In “Reimagining Computer Literacy,”  Stuart Selber urges educators in the humanities and liberal arts to have input into human-computer interface design.  These educators represent a major resource for uncovering the unexamined features in the human-computer interface that shape “how students think about, and engage in, discourse-related activities,” not to mention contributing to “reproducing the dominant cultural values” while blithely ignoring the implications for such socially contextual issues as race, class, and gender (12).

As I read through Selber’s discussion, I thought about my own experiences with the human-computer interfaces in my life.  I suppose that for the most part, once I have learned to use them, they become invisible.  But when confronted with a new program, or even an unfamiliar area of one I already use, I often find myself face-to-face with frustration.  I know what I want to do, but I cannot figure out how to make it happen.  The interface itself seems to be an obstacle instead of a tool.  For all the casual tossing about of the term ‘intuitive’ when it comes to these situations, my experience has been that intuition has little place in the learning curve.  Help files are usually not helpful, and seem to have been written by someone deliberately trying to obscure and complicate their language.  I imagine that input from professionals who know language, understand subtleties of communication, and are sensitive to cultural relevancies—people such as humanities and English teachers—could lend valuable insights into how to make the interfaces friendlier, as well as more neutral regarding embedded values oriented toward the mechanical productivity of the dominant cultural model.

What would a human-computer interface designed by English professors and humanities professionals look like?   What would a word processor (this very oxymoronic name calls up images of manufactories and possibly abattoirs, instead of a place where discourse is crafted and creativity is engaged) look like if English teachers constructed it to facilitate student writing and communication?  What would the research page of a database search engine look like if it were designed by and for the people who use it instead of the people selling it?  Personally, I think that most of such pages currently appear as formidable foes rather than the allies in research that they should.  I eagerly await the development of new versions of the human-computer interface made to reflect the image of its creators: people.