When we speak of information ecologies and human-technology interfaces connecting humanity with universes of knowledge, we may as well be speaking of the Internet, cell phone networks, the library, a school, a telescope, a satellite, a microscope, a radio receiver, a finger, an eyelid.... a psychologist's couch, ad infinitem. Allowing the free mining and flow of information from these sources into human society is what many in computer science, particularly in scientific computing, network analysis, and database integration are engaged in. NPACI is itself one of the leaders in exactly this pursuit.
Inspired to contribute to and help guide this unpredictable pursuit towards a beneficial destiny, former NPACI programmer and interface usability researcher Michael Bedar set out on a different approach to the question of interface, and returns with the documentary Henry and Dovid: Their "Vo-Cabala-ry." Seeking understanding of our universe on many levels, the subjects of this film utilize artifacts in which is imbued, to them, the ability to gain knowledge by virtue of the artifacts' numerical configuration, geometrical arrangement, and nomenclature. The universes they are used to probe, no matter what the domain, are understandable according to these variables and the colorful, expressive, and culturally-rich interpretations that their users engage in. As the chief teacher of this tool, Dovid Krafchow, explains in depth in the film, the tool he uses is but one of many that exhibit universe-compatible configurations.
To deal with the massive amounts of social, geographic, etc. information represented visually and aurally, major trends in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research are scalability, ambient-pervasive computing, natural mapping, and multimodality, including voice, gesture, haptic, eye-tracking, and other interfaces. The tool of understanding in Henry and Dovid: Their "Vo-Cabala-ry," it turns out, is the Tarot cards, and using the Tarot cards incorporates many phenomena seen in HCI.
To to compare the cognitive activity occuring at the Tarot table during Dovid's kind of reading with technological developments with pervasive and ubiquitous computing is to notice basic similarities. In the material realm of the cognitive system, the basic ingredients of the Tarot reading, e.g., table, chairs, cards, and crystals (weights and markers), we note that from Rekimoto to Hollan et al, a table with some form of projection (front, rear, or ingrained plasma), imbued with a physics for manipulating and sorting objects in 2-D, 2.5-D, and 3-D, is all the rage.
