Why You Should Care About (Post)Human Factors

Your experiences and interactions were designed.

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Complete entry

Posted by Viktor Teichman  on  01/11  at  06:48 AM

Is there any similarity or concurrence seen to what I consider to be one of first true 'posthuman' introduction - second half of 20th century move from 'heavy modernity' (term of Zigmund Baumand) with its premise of 'the more is, the better is'...to 'light modernity' of rather or purely arbitrary symbolic processing. I believe posthuman aspects have been going on now for few decades, apparently greatly accelerating, transferring long term historical experience of sensory reality into subjectively assigned meanings of symbolic reality, where technologies play key role. Gradual replacement of sentionced meaning, traditionally seen as the only and one real, by abstract formal operations of mental modelling required (allowed) by technologies, I can see as the start of affect of technologies on society and behavior of people. 19th century people would probably cope with behavioral requirements of today's daily life much less then many earlier generations with their own 19th century life's. When thinking of current and future state, I tend to look a bit into older days as well to see any parallel. Making sense or indifferent?

Posted by Viktor Teichman  on  01/11  at  06:52 AM

What I wanted to finish with my previous post but submitted too early: have we as humans already finished this adoption from reality meaning mediated purely/mainly by sensors, to reality requiring assigning arbitrary meaning to various tools/actions and assigning subjective meaning - are we done with this process and has our behavior been already modified successfully to cope with it, so that we can afford to go further and think of best ways to design our reality?

Thanks.

Posted by Samuel H. Kenyon  on  01/12  at  03:12 AM

First, I definitely agree that history should be taken into account when thinking about future states. In response to whether an existing transition of sensory reality to symbolic reality is relevant, I would say in general yes. (It also makes me wonder if children are recapitulating the entire heavy-to-light transition as they adapt to the world). It definitely seems that we've been changing information organization and ontologies.

The transformation into light/liquid/software modernities has increased/introduced various substrates of symbolism, but we are still stuck with the biological constraints of humans with all their evolutionary baggage. These constraints have major ramifications for interfaces and interaction design. Of course, that's not to disparage what simple information change can do--just look at how Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. participated in changing people's social (and work) behaviors and privacy concerns (and spawned a bunch of social web designers).

So, these disciplines of design will have to consider not only raw cognitive and physical updates to humans, but also purely informational sociocultural updates.

As for whether humans have finished this adoption of symbolic reality, I can't answer that question. But I suspect there will be no finishing of one thing before starting another. We'll have parallel intermingling threads of development.

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