Humane Interfaces (eBook)

Questions of Method and Practice in Cognitive Technology

B. Gorayska, J.P. Marsh, J.L. Mey (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

1999 | 1. Auflage
391 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-0-08-055213-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Ever since the first successful International Cognitive Technology (CT) Conference in Hong Kong in August 1995, a growing concern about the dehumanising potential of machines, and the machining potential of the human mind, has pervaded the organisers' thinking. When setting up the agenda for the Second International CT Conference in Aizu, Japan, in August of 1997, they were aware that a number of new approaches had seen the light, but that the need to integrate them within a human framework had become more urgent than ever, due to the accelerating pace of technological and commercialised developments in the computer related fields of industry and research

What the present book does is re-emphasize the importance of the 'human factor' - not as something that we should 'also' take into account, when doing technology, but as the primary driving force and supreme aim of our technological endeavours. Machining the human should not happen, but humanising the machine should. La Humacha should replace the Hemachine in our thinking about these matters.

Inhalt

Cover 1
CONTENTS 12
INTRODUCTION 16
Methods and Practice in Cognitive Technology: A question of questions 16
PART 1: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 24
MIND CHANGE OR CHANGED MINDS? 26
Commentary and chapter summaries 26
Chapter 1. Investigations in Cognitive Technology: Questioning perspective 32
Chapter 2. Can We Change Our Minds? The Impact of Computer Technology on Human Cognition 60
Chapter 3. Computers and Psychosis 86
Chapter 4. The Natural and the Artificial in Language and Technology 96
Chapter 5. Understanding Users: The knowledge-level of analysis 104
AUGMENTATION, MEDIATION, INTEGRATION? 120
Commentary and chapter summaries 120
Chapter 6. The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive embodiment in virtual environments 128
Chapter 7. Cognitive Tools Reconsidered: From augnientation to mediation 160
Chapter 8. The Meeting Place of Cognition and Technology 176
Chapter 9. Honesty of Affordance 194
Chapter 10. The Design of Cognitive Tools 206
Chapter 11. Cyberspace Bionics 218
Chapter 12. Cognitive Space 234
PART 2: APPLIED METHODS 244
HOW DO WE CONVERT PRINCIPLES INTO VALID AND VALIDATED APPLIED METHODS? 246
Commentary and chapter summaries 246
Chapter 13. On Why the Blind Leading the Blind is a Good Idea 250
Chapter 14. Between the Idea and the Reality: The case for qualitative Research in education 266
Chapter 15. Computer Environments Designed to Promote Cognitive Change through the Development of Well Reasoned Recommendations 284
Chapter 16. Evolution of Man's Needs and Technological Progression: Pragmatic foundations for a relational coupling 308
Chapter 17. Successful Technology Must Enable People to Utilise Existing Cognitive Skills 322
Chapter 18. Palmtop Reminding Devices: Capabilites and limitations 342
Chapter 19. A User Designed Contextualisation Method for an Argumentation Support Tool 360
Chapter 20. Cognition Oriented Software Verification 370
INDEX 402

Textauszug

Methods And Practice In Cognitive Technology: A question of questions

BarbaraGorayska    City University of Hong Kong

JonathonMarsh    The University of Hong Kong

Jacob L. Mey    Odense University

The search for some characteristic features of a humane interface in human/technology interaction was the central theme of the first collection of contributions to the newly emerging scholarly discipline of Cognitive Technology (henceforth referred to as CT) (Gorayska and Mey, 1996a). That first volume was primarily intended as an initial investigation into possible ways of exploring various aspects of human cognition via the technologies the mind produces. This exploration took as its point of departure the question: ‘What happens when humans produce new technologies?’ From that seemingly simple question two interdependent (and somewhat more complicated) perspectives were derived from which the study of such production could be approached:

HOW and WHY constructs that have their origins in human mental life are embodied in physical environments when people fabricate their habitat, even to the point of those constructs becoming that very habitat;

and

HOW and WHY these fabricated habitats affect, and feed back into, human mental activity and development.

That volume called for reflection on what constitutes a tool, drawing strong parallels between CT and environmentalism. Both were seen as trends originating in the need to understand how we manipulate our natural habitat by means of the tools we have created. This habitat consists, on the one hand, of the cognitive environment, which generates thought and determines action, and on the other, of the physical environment in which thought and action are realised. Both trends endeavour to protect the human habitat from the unwanted or uncontrolled impact of technology, and are ultimately concerned with the ethics and aesthetics of tool design and tool use.

CLARIFICATION OF THE PROPER INTERESTS OF CT

Collaborative intellectual effort to date has been directed primarily at properly defining CT as a field of inquiry. By way of summary, the following points may help to clarify the interests of CT outlined thus far:

• CT represents a departure from the conventional approaches practised within HCI.

• CT proposes to study the processes related to cognitive wholeness. It aims to humanely develop the cognitive eco-systems generated from the interaction between mind and machine. It is mainly concerned with the adaptation of mind which occurs as a consequence of that interaction. Hence, CT abandons the concept of a ‘man-machine interface’ and, instead, promotes the design of humane tools especially with respect to our interaction with computer technology.

