Homework #9 Tomohiro Oda

1. what did you find
  • interesting about the article?


    The ship navigation example illustrates benefits and difficulty of supporting communities of interests and it made me think about what is boundary of software science.
    I think that investigating principles and techniques of such support tools is a kind of computer science, but what about building/developing the ethnography of such communities in perspective of computer technology?
    I don't have the answer yet, but I know systems consultants do that job.




  • not interesting about the article?


    One question is the conceptual position of PAD++.
    They say, "It helps us realize that some of what is powerful about multiscale representations comes from how individuals and groups adapt", but I don't see essential relationship between multiscale and distributed cognition.
    Another question is what is relationship between emergent phenomena and tools which support them.




    • 2. what do you consider the main message of the article?

    One next step of HCI researches is to capture phenomena emerging from collaborating people.

    3. are themes discussed in the article which you would like to know more about?


    The paper mentions that one of potential breakthroughs of software technology is heterogeneous distributed system collaborating each others.
    I personally think it is challenging theme.



    4. please describe briefly your understanding of
  • distributed cognition? — cognition which does not belong to an individual, but tacitly implied from multiple individual cognitions

  • ethnography - to discover and describe social systems, roles of individuals and their inter-relationships

  • active representations — artifacts which change its form by contexts, e.g. chimera (hypermedia developed by Ken Anderson http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~kena/chimera/)

  • in future work environments people will pursue their goals in collaboration with elements of the social and material world — As tasks get larger and more complicated, people need collaboration and computational support tools.

  • the article talks about "new foundations" for HCI — to understand chemical reactions among individual cognitions and to study how to support development of distributed cognition


    • 5. please discuss a couple of "old foundations" for HCI
    how "new" according to your knowledge are these "new foundations"?


    HCI has been developing communication technology between human and computer, and has been focused on supporting individual works.
    The distributed cognition seems more focused on human-human communication and consider computational tools as media.
    Although investigating to support individual works and interactions between human and computer is still necessary, but human-human aspect of computational augmentation and community oriented software design are new factors of software design.



    6. do you have any ideas how this research could / should be extended based on your own knowledge and experience?


    I think there are some relationships between distributed cognition oriented HCI and software engineering, especially domain analysis.


    Assignment 9 Summary