Assignment

Listed below are four questions. Each one consists of a quotation or reference from our course text plus instructions about how to answer the question. You will answer completely from your own preparation.

In your answers you might relate the question to your class project. This exam is intended to encourage critical and creative thinking. A secondary goal is to measure your understanding of our assigned reading.

1. The Turn from Rationalism to Practice

"Rationalism is also apparent in formal approaches to design. Design methods attempt to capture and represent design expertise, making the process objective and explicit. As with artificial intelligence, design methods work from the idea that design proceeds from a problem statement to a solution with well-articulated methods as the means for reaching the desired end." (Chapter 2, page 25)

Question: Is this an accurate representation of the methods we learned in our course? What is rationalism in HCI? Do you believe in a rational formal method as the best way to develop a computer interface? Does this quotation accurately describe your own methodology for your class project?

2. Pragmatism and Personal Experience

"For Pragmatists such as Dewey experience is more personal than behavior; it involves an active self who not only engages in but also creatively shapes action. It is more inclusive than knowledge because it tries to encapsulate a person's full relationship - sensory, emotional and intellectual - with his or her physical and social environment. And, embedded as it is in what people do in the world and what is done to them, it is more than feelings." (Chapter 3, p. 54)

Question: When you tested your interface, did you find that the individual subject behaved as an "active self". Please give specific examples. What are the sensory, emotional and intellectual portions of your interface and the world created between the user and the interface? How did these portions influence your design process?

3. The Four Threads of Experience

In Chapter 4 McCarthy and Wright "...present technology as experience in an effort to see relationships between people and technology in all their potential value, meaning, and vitality."

Question: Pick any one of those four threads and relate it to both the themes of this course and your own experience in creating your HCI project.

4. Making Sense and Making Self

"We humans want to understand and interpret our experience. It is part of who we are and how we become in the creative, dialogical world in which we live. We live in a world that is not given to us whole cloth and so we have to make something of it. One of the most impressive features of making sense of experience is the always-emerging self that it evokes for us. In the process of making sense of our experience we get a sense of part of who we are." (Chapter 5,p. 122)

Question: In what sense is the HCI experience creative and dialogical? Please remember to focus on the user. If the self is always-emerging, how does your project help that self to emerge? In your response feel free to bring in examples from other, existing interfaces as well as your own.