Because of Ada Lovelace’s family and education environment, she knew lots of scientists such as Charles Babbage, who was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer. The documentaries of those men’s(people she was associated with) achievement are explicit and well-explained. Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. David Brewster, a British scientist, inventor, author, and academic administrator. He is famous for the discovery of Brewster’s angle. Charles Wheatstone, who was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs such as the English concertina.
From 1842 to 1843, she translated and developed ideas based on an article by an Italian engineer on the calculating engine, called “Notes”. Lovelace’s notes included algorithms that might lead the first computer program to work. Without a doubt, the accomplishment and achievement these men had were significant and helpful to our civilization development, but Ada’s work could be seen as a revolutionary one. Although some people claim that Lovelace’s friend Charles Babbage has the original notes that contain the first program for machine, without Lovelace’s works and her “poetical science mind(asking questions of the machine)”, we might still be ten years behind nowadays computational technology.
Frank Gilbreth, the husband of Lilian Gilbreth, was an American engineer, consultant, and author. He was known for an early advocate of scientific management and a pioneer of time and motion study. They were experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. They worked together on motion, scientific management, and fatigue study. All of these are welled documented, and their children had also written a book telling their stories. Because of their achievements, the award for lifetime achievement by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) is named in Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s honor.
It is important to know these pioneers because their contribution to not only interaction design history, but all human race, are tremendous. As an interaction design student or human-computer interaction design student, knowing about the origin of the revolutionary movement in the world gives us a basic understanding of what are we designing based on. We are practicing digital design and applying machine learning to modern computational devices. Without the exploration of our ancestors, the interaction design field would definitely not occur. Moreover, Ada and Lillian are female scientists that had such revolutionary achievement to the world. It is important to know them because people always tend to think of men as making a contribution to science and technology, however, women also gave great efforts into the development of human civilization.
