Choice: A Material of Interaction Design?

Published September 10th, 2007 in Course Blogs. 3 Comments

Repost from Interaction Culture.

Inspired by Erik Stolterman’s guest lecture, many bloggers this week have discussed that interaction design concerns itself with the “material without qualities.” As mentioned in lecture, all designers work with materials and the qualities of those materials have a profound effect on the product. Many have commented on the growing struggle within the field to identify the materials of interaction design.Yen-ning’s post summarizing the thoughts of McLuhan and Aarseth on the effects of the medium on the message poses the idea that the products of interaction culture require users to highly engage with our designs and generate their own meaning. Users have more power over the medium than ever before and this inherently changes how they interact with it. You might say that user’s engage with interactive media through a series of choices. However, these choices are largely capable as a result of a designer’s intentions. This leads me to believe that choice may be a “material” of interaction design. The level and complexity of choice offered are the “tools” of the designer and the product is the series of actual choices made by the consumer.

Choice might explain some of the previous concepts we’ve discussed regarding interaction culture. Distinctions between early adopting hobbyists and late adopting consumers correlate to their choices within the product and medium. Hobbyists make more detailed choices, perhaps based on a richer set of experiences with the medium, while consumers make simpler choices based on their more limited experiences. Perhaps consumers increase their experiences through increasingly complex choices which lead to a forward movement along the diffusion curve to hobbyists? (or a move to the next cycle as prosumers).

My previous post on reflective learning in interaction culture identifies interactive products (primarily video games) as major contributors to reflective practice. Interactive products promote reflection because of their ability to support and promote choices by the consumer. As you might expect, video games offer more choice than most prior mediums. A great discussion has recently broken out regarding choice as the key design factor in the most successful and memorable games.

So, can choice be a quality of the material of interaction design?

I590 Lecture Liveblog: 9-6-2007

Published September 10th, 2007 in Liveblog and Course Blogs. 2 Comments

Repost from Interaction Culture.

Manovich - Interaction CultureManovich draws heavily from Russian literary theory and Marxism. A focus on modes of production and consumption.”Digital materialism … principles of computer hardware and software and the operations involved in creating cultural objects on a computer to uncover a new cultural logic at work.” (p.7) [means of production]

However, he may draw on some structuralist theory.

  • “The Language of New Media.”
  • “Montage”
  • “I use ‘language’ as an umbrella term to refer to a number of various conventions used by designers of NM objects to organize data and structure the user’s experience.” (p.7)

Structure tends to trump content. Meaning comes from the structure of a sentence and not individual words.

Information Culture - “includes the ways in which information is presented in different cultural sites and objects .. Includes historical methods for organizing and retrieving information..”

Language - “it was important for me to use the word language to signal the different focus of this work: the emergent conventions, recurrent design patterns nd key forms of new media.”

Gene is a unit of the physical and biological. Meme is a unit of the cultural.

Object - “may be a digital still, digitally composited film, virtual 3-D environment..” (p.12)

  • Modularity of media
  • CS object
  • Russian constructivist notion of art that pointed toward factory production of art, rather than studio

Avant garde artist approach to scientific like experimentation of cultural forms.

Advocates a novel approach to analyzing new media with regard to previous media.

“New media objects are cultural objects .. thus … can be said to represent, as well as help construct, some outside referent: a physically existing object, historical information..” (p.15)

What does a YouTube video represent? A piece of culture? Vessel for content? The video stands in a as proxy for the subject whose likeness is transmitted through the video to the viewer. Different vessels (media) offer different and/or better representations of the original.

Construction may be the meaning that the author puts into the film, perhaps at the request of viewers. Alternatively, it may be the meaning that viewers construct based on their unique life experiences.

I590 Lecture Liveblog: 9-4-2007

Published September 10th, 2007 in Liveblog and Course Blogs. 1 Comment

Repost from Interaction Culture.

Liveblog for the 9-4-2007 lecture. No promises that I’ll come back and clean this up, but please comment and continue with the lecture discussions!

Interaction design concerns itself with “the material without qualities.”For all design disciplines, the notion of design material is critical. In many cases, we describe design professions in regards to the materials they work with. Carpenters are described as designers who work with wood, potters with clay, architects with buildings, etc.An example from organizational design. What are the materials of design of the strategic plan for the School of Informatics?

  • Goals
  • Rules and Regulations

Not quite, these goals are shared by many professions. Carpenters have goals and rules.

  • Students
  • Faculty
  • Curriculum

These are closer to the materials used to design the School’s strategic plan.

The similarities and differences between materials help create the different design disciplines. The process for creating a pot and a shelf might be quite similar, but give a carpenter clay and a potter wood and they will not know what to do. Material is central to their design craft. Craftspeople (designers) intuitively know that a deep understanding of the material of design is essential to the discipline.

