Human-Computer Interaction: Interfaces and Ideologies

Functional interfaces between users and computational systems present specific affordances for human-meaningful, i.e. semiotic interactions between user and system. Various semiotic resources, from verbal signs to visual patterns to meaning-laden actions by users and responses by the system (including apparent initiations by the system), are designed to mediate between human cultural systems and meaningful behavior patterns on the one hand and the underlying computational programs and hardware on the other. Such interfaces are a genre of multimedia, polysemiotic texts, not unlike films or videogames. As such, they embody the ideological dispositions of their creators, who, historically, have been far less culturally diverse than the human population as a whole. How do widely used interfaces today, their metaphors and cultural assumptions, reflect specifically masculinist, middle-class, eurocultural attitudes and assumptions? How do, or would, interfaces designed from other cultural, gender/sexuality, and class positions differ, and with what effects on the potential of computational systems to aid the full range of human projects and agendas?



Source:academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/phd-tops.htm