Book Review The Trouble With Computers Thomas K. Landauer MIT Press, 1995, 425 pages Reviewed by."R6ndn Kennedy University College Galway, Ireland ronan, m. kennedy@ucg, ie homas K. Landauer, Professor of Psychology at the Univer ity of Colorado (and former director of Cognitive Science Research at Bellcore) has produced a thorough study of why computers do not produce the promised improvements in efficiency of information work, and proposes a user-centered solution along with some ideas on organizational restructuring. Landauer examines the evidence on computer-augmented productiviq¢ considers the possible reasons for the gap between hopes and realities and sets out a number of case histories that illustrate how User-Centered Design, Development and Deployment works to ameliorate the situation in the real world. In the first section of the book, "The Productivity Puzzle," he leads us through a series of statistics that show that the Information Revolution has not produced the same transformation of office work that the Industrial Revolution did for factory work. In some ways, this beginning is the weakest part of the book, as such economic statistics are open to questions about measurement, definition and interpretation, a weakness which the author admits to. However, the underlying point is
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Book Review: The Trouble With Computers by Thomas K. Landauer
Kennedy, Rónán
Follow ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society
, Volume 27 (2)
Association for Computing Machinery – Jun 1, 1997
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