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Dipti Mandalia Assignment 9: Review of the articile "Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for the HCI Research" 1. What did you find interesting about the article? The idea of developing digital objects that are active in nature, thereby assisting them in incorporate the history of usage was the most fascinating idea presented in the paper. This will facilitate collaboration with users of a system where usage is asynchronous and will also help in contextualising the most relevant information. Also the article explains well why the researches should understand the domain of observation well by explaining the impact of ethnography. 2. What did you find not interesting in the article? I did not find anything not interesting in the article. What do you consider the main message of the article? The main message of the article is that the HCI research (and HCI systems as well) should move on from traditional human-desktop models to models that exploit the interaction of humans with the environment. Also availibility of more information and ability to collaborate with other individuals (E.g. availibility of the www) and advanced technology (that facilitates building of systems like the EDC) should be accounted for. Are themes discussed in the article which you would like to know about? The article discusses the "use of meaning of the artifact that represents something Vs. use of the meaning of the thing that the artifact represents" and gives an example of the icons on the desktop. I would like to know the validity/invalidity of this argument in systems like the EDC or the kitchen design program (like JANUS) where the artifacts are used explicitly to assist the user visual something they represent, say a piece that represents a house in the EDC. Or is it that this argument is applicable only to systems with computer-based interface and not with artifact-based interfaces? Please describe briefly your understanding of: Distributed Cognition: the interaction of the individuals with a group of people as well as with the environment around him which includes materials/artifacts. Ethnography: study of interaction of the individual with the environment and society and how he uses the knowledge and the environment he posses in order to achieve a goal. Active representations: These are digital objects that change form and also the relevant information they display depending on some driver (sa history). The concept that came to my mind was that of "intelligent search engines" that would display the hits in the order of frequently used sites. In future people will pursue their goals in collaboration with the elements of the social and material world: with the advent of technologies like ubiquitous computing, www etc. the users of these systems will collaborate not only with their own workspace but also with people across the world and will also make use of vast amount of available information. 5. The article talks about "new foundations" for HCI. Please discuss some old foundations for HCI. How "new" according to your knowledge are these "new" foundations? The old foundations in HCI are the ones that followed the closed model of cognition and only tried to bridge the gap between the external objects and their internal representation. The new artifacts are the ones that extend the boundaries of cognition and cosider the environment to be a part of the cognition system. Hence any system that does not support collaboration (may it be between individuals or between individuals and artifacts) can be considered as an old foudation in HCI. E.g. A word processor without annotation facility can be an example of old foundation in HCI (in the sense that it does not provide facility to aid collaboration with others since they cannot annotate your work) Do you have any ideas how this research could/should be extended based on your knowledge and experience? By recording the interaction around the action space in the EDC the concept of social collaboration can be incorporated in the EDC. Assignment 9 Summary
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