The machine age outlook has often led humans to act on the biological world in ways that are harmful to it. So there’s some irony in the fact that the mechanical world we have surrounded ourselves with is now impinging on human biology. This fact is an incentive for the rapidly growing field of ergonomics, which looks to improve the interface between individuals and their environments in the design of everything from car seats to staple gun handles.

The interface between users and their computers has become a major ergonomic focus. A $5.8 million damage award in 1986—against the Digital Equipment Corporation, for repetitive strain injuries caused by its keyboards—marked the start of a series of large jury awards for health problems caused by poorly designed environments. Dean Santner, a furniture designer based in Alameda, California, has worked for much of his life in the field. His company, Navigator Systems, designs adaptable, ergonomic desk arrays that have been prescribed to patients by doctors. “When people sit down to a task,” he says, “my job is to see that they don’t have to work in order to get to their work.” What interests Santner most about ergonomics is how it “brings together statistics, medicine, physics, biomechanics, anthropometry, kinesiology, engineering, and psychology” in the effort to integrate people more effectively with their environments.

One Stanford University study turned up an amusing example of psychological ergonomics. A group of computer users, who had been asked to score the performance of their computers, adjusted their answers in a surprising way. When required to respond through the monitors of their own computers, the subjects gave much more positive evaluations than when they answered the same questions through other computers or on paper. Says Stanford’s Clifford Nass, “Our participants automatically and unconsciously made an attempt to ingratiate themselves to a computer.”

Associated Press newswire item: “Issaquah, Wash.—A 43-year-old man was coaxed out of his home by police after he pulled a gun on his personal computer and shot it several times, apparently in frustration.”

This story went on to reveal that the man shot his computer four times through the hard drive and once through the monitor, and that he had been taken away for mental evaluation. Some, though, suggest it’s the computer that should have been removed and tested for antisocial behavior. According to Neil Gershenfeld, author of When Things Start to Think, it’s a mistake to assume that a computer interface happens “between a person sitting at a desk and a computer sitting on the desk.”

“The speed of the computer is increasingly much less of a concern,” he says, “than the difficulty in telling it what you want it to do, or in understanding what it has done…As smart as computers may have become,” he adds, “they are not yet wise.”

Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once remarked that computers lack the common sense of a six-year-old. That’s not surprising, Gershenfeld replies, “since they also lack the life experience of a six-year-old…A blind, deaf, and dumb computer, immobilized on a desktop, following rote instruction, has no chance of understanding its world.”

The importance of perception to cognition, he points out, can be seen in the way we are wired. “Our senses are connected by two-way channels: Information goes in both directions.” This lets us “fine-tune how we see and hear and touch in order to learn the most about our environment.”

In nature the link between figure and ground is just such a two-way channel. Much of life is defined by the contest between freedom of action for individuals and the integrity of larger patterns. Each represents a fundamental principle in living systems. Nature likes dynamic opposition, in some sense “wants” the tension between them, but also wants it to be animated by active play along the boundary. All of which has led to nature’s most extraordinary innovation at the boundary between the individual and its environment—brains.

Tags: artificial intelligence, brain, cognition, Dean Santer, ergonomics, figure and ground, Neil Gershenfeld, perception, senses

Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Kate (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 3, from 1 votes

Posted on May 11th, 2006 @ 6:00 am