That time Becky got really interested in stuff that happened at Xerox PARC half a century ago.
I took a class last semester with an intimidating title: Semiotics and Cognitive Technologies. It ended up being a revelation.
Bear with me for just a moment while I spew some words that might not be familiar. We covered a lot of ground, moving from humans' first use of tools through extended cognition and Engelbart to embodied technologies and artificial intelligence. Along the way, we applied the theories of a really smart, pretty eccentric guy named C. S. Peirce. He operated in the field of semiotics, along with many others, and was set on figuring out a system of signs and symbolic logic that could be applied all forms of human behavior.
All that basically means we looked at how humans make sense of the world around them. More specifically, we looked at how humans use things that they have created to learn, share memories, and build up the communal store of knowledge for current and future generations. That includes stone axes and beads as well as early computers and virtual reality technology.
The whole class shifted the way I think about the world. But I found myself especially interested in the application of these principles to interface design, particularly the work of Alan Kay at Xerox PARC and his influences. They looked at computing devices not just as tools humans could use to do work, but as partners of a sort in a symbiotic relationship. That was the beginning of personal computing and the drive to create devices with which humans could interact. Machines that could be integrated more seamlessly into normal human life than, say, room-sized computers that performed a series of calculations using punched cards.
More on all this later. For now, though, feel free to take a look at my final project for the class: "Big Ideas and Small Revolutions." It's just a first draft. I plan to work and rework this base as I move through my studies at Georgetown.