There is now a serious discussion taking place about the moment at which
human beings will be surpassed and replaced by the machine. On the one
hand we are designing machines which embed more and more human
intelligence, but at the same time we are in danger of becoming more and
more like machines. In these circumstances, we all need to consider: -
What can we do? - What should we do? - What are the alternatives of
doing it? This book is about the human-centred alternative of designing
systems and technologies. This alternative is rooted in the European
tradition of human-centredness which emphasises the symbiosis of human
capabilities and machine capacity. The human-centred tra- dition
celebrates the diversity of human skill and ingenuity and provides an
alternative to the 'mechanistic' paradigm of 'one best way', the
'sameness of science' and the 'dream of the exact language'. This
alternative vision has its origin in the founding European human-centred
movements of the 1970s. These include the British movement of Socially
Useful Technology, the Scandinavian move- ment of Democratic
Participation, and the German movement of Humanisation of Work and
Technology. The present volume brings together various strands of
human-centred systems philosophy which span the conceptual richness and
cultural diversity of the human-centred movements. The core ideas of
human-centredness include human-machine symbiosis, the tacit dimension
of knowl- edge, the system as a tool rather than a machine, dialogue,
partici- pation, social shaping and usability.