As I said in my previous message, I have some questions of methodology
I would like to ask these community.
First of all, I would say I'm doing my Ph.D. in the field of
Human-Computer Interaction. I'm an Electrical Engineer with a Master on
Informatics. The university In which I am doing my Ph.D. does not have a
group on HCI and I doing my job very much alone with the approval of my
supervisor.
My thesis is related to design processes in HCI, and I'm studying how
theories of communication, which include areas such as Semiotics (Peirce),
Literary Criticism (Bakhtin), could be used in technology development and
what they have to offer. About the "human" component of the HCI, I'm
drawing upon CHAT, Situated Cognition, and Distributed Cognition. For the
"computer" side, I'm using studies in "Software Design" and "Science
and Technology Studies".
My main difficulties are related to how to discuss theories normally
related to the human sciences in a computer science millieu. In such a
community, it can be said that there is a "culture of the deliverable"
that has been established. Or you work on "practice" developing software
or you prove something "theoretically". For the majority of people, there
is no middle ground. They are not considered scientific. The solution
normally is to adopted by people interested in this area is to use
ethnomethodology to study or propose working environments mediated by
technology.
I would like to do that in the future but as a one man enterprise I do not
have the time nor the resources to develop a system and than access its
use. But I haven't chose this venue because it is my opinion that the
theoretical frameworks are much more rich than they are being used (see
my previous message) . But to put them in use, the differences and the
benefits of each solution or school of though have to be understood. I
see that with exceptions these solution s are starting to emerge, although
most of the work still is restricted to specific communities and there is
no scaffold that enable a comparative analysis of them.
Comparisons made by either Liam Bannon or Bonnie Nardi conclude that most
of the approaches intersect and are complementary, what I agree. The
question I'm addressing is "How this happens?" . I'm not satisfied only
with the use of the Cognitive Sciences within the Technological Sciences
or vice versa or to chose one approach instead of another. Choices like
that create dualism traps that are difficult to escape, even if one
adopts a CHAT aproach.
At the moment I'm comparing different models, both of communication,
semiosis or mediation, in order to establish a common language in which
technologists could manage to understand the importance of theories done
in the Human Sciences and the Arts for this context.
Questions that I ask myself are? Is that too much for a Ph.D.? Will the
community in which I'm working accepted, although it is an approach
completely different from standard practice?
If you have any suggestions or comments, I would like to hear from you.
Thank you very much again.
Luiz
_____________________________________________________________
Luiz Ernesto Merkle merkle who-is-at csd.uwo.ca
University of Western Ontario voice: +1 519 858 3375 (home)
Department of Computer Science fax: +1 519 661 3515 (work)
N6A 5B7 London Ontario Canada www.csd.uwo.ca/~merkle