Archive for the 'Human Computer Interaction' Category
How compassion saved and broke the internet
March 19th, 2008Jon Postel, the late computer science guru pictured above, is widely credited with the following dictum:
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
This has come to be known as Postel’s Law, and it’s not explicitly about how people should treat one another.
Instead, Dr. Postel was talking about the problem […]
E-mail: “But in reality, can it really work? Yes it can.”
July 23rd, 2007
Here’s a story from ‘89 about one of the first public demonstrations of the x.400 e-mail standard, which helped e-mail move across platforms. As with all old tech articles, the beauty is in the enthusiastic descriptions of what the new technology will bring.
[I]n a series of tests between Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, […]
Go west, young psychologists…
July 10th, 2007Being from an east coast psychology program with deep–no, really deep–ties to Washington, D.C., I’m always saddened to see otherwise strong human factors students complaining about having to take internships at less-than-stellar Beltway companies.
No, people. Go west.
The Adaptive Digital Dashboard
November 29th, 2006
A year after the iDrive redesign, Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman and I reunited for another automotive project. This one was a contest entry in the 2006 International Award in Design, Engineering and Innovation in the field of Automotive Human Factors.
The competition was sponsored by some prety big names, including the International Council of […]
Driving Design: Redesigning the iDrive
October 20th, 2006This was a project I completed with Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman, and Nicholas Prada, to redesign BMW’s first automotive computer interface, the iDrive.
Evaluating Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future
October 20th, 2006Most people don’t know that modern airliners run on autopilot almost all the time. In fact, newer planes are technically capable of completing an entire flight with almost no input from humans.
Sadly, the interfaces that control these incredibly complicated automated flight computers date back to the 1970’s, and many important human factors studies have uncovered […]
I’m in Seattle
October 19th, 2006The nifty flight deck engineering team at Boeing has agreed to allow me to collect dissertation data on their new Flight Deck of the Future autoflight interface. I’ve worked with them before on the first evaluation of the FDF, and the time has come to create a more rigorous test, with more sophisticated […]