Week 4: 7 Days of HCI / Fall 2024
Living in a community is evident in various states of human life. We live in a community on the internet, in our neighborhood, in our career, in our friendships, and relationships both close and distant. Somewhere when digital technology boomed in the 90s, humans got lost in the fascination of it and obsessed over what the next best thing.
Internet is community as well and we use digital tech to communicate with each other. We don’t live on the internet to catch up on who’s doing what, but to feel a sense of community (although it exists in our heads). Perhaps, countries are the greatest example of living a community experience.
Designer’s in the HCI Community co-exist on the internet and in real life.
I’ve been having conversations around learning experiences and instructional design with various people this week. In the process of talking, I realized the design community stands on a ‘shared’ understanding of well, sharing knowledge. We talk to people to find clarity in ideas and seek knowledge.
We categorize information to get a better sense of how to behave or how are we expected to behave in a certain part of community.
Websites serve as a smaller part of communities present widely on the internet. We create tools to communicate information to another community. Mental models exist in the similar fashion to understand the placement of information or the ‘findability’ of information.
And because human population cannot stop reproducing and there are so many us, there is tons of data. Data is another tool of storytelling and communicating information to a community. Mental models are expected to be exercised in data visualization tools such as excel sheets and tableau to express information in an intended experience.
Our sense of physical environment and digital environments often overlap to get a sense of community.
I have a hypothesis (which I haven’t quite validated) that visual senses perform a larger role in interpreting information in our environments. But they don’t perform a lot in meaning-making. In one of the classes, we get a sense of our environment or we read images, people or even rooms by first observing, interpreting and then creating a meaning that we further in a mental model. What we perceive is then organized in our sense of community. Brains are automatic interpreters. Our memories also play a role in associating meaning.
Which makes me think — Are we humanizing digital technology as well? Do we want to stay connected with humans which includes our daily use of digital tech to enhance communication.