Re: [Usability] Interesting reading

[Seth Nickell <seth gnome org>]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 14:54, Bryan Clark wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 20:39 +0100, Maarten Menheere wrote:
> 
> > Just finished reading this book Embodied interaction by Paul Durish. It
> > provides some insightful reading material about how people interact with
> > objects around them and how this relates to computing. If you got the
> > time I can recommend it. There are some nice design principals in there
> > that I personally would like to see adapted by the gnome interface. It's
> > not directly comprehensive but does give some pointers for future
> > direction.
> 
> Cool, any specific direction bits or design principals you could point
> out?

While I highly recommend "where the action is" (Havoc has my copy right
now... who knows if he's actually reading it :-) ... I don't feel the
book is exactly the sort that you'd pull concrete design principles out
of. Instead, the book provides an alternative framing, based in
ethnomethodology, for the basic problem of HCI (nobody knows exactly
what that is, of course, and therein lies the fun). Dourish follows in
the footsteps of phenomenologists past and focuses on interaction as it
relates to the tangible and observable (note that sociology edge
creeping in :-)... but more importantly argues that this externalization
(of knowledge, meaning, etc) is integral to the way people interact. Put
another way, its another approach to addressing the faulty assumptions
raised by the descartian mind-body separation that pervades the way we
understand human psychology (and design for it).

-Seth