However, there is a distinct difference in the case of organizational designers and those of carpentry, pottery, etc. Organizational designers work with a material (people, policies, etc) that is often far removed from the materials that the business produces (cars, televisions, health care, etc.). CEOs are almost expected to hop industries during their career as a means to refine their craft of organizational design. However, this is not without some struggle as often times a CEO with an unrelated background to that of their new company is vilified by underlings in the organization who doubt the CEOs ability to manage a corporation without understanding the intricacies of the product (material).

So, what is the material of interaction design and how well do you as a designer need to understand the material?

Is there a differentiation between material and tool? Carpenters may not know the history and physics of the hammer, do interaction designers need to understand computers from silicon chips to iconography?

For carpentry, classifying tools and materials is relatively easy. Wood vs. hammer is well understood. What about a programming language? Where does it fall on the spectrum of materials to tools.

What about the constraints that material and tools place on the designer? Wood can only support so much weight and has a specific temperature at which it burns. Hammers can only apply so much force to a nail before they shatter. What are the limits to computational and information technologies?

What about the recursive nature of tools and materials? For many design disciplines, tools are created out of a new need to refine the material. Developing new tools opens up new possibilities for use of existing materials or allows for the acquisition of new materials.

What does it mean to be a good interaction designer in terms of the material? Design disciplines allow for varied relations to the material. The distance from designer to the material influences the quality of the designed product. Imagine a web designer who publishes a page using Google Pages vs. one who programs HTML directly into a text editor. The one who creates HTML directly is more intimate with the material and seeks a level of precision and control not offered by the Google Pages tool.

Materials and tools of design are shared and iterative. The product of one designer may become the material or tool for another. Every tool brings with it a certain set of features and abilities that influence the what the designer can do with the material. A good designer is extremely careful with their tools. At a certain point of skill, designers require the very best possible tools else they are restricted in their ability to modify the material.

The sign of a good designer is someone who knows their tools and why they need those tools. Alternatively, a really good designer can appropriate almost any tool for their work because they have mastered execution of their craft and can compensate for lesser tools.

Even the “material without qualities” has restrictions and limitations. How do you blend digital and physical materials? What will we learn about the limitations of each through their composition?

If digital products have qualities, how can the material they are produced with have none?

Reflection and Identity in Interaction Culture

Published September 10th, 2007 in Course Blogs. 0 Comments

Repost from Interaction Culture.

In the wee (not Wii) hours of the morning on Friday, I was preparing notes on the development and motivations of MMOG players. MMOGs, like many previous media, are a means for exploring ones own identity through experimentation with others. MMOG players enjoy a highly interactive form of anonymous, exploratory identity play in the vein of Turkle’s “performance,” Bartle’s “journey,” Caillois’ “mimicry,” and Jenkins’ “safe places.”What makes identity exploration in MMOGs different from previous media? Like all media immersion and reflection are critical tools for identity exploration. However, in MMOGs the level of immersion and nature of reflection are quite different than the mostly passive medias of television, radio, literature, etc.Immersion reaches a new level in games. As noted by Aphra Kerr, “Players do not passively identify with an avatar like the lead in a film, they are [emphasis added] the avatar.” In no previous media have consumers been given such opportunity to directly control what they see, do, hear, feel, etc. All outcomes are under the control of the player. In fact, the very decision to have outcomes and a story is subject to the desires of the player.

All medias serve as grounds for reflection. How often have you read a great novel and engaged in a meaningful, internal discussion of why the protagonist did what they did? How often (outside of Goosebumbs choose-your-own-adventure series) have you been given the opportunity to go back to the book and change the outcome of the novel? In games, players are given the benefit of reflection in and on action. For the benefit of those without I501 this year, here’s a brief summary of learning through reflection.

Reflection-in-action is the immediate recursive thought given towards the current action “during which we can still make a difference to the situation at hand–our thinking serves to reshape what we are doing while we are doing it.”

Reflection-on-action is the process of “thinking back on what we have done in order to discover how our knowing-in-action may have contributed to an unexpected outcome.”

Games are almost explicitly built on the principles of reflection in and on action. The heightened levels of experimentation, trial and error and surprise outcomes make games an amazing platform for identity exploration.

So, how does this relate to interaction culture? In 2002, James Newman wrote in his paper In search of the video game player: The lives of Mario that “videogame representation is indicative of an industry in its immaturity still struggling to understand itself.” Up to this point, the nature of games and MMOGs to support identity exploration has happened largely by circumstance and luck. As media converge and as a whole become more interactive and immersive, they universally suffer from the same lack of understanding about how they support exploration and representation of their users.

Does anyone have a critical language of interaction design to help us formulate a shared discussion on identity in the media of our new interaction culture?

First!

Published September 7th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

First on my own blog, go figure.

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