Interface and Interpretation

For her final entry in the book, Drucker sets her sights into more contemporary uses of information visualizations and takes us into a historical tour of the development of graphical user interfaces and the realm of HCI.

According to Drucker, the development of such interfaces, based on "user experience", is highly mechanistic and designed to maximize efficiency in performing tasks (instrumental, analytic, or research oriented) in a successful way.

In her view, we should aspire to create a humanistic interface, which she perceives as a combination of a map of data and a set of tasks to perform. Drucker believes that a way to start developing this is by providing the subject (not the user), with an interface that exposes and supports the activity of interpretation.

After reading this chapter I have to admit that I'm still struggling to fully comprehend her ideas and views on developing this subject oriented interface.