Fallman, Daniel (2007). “Persuade Into What? Why Human-Computer Interaction Needs a Philosophy of Technology.” In Lecture Notes in Computer Science.” 4744/2007, pp 295-306.
p 295
“a number of conceptual frameworks and associated methodological approaches have recently been proposed as post-cognitivistic alternative approaches to HCI that would be aimed towards and better suited for capturing various aspects of interactive experiences. These include ethnography and ethnomethodology [15, 3], phenomenology [3, 16], distributed cognition [6], and activity theory [13].”
“These researchers tend to be interested in the relationship between user and artifact in terms of for instance that relationship’s affective qualities rather than efficiency; meaning rather than various performance metrics; fun and playability rather than error rate; and sociability rather than learnability, and so on.”
p296
“‘five E’s’ of usability, i.e. that designs should be effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, and easy to learn”
“What is a good persuasive interface? One that persuades one more or one hat persuades one into something good? Who is to decide?”
p297
Re: John Dewey and Martin Heidegger — “Both regard technology as central to modern life, where Dewey holds a largely optimistic outlook towards modern technologies, while Heidegger comes to develop a more dystopian view. This basic utopian/dystopian divide is still visible within the field of philosophy of technology. In Thinking through Technology [12], Carl Mitcham distinguishes the engineering strand in philosophy of technology, which seems to assume the centrality of technology in human life, but also the humanities approach, which is more concerned with technology’s moral and cultural boundaries.”
“From his analysis, Ihde proposes a magnification/reduction transformation to be a structural feature: ‘For every enhancement of some feature, perhaps never before seen, there is also a reduction of other features. To magnify some observed object, optically, is to bring it forth from a background into a foreground and make it present to the observer, but it is also to reduce the former field in which it fit, and—due to foreshortening—to reduce visual depth and background’ [9, p. 111].
“…Ihde takes this argument further by arguing that even seemingly unobtrusive and ubiquitous technology, such as eyeglasses, have this non-neutral mediating character.”
p298
Optical technologies [he means perception technologies?] seem to be a special ‘enhancing’/’amplifying’ category—distinct from buttons, levers, etc. — but I’m not sure even the term “perception” encompasses the range of enhancing technologies. What about motors enhancing speed & power? What about weapons enhancing violence and its capacity to harm? What about musical instruments that enhance control over intonation, agility, range, and timbral variety?
“If looking through a telescope is a matter of sensory perception—amplified ‘seeing’ in some sense—using speedometers and clocks may be better thought of as a matter of ‘reading’. A world object is still being referred to—i.e. in the case of the speedometer the referred-to object is typically the speed of the vehicle—but the way it is referred to is not perceptual but rather translated into some
form of hermeneutic representation.” Goes on to say that technologies of hermeneutic representation require a constructed frame of reference for their meaning or value; thus they are also non-neutral.