Summary
This chapter discusses John Gould's research into speech recognition at IBM. His research and experiments attempted to determine whether speech recognition would be desirable and useful to users, whether it would be effective and be easy to learn. But since the technology at the time was still developing, they couldn't be evaluated properly. So in one of his first experiments, Gould used a "Wizard of Oz" technique, where a subject would dictate into a microphone in front of a monitor, and a typist in another room would type the text on the monitor to simulate speech recognition for evaluation.
Discussion
I think it was creative to use an actually human typist to simulate the speech recognition in progress. Personally, I find speech recognition to be an inherently fascinating subject, though I find its applications are somewhat niche; I typically prefer typing to speaking or dictating, unless my hands are occupied, like while driving.
Chapter 25
Summary
The author, Steve Harrison, talks about a video titled Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in 1980. This video defined video-mediated communication for Harrison, and he believes it has implications for future research in the field. In this video, for three 3 days and evenings, the sidewalks in Lincoln Center in New York and Century City in Los Angeles were projected on video and audio for the other city to see and interact with each other. This experiment was inspired and expanded upon how community cafes were linked together by fax and chat.
Discussion
I thought this was an interesting and fun experiment. I appreciate the interest and curiosity that it sparked for the passersby who gathered around and how they interacted with each other. For some reason, this reminded me of flash mobs.
Chapter 26
Summary
This chapter focuses on information or cognitive clutter. An example of this phenomenon is given where two parallel lines is actually three objects: the two lines and the whitespace between them. One of the author's personal experiences of how this occurs involves the open and close buttons in an elevator; presented with two buttons and the empty space between them can cause brief confusion from having to decode the meanings of both. Eliminating or mitigating this clutter may involve redesigning the two choices to very clearly differentiate them, or perhaps choice be removed entirely by presenting only one option, at the cost of some functionality.
Discussion
I feel this is one of the most important aspects in HCI and design in general. As cognitive and visual clutter are minimized, usability is greatly increased, so studying this is very beneficial.
Chapter 27
Chapter 27
Summary
This chapter discusses typography as a design aspect. A system called the Typographic System explored time and interactivity (motion) as design variables in typographic design. In this system, a designer could present text in three-dimensional space in up to three various design attributes (color, size, style, etc.). The reader could navigate through this space. Later, a method of textual presentation called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) was presented, where one word is displayed at a time in the same position on screen. Perceptually, this seemed very effective compared to static text, since eye movements are not necessary to read the text.
Discussion
One of my best friends is obsessed with typography, so I found this chapter interesting to read. This was my first time to read about RSVP as a presentation method, and I would like to see more examples of it to evaluate. I also found the discussion on kinetic typography interesting, as I have seen it used before, like in a music video. In addition, in RSVP, I thought the practice of using text styles (bolding, italics), as well as the speed and tempo of the changing text could convey emotion or even pitch and loudness of the "spoken" text.
Chapter 28
Summary
A paper in 1994 titled "The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker" by A. Kidd made two claims about computers: 1) they are mainly used for (and are good at) passive storage of information; but this information is not particularly useful, and 2) they are not very good at the important process of making sense of the information we encounter. The author, Steve Whittaker, discusses these claims and how they are relevant today. There is a distinction between sense making, the management of new information, and task management, the management and organization of the tasks associated with new information. Although new tools are available to address these concerns, there needs to be more and more support for sense making, as information becomes more and more available.
Discussion
The claim that there is little value to passively stored information because that information is only useful once it has informed is an interesting perspective. While this is technically and fundamentally true, I think that computers today make it far easier for users to access and process that information, as the author says, so the claim is somewhat redundant or moot. I found this chapter comparatively less interesting, though I liked the quotation, "once understood and integrated into the user's mental structures, it [the passively stored information] has little value and is seldom accessed."
Chapter 34
Summary
Ethnohistorians, who had to translate requests, along with the language culture, history associated with them, from Native Americans to make sense for the U.S. government, were faced with issues of ethics, politics and epistemology. This is related to how HCI workers or researchers must translate for users for development teams to understand. A. Krupat wrote three major principles meant to allow people in positions similar to those of ethnohistorians to understand cultures that are not like theirs; to question their own power and the potentially skewed perspective associated with that power; and to learn how to effectively communicate to others despite these differences in power.
Discussion
Comparing the situation for the ethnohistorians to HCI workers or researchers was genius; the fact that the Native Americans were at the mercy of the U.S. government was similar to how users may have less power than developers or HCI workers is a novel comparison.
No comments:
Post a Comment