Human-Centered Computing : Toward a Human Revolution

C omputing is leading a revolution—everything we do is changing at a pace never experienced before in human history. Whether we talk about the pervasive, ubiquitous, mobile, grid, or even the social computing revolution, we can be sure that computing is impacting the way we interact with each other, the way we design and build our homes and cities, the way we learn, the way we communicate, the way we play, the way we work. Simply put, computing technologies are increasingly affecting and transforming almost every aspect of our daily lives. Unfortunately, the changes are not always positive, and much of the technology we use is clunky, unfriendly, unnatural, culturally biased, and difficult to use. As a result, several aspects of daily life are becoming increasingly complex and demanding. We have access to huge amounts of information, much of which is irrelevant to our own local sociocultural context and needs or is inaccessible because it is not available in our native language, we cannot fully utilize the existing tools to find it, or such tools are inadequate or nonexistent. Thanks to computing technologies, our options for communicating with others have increased, but that does not necessarily mean that our communications have Human-centered computing studies the