What is Natural
One of my biggest worries about being a Computer Science student is that I don’t know how to code. I struggled with my code in almost all of my programming classes and that made me feel Computer Science was just not my thing and coding became something I did not enjoy. A few months ago, I had a very narrow view of the world of Computer Science, but after this semester, my perspective has changed drastically. My seminar on Human-Computer Interaction has proved to me that there is more to Computer Science than just algorithms and coding. Even though I really enjoyed studying the theoretical bits, algorithms, and data structures, I wanted something meaningful. This seminar .. challenged curiosity
One of the best aspects of this seminar was the open structure and student-directed. This allowed us to take the conversation where we wanted and it never felt like we were discussing something that’s not related to the material. Before coming into the seminar, I had never taken a class longer than 1.5 hours and I was so nervous about sitting through a long class because I have a short attention span. The first day in, I didn’t even realize how quickly class went by.
Reflecting on our conversations about natural interfaces and prototyping models based on human centered design made me realize how it is complicated yet necessary to engineer accessible solutions. The transition to remote learning reinforced this idea. Ironically, our seminar on human computer interaction became a literal human computer interaction. Students, professors, staff, and faculty were asked to reconnect after an extended Spring Break, but now all online. A few years after I graduate, I think the one thing I would remember the most is the transition to online learning. It was a huge adjustment and looking back at the beginning of the “new semester”, I have realized how quickly everything became the new norm. The knowledge I learned from my peers and professor in this class was very applicable throughout the online semester. Every lecture I attended for my other classes, I began to wonder how the experience would be different in class compared to online. For example, in Oceanography, we had a class on identifying marine invertebrates. We were divided into breakout rooms, similar to our group discussions with our peers at our table. We were divided into the same breakout rooms as our class discussion groups to maintain a sense of normalcy. While most of our online oceanography classes consisted of lectures, this class required us to observe fossils of marine critters and identity features about how they adapted, lived, ate, etc. Usually, this would have been done in person and we would have interacted with the fossils using all five senses, but the transition online made this impossible. Instead, we had to identify features only using pictures. This made me wonder how we could make this activity feel more natural.
There are so many other classes at Smith that require students to complete labs, do experiments or even perform. Designing an interface(s) to meet the needs of so many professors and students would be a challenge, but we can use this pandemic and the transition to remote interaction as a way to design future solutions. Maybe future computers with built-in 3-D printers so users, specifically students can carry on their work without compromising hands-on learning experiences. In this case, the 3D printer would help me teammates and I print replicas of the fossils and identify the features. This might be helpful for the future, not only for future pandemics but also for the future when our dependence on technology increases.
The last time the world experienced a large pandemic like this was over a century ago and while technology has advanced to become more natural, there are still ways where it can be improved. Before this pandemic, the technology available to us was based on our dependence on it. During this pandemic as our dependence has increased, the need for more natural technology is more noticeable. I always wondered whether we evolve with technology or if technology evolves with us. Coming into this class without much prior knowledge of natural user interfaces, I thought humans evolved with technology. The simplest example I have of this is of many toddlers and young children growing up adapting to technology, knowing how it works without even being taught whereas so many adults struggle with figuring out basic functionality. After this semester I think it’s both, but there is also another missing category that I realized was missing, technology evolving with technology. Apple has been known for its compact and sleek design, their recent changes to their devices caused much disagreement. The restructure of their headphone jack, the removal of their USB ports on the new Macbook has caused many manufacturers to design separate accessories to suit this redesign. The reason behind Apple’s choice was the fact that people are increasingly using Bluetooth devices. The recent introduction of AirPods is an example of how Apple evolved with its own technology.
This pandemic has made me realize that devices and interactions that seemed natural to us before social distancing are not natural to us anymore. We had created spaces with our devices which made them seem natural and suit a purpose, but with this pandemic, these boundaries were taken down and the whole experience seems alien. This pandemic will help us design interfaces to seem more natural in preparation for future catastrophes, maybe another pandemic, or climate change disasters.
