Post-cognitivist HCI: Preface and Introduction (Part 1)

„Člověk nemůže změnit svět a nezměnit přitom sebe“

— Stanislaw Lem¹

“Technology at present is covert philosophy; the point is to make it openly philosophical”

— Philip Agre²

“HCI research is not about tomorrow’s interfaces or applications but about the original ideas, fundamental knowledge and practical tools that will inspire, inform and support the design of human-computer interactions in the next decades.”

— Roussel³

„Nekompromisní technokrat Buckminster Fuller ohrnoval nos nad tím typem funkcionalismu, který se omezoval na vzhled kuchyňských kohoutků a neprojevoval špetku zájmu o potrubí, na němž byl rozvod vody závislý“

— Sudjic⁴

The following series is my master’s thesis, Post-cognitivist HCI: Seeing the Interface as a Sociotechnical Relation, defended in 2018 at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (New Media Studies). This is a translation from the Czech; quotations from Czech publications are left in Czech, with their translation in the note. The Czech text is unchanged apart from corrections of obvious typos and grammatical errors; the whole thesis is in the Charles University repository.

Preface

I chose the topic of this thesis because, in the information age of the twenty-first century, I consider Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), in conjunction with the philosophy of technology and new media theory, a relevant field that can tell the humanities a great deal about the relationship between humans and technology. For this to be possible, HCI also has to be looked at beyond the dominant paradigm of cognitivism.

Because, in my eyes, a “post-cognitivist” analysis of HCI has not yet been satisfactorily worked out in the Czech language, it was necessary to draw exclusively on foreign literature.

As the thesis assignment specified, its methodology was a theoretical and philosophical analysis of selected sources from HCI, philosophy in general, the philosophy of technology or new media theory. In the thesis I use the ČSN ISO 690 citation style.

In the introduction I outline why, in today’s information world and network age, it is necessary to reconceptualise the field of HCI away from the paradigm of cognitivism.

In the chapter An Analysis of HCI I present both the conventional and the unconventional history of HCI and stress that the first pioneers of HCI understood the development and design of technology as augmenting the human intellect and our cognitive skills. Drawing on the work of the theorist Paul Dourish, I analyse the history and theory of interaction and of the interface.

In the chapter Cognitivism and Cognition in HCI I define important concepts that come from cognitive science and describe the historical and present influence of the cognitive sciences and of the paradigm of cognitivism on HCI.

In the chapter Post-cognitivist HCI I develop the analysis of HCI, interaction and the interface against the background of phenomenology, postphenomenology and the theories of extended and distributed cognition.

In the chapter An Analysis of New Media Theories I analyse the influence of technology and the role of the interface from the perspective of selected new media theorists.

In the last chapter, The Interface as a Sociotechnical Relation, I summarise and synthesise how the analysis of the selected sources so far bears on the analysis of the interface as a sociotechnical relation. Here I introduce new concepts for analysing the interface, among them interfacial extension and interfacial reduction. Finally, I mention why I think HCI should be an integral part of the “sciences of man”, that is, of the humanities.

Introduction

Today I consider Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) one of the most fascinating and intellectually stimulating fields concerned with the relationship between humans and technology. If we look around us, my enthusiasm is not hard to understand. Technology has long since become an indispensable part of our lives. For all those who see technology above all as an antagonistic force that has to be overcome or, on the contrary, renounced for the sake of a return to an Edenic, immaculate “natural life”, I have bad news. As far as the use of technology is concerned, we have always been modern, in the sense that technology has been part of our lives, our culture, our communities and even our cognition since time immemorial. The dichotomies of technology and society, of the artificial and the human, may still be useful analytical divisions, but these divisions give a false picture of the relationship we have with our technological creations. Technological and sociocultural determinisms, which represent the opposite extremes of a single spectrum of the relations of humans to technology, should be consigned to the dustbin of intellectual history, for technology and society are two sides of the same coin, intimate and inseparable. Our lives are technologically mediated, and technology literally transforms what it means to be human. Yet technology does not come into being in a vacuum; it is always embedded in a context of social, cultural, historical and, last but not least, economic influences.

It therefore seems necessary that the traditional disciplines that study human communities, such as sociology and anthropology, begin to take into account the effects and influence of technologies and new media. But the same holds for engineering, design and the philosophy of technology, which for the same reason must acknowledge that it is not possible to analyse and create technology without knowing the social, cultural and other contextual aspects of how we actually use it. Technology and human users interact with each other, and a more philosophically informed empirical study of this interaction, of this mutual influence and constitution, is precisely the space to which the field of HCI can and should devote itself.

