Riga Technical University has made a new and very interesting Master’s program for students that wants to study Information Communication Technologies in a business context. Program is intended for students with diverse backgrounds and supposed to run in the atmosphere close to real business environment.

The aim of the Business Informatics study programme is to prepare professionals who master systems thinking and engineering sciences; who are able to use, choose, develop, and acquire ICT solutions that enable enterprise development; who can design intra- and inter-organizational information systems; and are capable of participating in corresponding inter-disciplinary and international projects.

This is a 2 year full-time program starting with 2010/11 study year. Studies will be in English.

Post-it notes - a cognitive artifact

Fridge full of post-it notes (what a variety there!) and a shopping list represents something about our mind. In this case we reduce a workload from a memory by externalizing our memory to the outside environment. With these artifacts humans represent information taken from their mind trying to improve their cognitive abilities. External cognition topic is important topic in Human Computer Interaction field as a complement to mental model theory in order to explain human cognition.

As it is suggested in Interaction design book, we use such external representations in order to:

Cognitive artifacts are different from cognitive tools in a way that artifacts are in static representational form while tools require more interaction, just like a modelling software which outputs different results relating to the input data.

Examples

I am amazed how different these artifacts are in various cultures. For instance the quipu recording devices used by Inca civilization – strings containing knots helping to remember something.

As another example a solar clock (sundial) could be mentioned where time is being measured by the position of the sun. First used probably by Egyptians on about 1500 B.C.

Future

As our manufacturing tools improve, cognition representing is becoming more complex. Take visualization of complex networks library or another data-driven vizualization library as an inspiration. What a variety of information design! As the amount of (recognized and processed) data is increasing there is a demand of relevant ways how to visualize them.