phenomenological sense?

This speaks again to the notion of how we perceive which brings the authors into a discussion of expressions and aesthetics. But once again we must first evaluate how we perceive tools that are already part of our living world. The argument stated here is that we take these things for granted and we don’t necessarily perceive them but rather except them as a part of our lives that will always be there, i.e. taking these object for granted.

All of this speaks to the ides of human complexity. We develop technology to enhance ourselves, to become super human, to move through the world with ease, but this transition forces us to better understand ourselves first. It is an interesting interplay between building from understanding. But what happens if our understanding is skewed or narrow sighted, then what are we building exactly and how is it affecting us?

Surveillance and Capture (Agre):

I really found this article enlightening in the sense that it completely focuses on technology’s effects on our sociology and the reverse. The idea that Surveillance in a social phenomena, that it is socially constructed and he also lends a moment in the article towards our critical understandings of these concepts often facilitated in literature such as Orwell.

This really makes me think about the role that the arts play in our development as far as better understanding ourselves as individuals and our role in the relationships and agreements that build social constructs. Arts provide a space to reflect on these issues and better understand them. What I’ve seen in the articles that we have read is that there is a disconnect between this understanding of ourselves in this way and the development of technology. It seems that the arts may be a way of bridging this gap.