IS 272 Week 2 Class Notes

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Are there ideas that seem like they are important to me, and in what ways? Connect the work to your interests. That’s the core. Not just whether you like it or not, but how it works for you intellectually as part of your learning.

Interaction in the 1980s becomes a trope – people looked to psychology
Psychological viewpoint: particularly cognitive psychology instrumental in this field
One of the major core disciplinary influences on this field (Borgman, Bates) in early IR, ISeeking fundamentally based in a psychological worldview
Bulk of analysis is based on individuals
Collective behavior, yes. Collective mind, no.
Individuals are unitary, has their own erceptions and understandings so that when you study more than one individual, you add them up. Measuring behavior, features, reflexes, attitudes of individuals and then try to say sthg

Ppl start with a set of assumtions about how ppl behave and a set of tools
We also have social relationships and interactions but it’s a very diff vwpt than sociology or anthropology

Diff between soc and psych
Psych more abt the individual, soc is more about social realities/facts: the whole is more than the sum of the parts
Howard Gardner – how people know
Jerome Bruner

Using technology as a means of asserting control/maintain control of the system
The idea of cybernetics: control
Jim Beniger—the Control Revolution

Projection – Turkle
Classics of new media project, leah included this article
Projective devices

Human limitations/ergonomics
Bannon – human factors versus human actors
Augmentation workstation
Agre: badges it’s about how users perceive the device
Polycimi – can’t take an object an assume everyone will have the same perception
Human capabilities – incredibly intelligent machines crafted for morons – facilitate cognitive processes. Don’t assume that these processes are minimal.
Benefits of forgetting – workshop leah did and bannon spoke
Verticality – disciples of disciplines as vertical manifestations of reality – Agre misconceptions of “real” work environments

What’s the IS vertical reality? Classification schemes
Believable rxn

Problem-solving versus cognitive skill → tasks
• Task vs. relational
• In communication, in management

a lot of design seems to have extremes of users in mind. newbies or experts. not a lot of talk about what is happening in the middle
framing of the notion of the user—very instrumentalist view—subject-object relation

the one after second self
turkle
rohrschack as a trope
in what sense is a computer
reflects back to us what we are
Eliza program tried to emulate a psychotherapist
manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3
non-directed therapy
Wisenbaum wrote Computer Power and Human Reasno based on the Eliza experiments
Took an ethical approach – bad ethics. Yes we can build this, but should we?
People were getting something out of it, even though
Turing test – if a machine appears intelligent, we can regard it as so
Eliza and ethics is the other side of that
What computer science an do and also what should be done
He was seen as a crackpot in computer science
The reigning viewpoint was if we can build it, we will
Demonstrate the turing test idea
How are computers subjective – their role in society
Using technology as a political scapegoat
Hobbyists versus hackers
How do we perceive of these machines
Artificial intelligence – the term Agre rants abt this.
John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956,[3] defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."[4
even AI itself is a projected phrase
Jerome Bruner – educational psych one of the first gen of cognitive psychologists: Acts of Meaning book of essays
He talks abt how he resents the crosscolonization of cognitive, AI,
When the cognitive psychs themselves went the other way and went to thinking abt human mind in terms of information processing
The term memory out of psychology – has implied meaning based on the field from which it came
Here are these moments when we can see that this is happening
Term computer was originally a person who does sums
Turkle
Much more at ease in interpersonal interactions through the machines
Configuring their own machines, self-representations
Erving Goffman – sociologist anthropologist phenomenologist forefather of ethnography
Book: The presentation of self in everyday life
He looked at interactions on a very micro scale, using terms of drama
How ppl make conversation
Cultural, on the fly activity.
He also did field work in prisons, mental institutions _ notion of visibility

Card & Moran – really into mental models
Models of the user
Personas are user models
Rationalization
In the sense of assembply lines
When you say how do I produce X, the first thing I do is break it down into little parts and then build up from there w subroutines and subcomponents
Rationalization of work, of a task
Can each chunk be separately performed and then glommed together
GOMS
Goals, operators, methods, selection
Was very much in that user-turn moment shift toward being user-driven
Start with a model of the user, then design/build for that
If there’s anything that’s persisted in HCI in terms of design philosophy is is that you start with the individual
It’s mostly about cognition because they’re talking abt machines that they think mimic brains
GOMS presumes a particular view of who the user is and doesn’t take into acct culture, etc.

Liam Bannon
Human TKTK to Human Factors
Human factors research
Major consideration in those days when -- Grudin discusses

Early idea that we needed to minimize the human factors
Now thinking about ppl affirmatively, not as breakdowns in the system. That’s not a bug that’s a feature
Bannon’s argument is like grudin’s non-discretionary to discretionary
Humans aren’t a pile of disembodied functions that fail
Instead think abt ppl in a whole way
Where we ought to be looking in the design in the machine, not the person. We have to design for the people.

Our notions abt what ppl are like has proliferated, gotten complex and sophisticated, the machines are much more complex and capable thatn they were then

What are the conceptions of the end user that he is using?
That there is A user and the traditional notion of computing is one person, one machine now
He highlights how users fit into the social community or organization
How we go from 1980 to 1995
Yet the language is so similar
To be talking abt ppl who engage with the systems
Phil is criticizing that the language hasn’t changed
Two conceptions of the user: technical: extreme separation between user and designer
Managerial: more attn. to social, but can still be manipulative. Trying to persuade ppl to look at the technology in a diff way than to build around the user
Phil denies the autonomy of the user in the end
Managers and techies know what’s best for the user
Published this in 1995, on a theme he’d been writing abt for a long

Phil Agre
Hardest book, but maybe the most important
Critique of the idea of the user as the object we are reduced to the use of tools
Agre has ethical questions abt that

Next week:
Ethnographic viewpoint
Erving Goffman phenomenology – the actual experience of being in the world – now hace to think abt ppl as whole persons in certain contexts
This is where lucy suchman’s book was the linchpin
Winograd and flores
Orlakowski – one of the most cited pieces
Group process computing together
Dourish – context
2005 affect – really diff notion of people and computing in this set of readings