Posted: February 21st, 2013 | Author: tonytang | Filed under: Assignment 1 | No Comments »
Inventing tools to break through innate constraints and to extend abilities is how human beings are separated from other species. From stone age to industrial era, tools originally giving more power and speed to people gradually shift to inspire intelligence and creativity of humans. Following this tendency, Engelbart envisioned the potential power of computational tool and defined a framework to open up a new path toward today’s augmented intelligence. Actually, his framework, the so called H-LAM/T system (Human using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, in which he is trained), covered most of the interaction principles of popular software/hardware nowadays.
The T seems an important part in his system. By training, users know the standard procedures of invoking predefined functions in a system, such as drawing a line. They can also generate new combinations to externalize their mental representation of thoughts, making a graph for example, after getting used to the standard ones. However, modern notions of computational system design didn’t take training for granted. GUIs tries to use visual icons and symbols to lower the burden of learning, while TUIs attempt to borrow people’s everyday experiences of objects (affordance) as a way of triggering digital function intuitively.
Context aware and adaptive tools, such as push notifications and location based applications, get rid of foregoing intention driven interaction model and provide real-time supports one second before the needs are actually generated. This will be achieved by systems’ actively monitoring users and their surroundings and constantly interpreting collected data. Comparing to conventional AI which turns machine into a living creature, the tools equipping limited AI to mainly predict people’s needs won’t cause the result that machines take over the world in science fiction.
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