VocabControl

Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design is another classic I should almost certainly have read ages ago. It gives very straigthforward explanations of why language and cognition are complex social processes and how this presents huge challenges for designers and for the whole field of AI.

I also enjoyed the wonderful predictions that by 1988 we would have “thinking computers” and advertisements from 1982 offering “programs that understand you so that you don’t have to understand them”. Technology progresses, hype remains a constant!

It is also interesting that “not having to understand” was promoted, rather than “being easy to understand”, even back then. I’ve always thought of usability about being helpful and increasing clarity, rather than about encouraging people not to think at all.

A really interesting discussion about the differences between Chinese and American website design on Live From Beijing (via 290s). I particularly liked the comment “Let’s avoid the trap of explaining things with culture instead of explicit motivations.” It’s so hard to disentangle the multiple motivations and influences on user behaviour, but financial gain does seem to have a tendency to trump everything else!

Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age was well worth a read (the link is to a serious review). I found it a bit hard going to start with (but I’d always rather be challenged than patronised) probably because it began with a scholarly overview of concepts of culture. I enjoyed the interesting juxtapositions, such as the way the concept of text as artefact has changed since medieval times and how the idea of text as a performance is returning in the online arena. With chapters looking at the effect of the cyber revolution on notions of knowledge, authority, power, memory, and identity, it posed lots of challenging questions and highlighted some new ways of examining the cultural, political and psychological effects of the digital age.