Ann, this message was blocked because it had an email header from a previous
mail. You need to strip these off before sending a reply - I know, it's a
pain!
Sue
From Ann Light:
A bunch of us ran a panel and a workshop on 'values in HCI' over the last
year because of these supposedly non-existent dark possibilities. HCI
produces all sorts of prescriptive research that impacts upon the design of
systems and consequently what happens to the people using them or
experiencing them, but often it does so naively. We had raised, amongst
other examples, that of the fighter airplane cockpit: two interfaces with
people, one involving dials and switches for the pilot, the other mostly
just explosives. Call centres are another interesting case... Good design
and usability isn't always the end point; the end point is what becomes of
all that hard work and that is often hard to define.
But there is a difference even here, between what Jeremy talks about - the
academic discipline, with its occasionally uncritical and mostly unpolitical
presence as a research endeavour; and people's actual interaction with
computers: a catalogue of positive and negative reactions in people that are
not historically well documented because traditionally HCI was viewing
interaction in terms of performance and productivity. Only the new cannon of
literature on emotion begins to capture this side.
I suppose it comes down to the study and the studied: both of which have a
dark side.
Ann
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