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Understanding Human Relationships

03.Jun.2007

I’ve just read a good paper on Human activities and relationships. It’s a sample chapter of Leonardo’s Laptop that can be found here. There is also a nice post about the Circles of Relationships that Ben Shneiderman mentions on his book. The chapter focus on the understanding of how human relate to each other, so that this knowledge can be applied on the creation of better technological products.

Some of the products used for case study are a bit dated, but all the analyses are pretty current. After studing how human act and their interactions, Shneiderman studies the case of photo album software and the dawn of ubiquitous computing, focusing on the way humans prefer to write on a Palm for example. It’s also very interesting to see the good perspective the author gives to a simple gadget to keep on office doors, that would have current information of where the owner of the office is. Now we can see this on the more than popular Twitter, that’s based simply on the idea of keeping track of what friends are doing. So it’s worth reading the paper even if you are only searching for inspiration.

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