ABSTRACT
The main idea of this historical review about human-computer interaction (HCI) models is that technology (considered as téchnê) has to be understood as an extension of human abilities. Derrick De Kerckhove, director of the Marshal McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technologies, claims that technologies are a “second skin” (1995) able to modify the human mind and extend the senses. In order to understand this concept, we rst need to consider that in today’s society interactions between humans and systems have become daily actions. In this kind of society, dened as “e-societies,” or “information and knowledge society” (Bindé, 2005), people consider access to and use of information as important goods. Second, we must also consider that each dialogue between users and computers is mediated by an interface that uses graphic elements, affordances (Gibson, 1979), and relations between elements. These interfaces indicate to users the actions they should perform in order to achieve a goal. In this sense, the technological product (i.e., the interface) is not only a “means” for communication, but, to a certain extent, also becomes an interlocutor for the user. In order to achieve their goals, users are forced to adapt their skills to the technologies they are dealing with and therefore are also forced to extend and partially change their abilities, transforming the technologies into a “second skin.” Without any intent of reductionism, we may consider De Kerckhove’s idea of technology as a second skin to be an extreme extension of the distributed cognition concept (Hutchins, 1980, 1995), an extension that is well justied by the extreme relation between human and technology in today’s societies. Edwin Hutchins (2001), professor of cognitive science at the University of California, describes the concept of distributed cognition as
In an information society, the relationship between human and material artifacts (which, in our case, are information and communication technologies [ICTs]) is a wide and pervasive process that changes the way information is accessed and used; indeed, these external relations become internal and symbolic, thus changing users’ cognitive processes. As Hutchins (2001) states:
Hutchins, together with his colleagues at the University of California, James Hollan and David Krish (2000), claims that distributed cognition has a deep impact on HCI:
We will use the idea of technology as a second skin as a conceptual background for our analysis, by endorsing a perspective in which the interaction is a pervasive process of distributed cognition. The second-skin metaphor suggests that any user interacting with any technology is forced into some kind of adaptation that results into a modication of the same user’s cognitive processes. However, each different user adapts to the technology in a different way, which reects in different abilities of learning the system, quality and time of performances, number of problems, and solutions found during the interaction. The users’ adaptation is the core cognitive process of the relation between human and technology because it is necessary to grant a satisfactory dialogue, together with two technological conditions: rst, the access to the system (accessibility) and second, the opportunity to learn and use the system in a effective way (usability).
