Wendy March and her research on "ordinary people"

Wendy March is an interaction designer, and she is doing a interesting research on teen girls and communications technology. (http://www.intel.com/research/researchers/w_march.htm)
The angle she focuses on is not the "special", but the ordinary people. It is a remarkable angle, and made for a compelling argument that the design has impact the ordinary, boring activities that usually escape the notice of researchers and product developers.
One example is: Interviewing a Japanese housewife about how she spends money, it turns out she takes a wad of cash with her every week and physically deposits it in three bank accounts in three different banks. Asked about online banking, she explained that it was too expensive, and too easy -- the walking and depositing was integral to the way she managed her money. "We keep trying to make things seamless and easy," observed March about this discovery, "but maybe people don't want it to be seamless and easy."

how do we think about technology? Reading "Natural Born Cyborgs"

how do we think about technology?

To a infant, every thing is new, she is totally a learner. As an older person, we learn "who am I" by exprience the life. the information day by day is always changealbe, we absorb and selet the information in different ways depending our personalities, relationships, realities and cultural backgrounds. What is real, what is not real? People pay attention on the environment. when we look around, we see many things involve technologies. The technologies are invoving to our life style and it seems become part of our life. I notice when I am communicating online that my face usually mirrors whatever emotion I am feeling and/or trying to express - I have caught myself smiling at my monitor when sharing a joke with a friend in IM. I don't have to think about my face as much when I am just looking at a computer, so I think maybe I work less at controlling it, not more, than when I am face-to-face with someone. Interesting.

Reading: Natural Born Cyborgs (Andy ClarkMake)

Chapter 4
Question1: First, Please try the first 2 experiments on this chapter on Pages 59-60.
question2: given this adaptability with our external world and our ability to accommodate seemingly artificial things to be part of this speculate on what could be done with this ability?

They are interesting questions. Since our bio-body is a whole, combining and balancing all the actions and functions, and the brain control and balance all of these information and functions by sending signals and receiving signals. We don't notice that because we don't need to, our "mind" have other things to do. But all of these body systems are able to make things out. Something has become our instinct, the exprience and skills that we learn. But sometimes the "instinct" could be wrong. seems we only believer our instinct, and all the instinct all from our exprience. Those exprience become(creater) our soft sense, and these "soft sense" can fool our judgement, mess up the balance between the body and mind, that is what the experiments in the book about.