Krzysztof Kowalczyk linked to a few essays about the principles of computer software design, with a particular emphasis on advanced collaborative tools. (Note, that I just wrote this post and it was lost with a Tinderbox crash, ugh.)#

The main work that all of the essays referenced was Doug Engelbert's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, which I did not read today (because of its length) but plan on reading in the future.#

The first essay was A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools from Eugene Eric Kim and it mainly focused on serving as a reminder to the design community of the precepts set my Doug Engelbert in the work referenced above.#

The main precept here is that people should always come first in computing, not only when thinking about what to do design and how it will work, but also in why a particular tool is necessary--what purpose it will serve.

The natural starting place for building people-centric applications is the user interface. The opportunities to improve here are endless, and the increasing number of publications in this area show that people are paying greater attention.

The problem with usability is not a lack of good ideas; it's that most of these ideas never make it into real applications. There are many reasons for this, from organizational shortsightedness to the vagaries of the marketplace. As frustrating and as uncontrollable as these factors may be, the onus for changing the situation is on both the researchers who develop these ideas and the programmers who implement them. Open source software offers an excellent and underutilized avenue for disseminating innovations in user interface. Researchers should be writing plugins for widely-used open source applications, such as the Mozilla Web browser, instead of developing prototypes from scratch. Open source developers should be scouring academic publications for ideas, rather than simply duplicating the user interfaces in commercial products.

Being people-centric isn't just about user interface, however. It's about attitude -- how we think about our applications in general. The wrong attitude can steer people away from some very useful technology.

The author also makes a great sound bite in another essay, Do We Need The Semantic Web?

I'm not saying that the Semantic Web is a waste of time. Far from it. I think it's a valuable pursuit, and I hope that we achieve what the authors claim we will achieve. Truth be told, my inner gearhead is totally taken by some of the work in this area. My concern is that our collective inner gearhead is causing us to lose sight of the original goal. To paraphrase Doug Engelbart, we're trying to make machines smarter. How about trying to make humans smarter?

The other essay was The Computer as Tool: From Interaction to Augmentation, by Chris Dent, who focused on the problems that occur when viewing the computer as something that you "interact" with and on some remedies to this kind of thinking.#

His characterization of the problem:

Characterizing the computer as an intentional interactive artifact lays the groundwork for several problems with computer use: it grants inappropriate power to the computer in the relationship between user and computer; it creates inappropriate expectations of the computer while at the same time lowering expectations of computer use; it lowers productivity.

When the computer is viewed as having intention "the personification of the machine is reinforced" (Suchman). The interaction between the user and the computer is the locus of negotiation for performing the task. The computer takes a privileged stance, above the task. When in that stance we expect the computer to truly have, given the intention we have granted it, the intelligence, inferential power and adaptability that Suchman says we expect in social interaction. This is unfortunate because the computer is not intelligent; it cannot compare arbitrary and dynamic categories. It has no true and general inferential power; it cannot create links between categories. It is not truly adaptable; it can only create new classes of distinction according to a limited rule set. The expectation of intelligence sets up a poor mental model of the real situation. Such a model cannot be run to "predict the output which would result from some kind of input" (Eberts, 1994).

Paradoxically, the intention that grants the high expectation of intelligence creates lower expectations of effective performance. We perceive an obscure purpose in the computer that we must decode and any difficulty in doing so must be our fault.

A great description of future modes of computer training:

The car and the book are powerful icons in the HCI literature. Is this because they are great examples of design or because the car and the book have become integral parts of our cultural understanding? Phase two computer applications are too new to be fully integrated, naturally, into our consciousness. Those implementations that excel at making us more effective and have a long life will come to be viewed like the car or the book. People will talk about them in the same way they do the car. When it is time for Johnny to learn how to use his information processing tool we won't send him to a copy of Learn to Use Your IPT in 7 hours, instead his learning will be a part of his ongoing education and socialization and could very well involve spending time with Mom or Dad showing how things are done, just like how things happen when learning to drive a car.

Is this how our children will learn to use computers? The same way we teach them use kitchen appliances, hygiene products, or the car?