After all, HCI has it in its DNA. From the many possible definitions of HCI we learn that it is an interdisciplinary socio-technological science which studies the interaction between humans and technology and encompasses a range of disciplines: computer science, information science, ergonomics, art, design, cognitive psychology, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, physiology, artificial intelligence, engineering, cognitive science, ethics, aesthetics and so on.⁵ The original vision of HCI was to establish a field that would apply findings from the traditional, individual-centred cognitive sciences to the design, evaluation and testing of information systems^6,7 and to the creation of a usable and accessible user interface, or simply interface⁸. These are the vision and practice of HCI that, in the Czech context, above all in information science, informatics and media theory, have remained in a relatively unchanged form to this day.

In this thesis, however, I want to point to the forgotten roots of the radical ideas of the first pioneers of HCI, who were unanimously interested in how interaction with computers could augment our intellect and cognitive skills to cope with the growing information complexity of our lives. The genius of these figures from the pantheon of the first experts in the prehistory of HCI lay in the fact that they anticipated new findings of current research and theories in the cognitive sciences and philosophy. These define themselves against the long-dominant paradigm of cognitivism and its view of human cognition through the metaphor of the computer: internal symbolic representations, fixed rules and the Cartesian dualisms of body and mind or subject and object, which cognitivism implicitly took over as pillars of the metaphysics of Western thought.

In the literature of HCI, the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, the new theories that move beyond cognitivism are referred to as post-cognitivist theories, among which, following the theorists I have chosen, I count in this thesis the approaches influenced by phenomenology and the theories of extended and distributed cognition. Post-cognitivist theories point to the fundamental interconnectedness of thinking and acting, the human body, technology and the environment around us. This interconnectedness is not an achievement of modernity or of today’s information society, but the natural state of our cognition and of our being.

It is precisely the unexpected discovery of the role that the environment and technological artefacts play in our cognition that makes post-cognitivism an ideal partner for HCI, which has to come to terms with the new role of technology and with its design. In today’s technologically mediated information society, information technologies have moved out of specialised laboratories and the static environment of the desktop and have become an integral part of our lives, as the new approaches of the Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing announce. Besides its evident visual, auditory or tactile surface, technology is taking on an ever greater depth of the background: of less visible infrastructures and of layers of cultural and social relations and contextual aspects.

Following the turn of the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan in media theory towards the medium itself, its effects on society and the extensions of our abilities and perception, I try in this thesis, with the help of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, postphenomenology in the philosophy of technology, the theories of extended and distributed cognition and selected new media theorists, to show that HCI and the design of technologies cannot privilege the surface of technologies and media at the expense of the depth of the background, because it is precisely this depth that makes technologies and media possible. In this thesis, therefore, it is the interface that becomes the point of contact between depth and surface, but also the relation between the sociocultural and the technical layer of technologies. Technology cannot be regarded as a set of fixed objects, but rather as a space of potentialities which become concrete, materialise and mediate the aforementioned relations during interaction at the “interface” of depth and surface, of the sociocultural and the technical layer, that is, in the interface of technology.

The depth and complexity of the background of these relations are not directly accessible to us perceptually and phenomenologically. I will argue that access to this depth of the background of technologies is possible only in a mediated way, through the interface, which becomes both a medium and a cognitive map, for it enables contact and interaction between two or more otherwise incompatible parties and, specifically for the human user, reduces complexity to accessible affordances that allow the sociotechnical assemblage to be controlled. According to this thesis, the interface mediates by means of two main functions, for which, for the sake of economy, I have introduced the new auxiliary terms interfacial reduction and interfacial extension⁹.

Post-cognitivist HCI, together with new media theory and the philosophy of technology, provides enough arguments for us to update our view of technology and its interface. Technology is not a passive servant that fulfils the purely instrumental needs of its masters. Technology does not determine society, but it does have the power to change it, as well as our thinking and acting. Besides the material side of technology itself, it is also designers who sow in technology the seeds of potential for the ways in which this power can be activated, a potential this thesis refers to by Ihde’s term multistability. Technology is in interaction with human beings and actively shapes society as well as our thinking, in a way that Ihde called the non-neutrality of technology. The design of the interface of technology has to come to terms not only with the complexity of the depth of the background of technology, but also with the ethical questions of how technology, in planned or unplanned ways, affects individuals and society as a whole.

As early as 2005 the Czech HCI researcher Jan Brejcha¹⁰ urged that HCI and the (interaction) design of technologies must also be opened to experts from the humanities and social sciences, who could inform them about the wider context of technology. Today, however, we may ask the following question: if HCI and the design of technologies once quite rightly needed the humanities and social sciences in order to be informed about the human aspects of interaction, is it not the case today that these sciences now need HCI and design? If the humanities and social sciences once provided a synthesised picture of society and shaped public opinion, does the technologically mediated information society not give rise to the need for a new “liberal art” that would fulfil the same functions, supplemented by the perspective of technologies? In my opinion, we should look for the answers somewhere at the “interface” of post-cognitivist HCI, the philosophy of technology, new media theory, the contemporary sociology of technology, and design, all of which could contribute to a new, integrative “liberal art of technological culture”¹¹.

