Christine Boese » LinkedIn

2009 IA Summit Presentation: Are Human Beings Becoming Dumb Terminals?

Chris Boese — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:00:25 +0000

An Atlantic Monthly article posed a provocative question and set off debates across our electronic spheres: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” However, the article didn’t engage whether or how specific interactions and interfaces may contribute to increased intellectual acumen, or lull us into somnambulistic stupor. This presentation will examine that question at the interface level, in an attempt to discover how seemingly routine interaction design decisions made in the name of ease of use may be inadvertently shaping human consciousness, as with our laptops, into becoming “dumb terminals,” with more and more thinking processes “outsourced” to The Cloud. This discussion will also be strongly informed by the framework presented in Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It,” comparing prescriptive use interfaces associated with “tethered appliances” with those considered more “generative” technology.

Notes (not too extensive) and Works Cited from my talk at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, titled “Are Human Beings Becoming Dumb Terminals? Implications for Deep Structure Interfaces.”

(Boxes and Arrows podcast is unfortunately unavailable for Day 3 Morning Sessions due to technical difficulties)

Are Human Beings Becoming Dumb Terminals? IA Summit 2009

Summer 2008: Relaunch of Style.com for Fall Fashion Shows

Chris Boese — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Responsibilities: Wireframes (redesign already in progress when I joined the team); Site Map; Flows; Design and Structure of Wiki intranet document space; Integration of Wiki docs with RallyDev Agile Specs and Feature/Bug Tracking system; Functional Specs; Management of QA process and functional QA through launch.

Spring 2008: Spec’ing ESPN.com Redesign: Winner of two 2009 Webby Awards: Sports Judges’ & People’s Choice

Chris Boese — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:11:19 +0000

Responsibilities: (Proposed UX/Creative redesign already complete when I joined the team); URL Remapping Master Document; Functional Specs for entire site (except premium content), including rules and interactions for all page/sport/community/personalization templates and modules. Sole author of about 200 pages of documentation for the proposed redesign, written in two months, April-May 2008.

Spring 2008: Redesign of Portfolio.com home/article templates

Chris Boese — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Responsibilities: Wireframes (Article Template redesign, Comments Interface and Comment Page redesign, Module system WFs, Teamsite CMS redesign for Home Page Template and Article Template); Home Page and Article/Module Template Specs.

2007-2008: Major and iterative redesigns for Flip.com

Chris Boese — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Responsiblities: Lead Functional Analyst on Flip team for 1.5 years; Specs through Iterative and Two Major Redesigns; Content Migration Plan; Registration and other Process Flows; Contributed to two separate UX and Interaction Design Audits with Sr. IA; Migration of RIA tools to Facebook Application; Teamsite CMS Wireframes; late RIA Wireframes; Design, Navigation, and Structure for fully-integrated intranet wiki archive of all documentation, design, and content and PM resources (my wiki central doc design and navigational structure was adopted as a model across other CondeNet properties as well).