The Machine Goes

A graduate student’s blog about design, HCI, and related fields.

Entries Tagged as 'HCI'

Balancing Values & Usability

November 7th, 2007 · 3 Comments

“The landscape as well as the city are both highly structured, and our existence is furnished with many different kinds of devices and technological systems. These are what instruct people in contemporary societies ‘how to live.’”-De Vries
There is a wealth of design and social science literature that suggests that the artifacts we use shape […]

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Tags: Ethics · HCI · Design

Interesting Commentary On Smart Homes / Design / Technology / Humanity

October 23rd, 2007 · No Comments

Here is a presentation I found last year when I was Marty’s RA, looking for new material for his course. - http://web.archive.org/web/20040407205056/www.richgold.org/SMART/HTML/slide2.html
This guy, Rich Gold, was a researcher at PARC before he passed away. Pretty cool stuff, my favorites are:

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Tags: Ethics · HCI · Design

Present-at-Hand & Ready-to-Hand in Interaction Design

October 16th, 2007 · 4 Comments

Recently, Heidegger’s concepts of present-at-hand and ready-at-hand have been mentioned in readings for both Jeff’s class and Erik’s class. I find the implications of these concepts interesting for interaction designers and want to examine them further. A fundamental question for an interaction designer being introduced to these concepts is:
Should products be designed to be ready-to-hand, […]

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Tags: HCI · Design