Alex, I saw your post and was briefly excited. But then I saw that the NLP you were referring to was not Natural Language Processing and I became disappointed. I know next to nothing of nuerolinguistic programming, but am vaguely suspicious that it is a pseudoscience concocted for some sort of marketing purpose. But I show bias, since I'm a computational linguist by training and have found an interesting niche in interaction design for language tools. Not language education or training tools, rather tools for information extraction, machine translation, dialogue systems, speech-to-speech translation, etc.
Back to NLP -- Natural Language Processing... if you look toward psychological theories of communication and discourse, it seems there is very much to offer interaction design as a discipline. Look particularly at Herb Clark's 1996 Using Language. Such theories account for how humans build common ground in conversation but also account for how people detect and repair error. In essence, a human-machine interaction is a sort of dialogue. You could say that interaction designers purposefully, and intuitively, exploit this understanding of human communication to enable a sort of loose mixed-initiative dialogue. Researchers working in the area of computational dialogue (e.g., to enable machines to converse with humans via text or speech dialogue) have long mused that the same technology driving speech dialogue could drive interaction with a non-speech or graphical user interface. Mixed modal interfaces such as auto systems that allow you to adjust the radio or comfort inside the car using speech and manipulation are probably the first of these sorts of "dialogue-driven" interfaces close to making it to the commercial marketplace (see papers relating to the DICO project http://dicoproject.org, for example). Until now, speech control has largely been based on simple state machine transactions supported by VoiceXML or other similar formalisms. But richer formalisms supported by dialogue theories may actually be relevant to guided or other sorts of specialized interactions. In any case, if you find you don't understand neurolinguistic programming, perhaps the water is muddy for some purpose.... Lisa Harper The MITRE Corporation On Jan 3, 2008 8:31 AM, Alexander Livingstone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have been thrust into the role of 'ownership' for several engineering > packages from a venerable engineering firm. > They have developed, ahh, organically (I think that's the politest way of > saying it). > > Suffice it to say they need a thorough looking at. I discovered interaction > design about three months ago and have been devouring books on the subject > ever since - I am convinced that it is necessary. > > Coincidentally I also recently read about neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) > which has a wonderfully airy-fairy name, but seems to apply a lot of clever > psychological > methods to looking at and altering people's behaviour and understanding. > > It struck me that some of this would be highly applicable to Interaction > Design - has anyone tried applying NLP methods - or something similar - in > there designs, or am I barking up the wrong tree? > > Thanks, > > Alex. > ________________________________________________________________ > *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* > February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA > Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
