For Erik’s class we read a chapter from Peter-Paul Verbeek’s What Things Do, which presents some pretty interesting ideas relating Heideggerian concepts like “present to hand” to the sustainability of products. He also claims to draw on the perspective of postphenomenology. Since Wikipedia was no help, I’m wondering if Jeff or someone else can explain…
At the beginning of the semester, Gillan Smith’s article set up the challenge to develop an “independent language of interaction” that fully exploits the medium of computers — similar to how the early techniques of cinema eventually stabilized into a coherent visual language. While its contentious that such a singular language can be created for…
I have seen a number of posts and comments that grapple with the notion of “breakdown,” and I thought it might be constructive to clarify something. “Breakdown” in everyday English is a bad and destructive thing. “My car broke down.” “He had a nervous break down.” The phenomenological notion is derived from this, but as…
I started to think about how different theories constrain and open up the space for design but got caught up in trying to sort out how exactly these theoretic traditions (rationalism/cognitive science, phenomenology, activity theory) are similar and different. It would be nice to have some sort of philosophical foundations of HCI cheat sheet. Here…
I wrote a last minute paper for the CHI workshop on Secrets and Lies in Computer-Mediated Interaction: Theory, Methods and Design . Here’s the abstract for the paper I submitted. Deception in massively multiplayer online role playing games is a complex and nuanced issue. Anonymity and the deceptive behavior it enables are required to facilitate…
Read more Magic Circle or Firewall: Phenomenology and Game Security
Nine friends played Wii games today at my home including sport games and Mario party games. We have four handlers which means that we could have four people play at the same time. When we played those minigames, eight of us were really enjoy. Another one was very busy and working by using her laptop.…
So back to the topic of games, I’ve posted a few times on this… but games are important: we spend more money on online games than music. Gaming is the #1 online activity. HCI studies technology with very different methodological and philosophical bent than Computer Science or it’s many sister sciences, that of phenomenology. This…
Stephen Prince argues that “To date, theory has tended to minimize the importance of perceptual correspondences, but the advent of digital imaging demonstrates how important they are and have been all along.” Things like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the impossibly realistic landscape in True Lies each highlight problems with traditional film theory, exposing…
After reading the articles for this week (the first two, i couldn’t find the third.. is it up and I’m missing it?) , I was blown away by the explanation given of Heidegger’s theories in the Winograd & Flores article. It helped me make sense (I think) of many things… many ideas that were fluttering…
Read more “We design ourselves in language!” Selective attention rules.
In regards to film theory, are we saying that the opposition ‘realism vs. formalism’ mirrors the opposition ‘phenomenology vs. structuralism’? Is realism in film purely phenomenological and formalism in film purely structuralist? I came across the following entry in wikipedia under ‘Formalist Film Theory’ and ‘Ideological Formalism’: “It can be argued that, by this [formalist]…
Interaction Culture 