Orienting Towards Google
Joi Ito, and several commentators, talk about the emerging practice of taking pen-and-paper notes that are primarily designed to be
fodder for later googling:
I had a breakfast meeting with Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi about my doctorate program and I was taking notes in my moleskine notebook. I was jotting down just names and keywords and I think the professor thought it was a bit odd. I realized that taking notes with the intention of googling everything later is very different than taking complete notes. I had never noticed that I had started doing this.
One of the most interesting areas of interface design, I've long thought, has been the boundary spaces around the interface: how people work at the margins, moving information in and out of the computer, translating and restructuring as they attempt to put information to work. (Another, similar boundary space is that between users of different computers, as information flows from user to user over networks and is remade and restructured as new users take it up.) Those boundary activities tend to highlight structures and practices that are otherwise often hidden or at least unconsidered.
Several years ago, HRH Harper and colleagues completed a research project designed to help them improve the computer interface of air traffic control software. One of the primarily goals was to do away with little slips of paper that controllers used to track data--the program designers hoped to come up with a system that moved information on the paper slips into the interface, one step toward the mythical paperless office.
Harper and his team discovered, though, that the movement of information in and out of the computer--in the physicality of passing paper, and in the way that the slips of paper were easily handled, distinguished from other types of information that was on the computer, and the paper trails generated--the movement of information across boundaries was absolutely crucial. (See similar comments about the necessity of papertrails for electronic voting systems.)
Posted by johndan at August 22, 2004 10:38 AM
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