HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

Human Computer Interaction

Human Computer Interaction

Introduction

Communication researchers such as S. Shyam Sundar of Pennsylvania State University and Clifford Nass of Stanford University focus on the nature of users' orientation toward computers and other media technologies—as either independent sources of information or simply mediums between sources and receivers. Under the former conceptualization, the degree to which individuals treat computers as human is an indication of their tendency to view them as autonomous sources. Several experimental studies in the media equation literature document the human tendency to apply rules of human-human interaction to human-computer interaction.

In fact, the socialness of human-computer interaction has been a fundamental preoccupation in this subfield. For example, an entire design movement, labeled social computing, is devoted to research and development of interfaces that contribute to compelling and effective social interactions. Emphasis is placed on research related to the social relationships in which users engage with computers and other users via computers when they are online. In his 1994 article “Social Computing,” Doug Schuler has described social computing in terms of software that functions as an intermediate entity in any social interaction. The relationship between social behaviors and interactions with computing technologies has been the focus of research done by Christopher Dryer and colleagues. Another distinctive aspect of social computing is highlighted by some researchers at the IBM Research Division. John Thomas and colleagues emphasize the role of digital systems that can draw upon social information and context. According to these researchers, such social computing enhances the activity and performance of people, organizations, and systems. On a similar note, Adrian Cheok and colleagues call attention to the social, cultural, organizational, and interactional context that social computing brings to mixed-reality environments, which, they argue, is crucial for embodiment in such environments.

Developments in HCI

Research

In the past, research required significantly greater time to complete than today. Data had to be gathered, then analyzed by hand. This was a very slow, tedious, and unreliable process. Today, computers take much of the manual labor away from research. Primarily, computers assist researchers by allowing them to gather, then analyze, massive amounts of data in a relatively short period of time.

Even though scientists began identifying and understanding DNA in depth in the 1950s, detailed analysis could not be performed until technologies were able to analyze and record the volumes of data associated with DNA research. The Human Genome Project began in 1990 and was coordinated by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), resulting in the coding of the human genetic sequence. The goals of this project were to identify all the approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA, to determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, to store this information in databases, to improve tools for data analysis, to transfer related technologies to the private sector, and to address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project. The Human Genome Project was originally intended to last 15 ...