Notes

11 notes

1. 1↑

   Cited in: ŽÁČKOVÁ, Eva, 2015. K čemu konvergují nové technologie?. Plzeň: Západočeská univerzita v Plzni. ISBN 978-80-261-0574-9. In English: “One cannot change the world without also changing oneself.”

2. 2↑

   Cited in: DOURISH, Paul, 2004. Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-04196-6.

3. 3↑

   ROUSSEL, Nicholas, 2014. Looking back: a very brief history of HCI. Available also at: http://direction.bordeaux.inria.fr/~roussel/publications/2014-looking-back.pdf

4. 4↑

   SUDJIC, Deyan, 2016. B jako Bauhaus: moderní svět od A-Z. Translated by Radka KNOTKOVÁ, translated by Lukáš NOVÁK. Zlín: Kniha Zlin. Tema (Kniha Zlin). ISBN 978-80-7473-322-2, p. 320. In English: “The uncompromising technocrat Buckminster Fuller turned up his nose at the kind of functionalism that confined itself to the look of kitchen taps and showed not a shred of interest in the pipework on which the water supply depended.”

5. 5↑

   NĚMEČKOVÁ, Lenka, 2010. Rozvoj problematiky HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) na UISK FF UK (ZPRÁVA) ČLOVĚK – Časopis pro humanitní a společenské vědy č. 18 (15.4.2010)

6. 6↑

   CARROLL, John M., ed., 2003. HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks Toward a Multidisciplinary Science. Burlington: Elsevier. ISBN 978-008-0491-417.

7. 7↑

   TURNER, Phil., 2016. HCI redux: the promise of post-cognitive interaction. ISBN 9783319422336.

8. 8↑

   In the Czech original I prefer the English term “interface” to the Czech rozhraní, because its etymology and neutrality are better suited to the needs of this thesis. In most cases, by the term “interface” I do not mean the graphical user interface, but a general point or place of contact for interaction with technology. Over the course of the thesis, however, I will gradually develop this conception of “interface” further and redefine it as well.

9. 9↑

   I am aware how immodest it may seem to introduce new terms in a master’s thesis. I want to stress, however, that these are only auxiliary names for certain concepts that I would otherwise have to keep repeating. In the spirit of this thesis I can say that words are “interfaces” to far more complex depths of thought, and it is up to whoever introduces new words to make sure that they extend our ability to think rather than reduce it. I leave it to the reader to judge how I have coped with this task.

10. 10↑

    BREJCHA, Jan, 2005. Towards a Philosophy of Interaction Design. In: Post-media Theory [online]. [cited 2017-11-26]. ISSN 1803–4055.

11. 11↑

    BUCHANAN, Richard, 1992. Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues. Vol. 8. The MIT Press, Spring, 1992(No. 2), 5-21. Available also at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511637

Literature

9 sources

• BREJCHA, Jan, 2005. Towards a Philosophy of Interaction Design. In: Post-media Theory [online]. [cited 2017-11-26]. ISSN 1803–4055.
• BUCHANAN, Richard, 1992. Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues. Vol. 8. The MIT Press, Spring, 1992(No. 2), 5-21. Available also at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511637
• CARROLL, John M., ed., 2003. HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks Toward a Multidisciplinary Science. Burlington: Elsevier. ISBN 978-008-0491-417.
• DOURISH, Paul, 2004. Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-04196-6.
• NĚMEČKOVÁ, Lenka, 2010. Rozvoj problematiky HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) na UISK FF UK (ZPRÁVA) ČLOVĚK – Časopis pro humanitní a společenské vědy č. 18 (15.4.2010)
• ROUSSEL, Nicholas, 2014. Looking back: a very brief history of HCI. Available also at: http://direction.bordeaux.inria.fr/~roussel/publications/2014-looking-back.pdf
• SUDJIC, Deyan, 2016. B jako Bauhaus: moderní svět od A-Z. Translated by Radka KNOTKOVÁ, translated by Lukáš NOVÁK. Zlín: Kniha Zlin. Tema (Kniha Zlin). ISBN 978-80-7473-322-2.
• TURNER, Phil., 2016. HCI redux: the promise of post-cognitive interaction. ISBN 9783319422336.
• ŽÁČKOVÁ, Eva, 2015. K čemu konvergují nové technologie?. Plzeň: Západočeská univerzita v Plzni. ISBN 978-80-261-0574-9.