Article on Web Accessibility

If you are interested in learning more about perspectives on web accessibility, you may be interested in the article Web Accessibility: A Digital Divide for Disabled People by Alison Adams and David Kreps.

You can view the article by using an IU-networked computer or logging into the IU VPN. Here is the link:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x835p22217q3t143/

Regards,

Bob

Class Notes for Tu, 25 Mar 2008

All,

I’ve posted notes from today’s lecture. You can find the notes using either of the two links below:

• Freemind Format (open in Freemind)
• XHTML Format

Regards,

-Bob
rmolnar[at]indiana[dot]edu

Lecture Live Blog 03.04.2008

Kengo Kuma, Tea room building as a critical act

• the construction of the building out of paper is a critique of human spaces and the effect of these spaces on human interaction and condition
  • tea space is built according to the scale of a human (rather than scale of a car, etc..)
  • a notion of temporality, social arrangement, and ritual are in mind when tea houses are constructed
  • material dimensions of tea house connect to the context it is situated in (i.e. natural surroundings)
• How has this aesthetic been translated from exteriors to modern interiors?
  •  make buildings harmonize with their environments, even when those environments aren’t always natural
  • the construction of an artificial garden might be reflected in the tea shelter that it is constructed within
  • might use natural outside light as a means of lighting the minimalist interior surroundings
  • the material of wood is helps construct a warm aesthetic (particularly when paired with incoming natural light)
    • opposed to cold color of concrete
  • use of glass to pull the outside in (in a natural, bucolic setting)
    • achieving a natural aesthetic instead of paneling with wood
  • tea house geometry is incorporated throughout interior design
    when you do design, you intentional intervene in the world to make it a better place and as you engage in any type of design you are acting as a critic
• when you do design, you intentionally intervene in the world to make it a better place and as you engage in any type of design you are acting as a critic
  • to design is to critique

Experience design: is it a change in title, or is it an underlying change in methodology?

Interesting shift in the history of Western philosophy
(in medias res)

•  Nietzsche declared “god is dead”
  • what he did not mean: there was once a god and it died
  • what he meant: there never was a god and we’re finally acknowledging it as a civilization
    • if it is the case  that god is dead, then what is the foundation of philosophy?
• Anselm declared “I believe in order to understand”
  • thus, believing in god was the grounds of scientific reasoning
  • Nietzche’s statement completely upends this perspective
• Camus and the idea of the “absurd”
  • no god and no purpose for our existence and everything that tells us what we should and shouldn’t do no longer holds any weight
  • in this world, can we live ethically
  • can their be an atheist saint?
• In HCI, we are the Camus
  • HCI historically has been a rationalist field
  • many movements over the past several years have rejected this perspective (e.g. McCarthy & Wright)
• Rationalism 101
  • separation of the mind and body (mind-body dualism)
  • Mind = thinking & knowing
    • truth | understanding | intention
    • abstract symbolic representations & systems of truth (e.g. Nielsen’s heuristic)
    • think first (i.e. form an intention) and then we act
  • Body = material things in the world
    • acting | bodies | the world

Take home question: If god were to come up with a usability framework, what would it look like?

mix tapes vs. digital playlists (mediation, meaningful objects and sign values)

Last week, I conducted some user studies to learn about music libraries. One of the participants commented on how cool mix tapes were yet how rarely he creates playlists in iTunes.

I started to wonder about the differences between old and new music media formats. In particular, I was interested in the differences between mix tapes (cassette tapes created by the user from other cassettes or CDs) and digital music playlists (lists of current or saved songs in digital music players like iTunes or Windows media player). I found various theoretical concepts helpful in thinking more precisely about these differences and how we might improve the design of digital music technologies.

Animator vs Animation

Jenny Brown sent around a link to this website.  I believe it does a nice job illustrating many of the aesthetic concepts we struggled with yesterday (especially hypermediation!).

http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf

p.s. if it is illegal to post this link for some reason, I take full responsibility for it and ask you to forget that I mentioned Jenny Brown sent it because that was a lie (even though it’s true).

Dealing with aesthetics

We all have a general conception about aesthetics and we discussed most of that in the class. Based on that I tried to have a discussion with my fellow photographer friends.
In common terms, it is something that is appealing, an epitome of beauty, a piece of art, or more broadly something that gives us joy. It is contextual. It deals with balance and co-ordination, it is a consummation or a closure.
Aesthetics is a subjective responses to the things we consider beautiful.
These were said in class.