• While the HCI approach is characterised by a trend towards anthropomorphizing machine outputs to promote “naturalness” in human-machine exchanges, CT is conversely interested in the fundamental issue of what happens to humans when they augment themselves, either physically or cognitively, by technologically amplifying their natural capabilities.

• It is assumed that an understanding of the processes involved should serve to inform design decisions and reduce from the outset any undesirable side-effects of technological development on human adaptation.

• CT is a process: an approach to design, not a product of such a design. Tools can be designed according to CT principles; they are not in themselves instances of CT.

It is the point of CT to evaluate the impact of proposed technological solutions to problems on the mindset of the humans who apply them, and accordingly take a humane approach to devising the necessary tools which incorporate these solutions. Consequently, the focus is on human inputs to technologically mediated interaction and not on the technological outputs related to that interaction.

TOWARDS A METHOD OF INQUIRY

One of the most significant hypotheses in CT, is the conjecture that human cognition can be “technologised”, that is to say, it can dialectically adapt itself, both unconsciously and by conscious induction, to the relatively simplistic but strongly deterministic dynamism of the technological environments (Gorayska and Marsh, 1996, Gorayska and Mey, 1996b). This hypothesis has given rise to two distinct directions for further CT investigations: cognitive prosthetics, on the one hand, and cognitive regression, on the other1.

Cognitive prosthetics encompasses studies of the positive impacts of tool use on human cognition. It focusses on how and why technology is able to aid people in performing tasks which normally would have fallen outside their cognitive resources. Here belong such areas of investigation as: overcoming cognitive impairment, effective interactive learning, technology as a cognitive microscope, and technology as an instrument for the scientific study of the mind.

Cognitive regression, by contrast, is concerned with the negative impacts of technological environments on humans, especially with respect to their cognitive capabilities. It is primarily concerned with what happens to people as a consequence of extensive exposure to a wide variety of mental prosthetic devices. In particular, we believe that greater effort needs to go into properly understanding the cognitive effects of large scale, widely significant socio-technological phenomena. These include issues such as 1) the global displacement and local isolation of individuals interacting and communicating electronically, 2) information overload, and 3) the inability amongst technology users to relate effectively to the complex but weakly deterministic dynamisms of natural environments as a result of prolonged interaction with and through mechanised communication tools.

While current practices within HCI have benefited from the steadily evolving methodologies for designing user friendly applications, CT, with its new emphasis on technological cognition as a major source of information for bringing humane practices to bear on such designs, has so far concentrated largely on informal observation. This has led to an awareness of, and a need for, the analytical observation of larger bodies of human-machine related phenomena from a C T perspective. As a result of this preliminary work, three further needs have been identified:

1. the need for a unified understanding of what CT is,

2. the need for systematic collection of basic data about the cognitive prosthetics and the cognitive regression phenomena, which can provide the empirical basis for further theoretical development, and

3. the need for a method of enquiry which properly reflects the interests of CT.

While clear-cut solutions are still some way off, many of the issues involved in responding to these needs are spoken to in this collection of papers.

In accordance with its title, this book falls broadly into two main parts. The first part is concerned primarily with theoretical and methodological issues (Chapter 1 through 12), while the second part (Chapter 13 through 20) deals with more practical and applied aspects of CT. However, regardless of the specific interest of any one contribution, as a whole this volume is concerned with asking questions about the way we think about human-machine interactions. More importantly, it is concerned with asking ourselves questions about whether or not the questions we are and have been asking so far are the right sorts of questions to ask.

In his recent contribution to the Cognitive Technology agenda, Frank Biocca (1998:12-13, reprinted in this volume), echoing Marshall McLuhan, observed that “…the most important part of science is not theory, methods, or instrumentation, but asking the right question…accompanied by “probes”, a kind of intellectual shot into the darkness.” Ask the right question for your time, place, tools, and abilities and “… the answers it engenders can be more than a flare. It can be explosive, lighting the horizon as it casts long shadow on the intellectual terrain.” In keeping with this spirit, we can say that:

Each newly emergent scholarly discipline is best defined by the questions it formulates.

In the domain of human technology interactions, many areas of study have been differentiated according to the central questions they address. For example, the issue of how users communicate with application systems has driven research in the broad field of user-centred Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Great efforts have been, and are still, expended in order to achieve a better users’ understanding of what the system can do for them and what they, as users, can do with the system. Consequently, HCI design methodologies strive for correct marketing metaphors, graphical interfaces (GUI) for direct screen object manipulation, and recently, tangible interfaces (TUI) (Ishii and Ullmer, 1997) which involve direct interaction with real physical world objects, coupled with digital information. The main objective has been to arrive at an...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.4.1999
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Allgemeine Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Test in der Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Verhaltenstherapie
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Software Entwicklung ► User Interfaces (HCI)
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Theorie / Studium ► Künstliche Intelligenz / Robotik
• Themenwelt: Technik
• ISBN-10: 0-08-055213-7 / 0080552137
• ISBN-13: 978-0-08-055213-2 / 9780080552132