Just fantastic technology all around. Absolutely no worry where this is all going to go.

Is it just me? Am I using this wrong or am I asking questions that are too hard?

Here’s an example of a hallucination that happened while explaining away another hallucination I called it out on. I rarely have experiences other than these.

@mwichary Claude Opus 4.5 (probably overkill but my default) gave Lillian Gilbreth, Susan Kare, Lucy Suchman, Muriel Cooper, Joy Mountford, Brenda Laurel, and Elizabeth Sanders. I'm not familiar with all of them, but its explanations of them seemed to be in line with what I looked up, at least at a high level. I had "thinking" enabled in an incognito chat (no previous context), used your prompt verbatim, and it opted to answer without performing web searches. Will thread its full response.

@mwichary

Several remarkable women have shaped the fields of interface design, human factors, and ergonomics:

**Lillian Gilbreth (1878–1972)** is often called the "mother of modern management." She was among the first working female engineers with a PhD and pioneered time-and-motion studies alongside her husband Frank. After his death, she focused on applying ergonomic principles to domestic spaces—designing the "work triangle" kitchen layout, foot-pedal trash cans, and refrigerator door shelves. She consulted for GE, Johnson & Johnson, and other companies on making products more usable.

**Susan Kare (b. 1954)** created the original Macintosh icons, fonts (Chicago, Geneva, Monaco), and interface elements in the 1980s—the happy Mac, the command symbol, the trash can, the paint bucket. She essentially invented the visual language of the graphical user interface and later designed icons for Microsoft, Facebook, and Pinterest.

**Lucy Suchman (b. 1951)** worked at Xerox PARC and wrote *Plans and Situated Actions* (1987), which fundamentally challenged assumptions about how people interact with machines. Her ethnographic approach influenced how designers think about context and real-world use rather than idealized user behavior.

**Muriel Cooper (1925–1994)** founded the Visible Language Workshop at MIT Media Lab and pioneered digital typography and information design. Her work on dynamic, three-dimensional information spaces anticipated many modern interface concepts.

**Joy Mountford** led Apple's Human Interface Group in the late 1980s and early 1990s, shaping the direction of Mac interface design during a formative period.

**Brenda Laurel (b. 1950)** wrote *Computers as Theatre* (1991), applying dramatic theory to interaction design, and was a pioneer in virtual reality research and designing technology for girls.

**Elizabeth Sanders** developed participatory design and co-design methods that brought end users into the design process as active contributors rather than passive subjects.

Would you like me to go deeper on any of these figures or explore others in related areas?

@aschmitz This is better than what I got, I think. I don’t think Lucy Suchman came up for me.
@aschmitz I used ChatGPT and it gave me a lot more names and categories, but alas at least one was made up.

@mwichary If I ask for ten more and very brief descriptions, I do get more:

~~~
**Yvonne Rogers** – cognitive scientist whose work on ubiquitous computing and external cognition shaped how we think about technology in everyday environments

**Wendy Mackay** – HCI researcher at Inria who pioneered work on augmented reality, paper interfaces, and participatory design methods

**Bonnie John** – developed GOMS modeling techniques for predicting human performance with interfaces, long associated with Carnegie Mellon

**Jodi Forlizzi** – Carnegie Mellon professor known for service design and social robotics research

**Gillian Crampton Smith** – founded the influential interaction design program at Royal College of Art and later the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea

**Terry Winograd** – actually, let me replace this one

**Pattie Maes** – MIT Media Lab professor who pioneered software agents and wearable computing interfaces

**Abigail Sellen** – Microsoft Research scientist known for work on the psychology of reading, paper vs. screens, and memory in HCI

**Irene Au** – led user experience and design at Google (2006–2012), scaling UX practice across the company

**Karen Holtzblatt** – co-created Contextual Design, an influential user-centered design methodology

**Loren Terveen** – actually, let me replace

**Sara Kiesler** – Carnegie Mellon social psychologist whose research on human-robot interaction and online communication was foundational
~~~

Upon further questioning, it indicates it replaced Terry and Loren because they're men. I'm actually surprised to see that happen, I've never seen it "backtrack" in non-thinking-preamble text. Claude is pretty good at following directions, I suspect I could ask for a dozen from each category too. But I'm far out of my depth at knowing off the top of my head whether it's right or not, and not in a position to research to confirm them right now.

@aschmitz Yeah, this backtracking is strange and interesting and bad in its own way! Also, I worked for Irene back in the day.