The user-system interaction issue : has it been turned upside-down?

After reading Elwood and Lanter’s articles I had the image of a complete shift. With his user-centered interface, Lanter was concerned with the interaction between the user and the system. The user-centered interfaces are so developed now. Someone mentioned the perfect example in this blog; two years-old baby are able to use iPads! Can it be more user-friendly than that? Interfaces are so user-centered that people generate an enormous amount of heterogeneous data, and are using geotagging and geoblogging. I think that users are directly interacting with the system now and not only with the interface. Furthermore, users are interacting with each other. On the other end, ‘system designers’ (in Lanter’s words or ‘GIScientists’ in Elwood’s perspective) have to figure out ways to manage this phenomena. The problem has turned back to the ‘system’. It is interesting how the ‘system’ from Lanter’s point of view refers to the software system design. Although what I mean by ‘system’ refers to a broader point of view and is about social, political, technological systems (Oh no not the GIS tool/Science again!!!). Geovizualisation technologies have an impact on all spheres of the society. I’ll give a few examples of that (from Elwood’s paper). Political: renaming places and the negotiation of colonial and postcolonial histories or the promotion of activist activities; Social: posting information on bad neighbors!; technological: interoperability of heterogeneous data, transformation of meaning when different people work with the data….

S_Ram

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