Talk:Human-centered computing (discipline)

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I am reorganizing some of the recent changes to this article. Listing out things found in a google search does not make the article any easier to understand. Some of these topics may be best handled by a disambiguation page anyhow.

Also, I'm removing some traditional HCI buzzwords like "user-friendly." In general, a lot of HCI seems to be creeping in here. I'm not even sure if we should keep the links to ergonomy and all that traditional pre-HCI stuff. --Andicat 22:58, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

To anonymous editor: this is in response to your edit summary. please use the discussion page to discuss page content. The nasa definition is just one project... there is a whole research movement that is unrelated to the NASA project that spans several institutions called "human-centered computing." What's confusing here is that the term needs disambiguation page to separate the two uses, which I have just created. --Andicat 18:14, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Dear "Main Editor" of Human-centered computing

for me, the Human-centered computing is rather a sc. perspective than discipline. No unique theoretical framework exists in this approach. On the other hand every computing is for humans.

Of course, I understand that this term has been used as the names of laboratories, centers, programs or phd theses in concrete sc./tech. domain contexts. The same situation is exactly with the NASA project.

- I would like to ask you : What kind of computing evidently is not, more or less, Human-centered? (- I suggest to create the article Human-centered).

- Your personal opinion (lack of references) on: what is not of interest to Human-Computer Interactions or Man-Machine Interaction (why the reference to this term you canceled?), I do not share ( see also Google).

  • Could you explain more exactly what Human-centered computing means for you.

"...computation will be human-centered. It will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe. It will enter the human world, handling our goals and needs and helping us to do more while doing less...".

- It has to be:

"pervasive—it must be everywhere, with every portal reaching into the same information base; embedded—it must live in our world, sensing and affecting it;

nomadic—it must allow users and computations to move around freely, according to their needs; adaptable—it must provide flexibility and spontaneity, in response to changes in user requirements and operating conditions;

powerful, yet efficient—it must free itself from constraints imposed by bounded hardware resources, addressing instead system constraints imposed by user demands and available power or communication bandwidth;

intentional—it must enable people to name services and software objects by intent, for example, "the nearest printer," as opposed to by address;

eternal—it must never shut down or reboot; components may come and go in response to demand, errors, and upgrades, but Oxygen as a whole must be available all the time."

or Google search: "Man-Machine interaction", intelligent

...

Sorry, but your article is written in the traditional buzzword style - I suggest you to improve it asap.

Kind regards.

- anonymous editor --192.107.75.158 17:51, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi, anonymous, I dont' know if I'm the "main editor" here but I care about the article so thanks for helping get it to the point where it has some content! I agree that one could certainly call human-centered computing a perspective on computing. It's also an interdisciplinary area of research that is becoming more and more reified in the form of academic centers, research consortia and programs, etc. There is a distinction to be made between human-centered approaches to computing/computer science and... well... computer-centered ones! :-) That's WHY these various organizations are differentiating themselves from the tradiational approaches.

As one editor of this page wrote, the distinctions between HCI/HCC and Info Sci are not always clear. In order to create an encyclopedia article that conveys what kind of work is being done in HCC programs, I've personally been trying to avoid including content about the traditional ways of dealing with the interactions between humans and computers, (i.e. ergonomics, etc). Mostly because I think those things are probably best dealt with in other articles anyhow.

I can certainly see where the NASA project could be included as a related link along with the others, it just seemed as though they used a narrow, quite contextualized definition of HCC and shouldn't be used in the body of the article as a main definition, so I moved it.

I disagree that the article is poorly-written. I think there are some editors whohave been doing a marvelous job here. I think this article is best left a stub actually, and fairly abstract as this is a pretty new topic. It will grow. --Andicat 11:12, 11 October 2006 (UTC)