physical representations: object knowledge cs376 fall sdoorley

Why group these readings?

Reading 1: Haptic Techniques for Media Control: Snibbe, et al.

Haptics

Film Editing in Ancient Times: late 1900’s

Summary: Design Principles Discrete vs. Continuous Control Information Delivery Through Touch Dynamic Systems for Control Modeless Operation Application and Interface Communication General Devices Orthogonal Force Sensing Big Wheel Multi-axis-force Sensing Brake: Passive Haptic Display Slider: Absolute Positioning Tagged Handles: Discrete & Continuous Control Rock-n-Scroll Media Controls Haptic Navigation & Control Clutch & Fisheye Haptic Annotation Foreshadowing & Frictionless Shuttle Functional Integration Tagged Handles, Preview Button, Absolute Media Browsing & Super-Sampling Alphabet Browser, Sticky Channels

What do we do with the sense of touch? When should we use it?

Reading 2: Cognition in the Wild: Navigation as Computation: Hutchins

“In the western tradition, physical artifacts became repositories of knowledge, and they were constructed in durable media so that a single artifact a single artifact might come to represent more than any individual could know…” p96 “The astrolabe and the compass rose…involve the creation of physical artifacts whose structure capture the regularities in the world of phenomena in such a way that computations can be performed by manipulating the physical devices.” p102 “The construction of a network of artifacts and skills for converting the stars from irrelevant points of light in the night sky into formidable allies in the struggle to master the Atlantic is a good example of heterogeneous engineering (Law 1987:124)” p 113 “In the Western tradition all navigatable space is represented from this [navigation chart] perspective, is is from this virtual perspective that voyages come to be conceived. We imagine the voyage as the movement of our ship over a stretch of water… there we are, like tiny imagined specks on the tiny imagined ship that is moving in our mind’s eye across the expanse of paper that represents the water between the origin & destination. Yet there are moments when this perspective does not serve the needs of the navigator…” p 110 “Every argument showing why a particular tool is easy to use is an argument showing why both internal and external tools are part of the very same cognitive ecology. It is a truism that we cannot know what the task is until we know what the tools are. Not only is this true of both internal & external tools, ut it is also true of the relationships among them. “ p114

Does our reliance on machines for memory and computation enhance our understanding of the world or degrade it?

SYTHESIS How do we decide which sense to enroll for which task?