CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)
Fridays 12:30-1:50 · Gates B01 · Open to the public- 20 years of speakers
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Austin Henderson||Jed Harris
Pliant Research||Pliant Research Negotiating Ontologies: bridging the gaps May 16, 1997
The last fundamental advance in human-computer interaction -- the graphical user interface -- was made well over two decades ago; it's been commercially available for at least 15 years. Should we content ourselves with incremental improvements, or should we aim to do better than that? In this talk we claim that we should do much better: that current design practices lead to a serious mismatch between human activity -- very rich and flexible -- and computational activity -- very simplistic and rigid. People constantly negotiate and evolve their practices, while digital technology typically demands a fixed view of the world. This inevitably leads to "ontological gaps" between people and their machines. However, we claim that improved design practices can help to both bridge these gaps, and to make digital systems pliant enough so that people can mold them to fit their practices. |
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