Wikipedia defines it as :
Aesthetics is commonly perceived as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as “critical reflection on art, culture and nature.”Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of art. Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world.

Q & A About Expression Assignment

People have asked me some questions about the expression assignment, and I thought I would collect and answer them here. This is important, because if you don’t understand what these key concepts mean, you can’t do the assignment correctly.

Make sure you have a clear idea of what is “an expression” and “an experience” before you attempt this assignment!

Q. Is “the written word” or “film” an expression?

A. Nope. That’s a type of expression. An expression is always concrete, like this particular film, or even this scene from this particular film; or this poem, or even this stanza from this poem; or this story that my mother used to tell; or the jingo from this commercial. In class, we looked at a 5-minute segment of the film, Spirited Away. That film segment was an expression; some of the “an experiences” it seemed to draw upon related to our everyday experiences of adolescence, nightmares, and myth.

Design: Nemesis

Most of people say that there is merely no dichotomy theory to divide an idea, or identification or explanation to explain about a certain phenomenon in an obvious way since there are the numerous things that we cannot explain. I am so tedious with this opinion since I was also telling to LB, and Sean also said to me it as if that is the life.. How is irresponsible! (Sean sorry, it’s just for me, not you!, and sorry to LB

I am just thinking that as if we, human beings don’t try to own any other purpose of life but instinctive goals, this kind of behavior seems like we might give up to take up the responsibility to think, question, and then answer to our own questions to exist here . I might not open to door of thinking space.  

If we don’t refuse to take up the responsibility… even though we already know we have not stopped to find the coherence meanings in hermeneutic cycle and the fundamental characteristic of the world has focused on phenomenological issue, that is, we already used to be, are trapped and will be trapped in our own thinking forever, why we cannot to stop analyze and categorize our own language into a sort of structures, creating new breakdowns or subjective interpretations on the other hand. (Anyway we know the both sides of a coin.)  
      

As a designer who tries to be authentic and flexible, I am also asking to myself. If the thing, we call knowledge, can be coined in a certain consensual domain, design knowledge should be there against the notion of innovation or creativity? (I have no idea if the notion would be called deconstruction or postmodernism or not. Whatever..)   

If putting designer’s own meaning (interpretation) into the center of design consideration will give designer a unique focus that other disciplines do not address, how can they deal with which individual users understand their artifacts and interact with them in their own terms and for their own reason? How do they know the boundary of interpretation in terms of meanings of user in use? Finally, how do designers argue the design knowledge in order to create the consensual area?      

Thus, is it the conclusion by me that design is not subjective or not objective? Hmmm..

I am not confident. I can’t trust myself. Can I be a designer? Do I really think that I am a designer?     

I have no idea why I am unsettled yet. The more I have gathered the evidences to argue my idea, the more my assumption has been agitated. Maybe.. I am worry to collect them since my limitation of design knowledge and ability as a designer would reveals… Maybe.. I would already think I am not good at getting the authorship of meanings of users aroused through their internal and external world.   For me, Designing is like Nemesis that I could not get out of its trap forever. I have no idea why I want to be in the trap, why I want to challenge to it. I could not trust if there is design axiom that could resolve my confusion. Where can I find it?       

If I am avoiding from the nemesis, do I have to be an irresponsible designer who gives up being human? Unreasonable thinking of mine!! :)   

Hey! Sean! I don’t get my answer to my humble question yet. Yes, I am just finding my answer as you said to me. However, I have no idea if I can get it finally or not. In HCI filed, I have to think what the design is again. I will learn it from my smart colleagues and thoughtful professors again and will apply the new realizations to existing design knowledge of mine. I guess this is also my duty as a human being who tells what design is and transfers design knowledge to other disciplines. I just try to do it. I just love the design.

Semiotic dynamics

I’m in an informal reading group with some of the gang from complex systems, cog sci, and linguistics. One of the papers we’re reading for today really illuminated - in an HCI/d way - the talk Jeff was giving yesterday about the shared collective space of intention, meaning, and understanding. Since I know Dewey and Turner, et al, can seem a bit flimsy to some students with a more technical background, I thought the opening page of this paper made a great concrete example of how the complex emergence of meaning impacts our future technical designs.

Here is a link to google scholar (you still have to click the top link “Semiotic dynamics for embodied agents” by L. Steele to get the PDF): http://tinyurl.com/yqv2ov

To make this relate directly to our discussion yesterday, you might just consider semiotics as “words”, dynamics as “interactions”, and embodied agents as “people.” If you’re intrigued, move on to the later pages where you’ll see how the modern research in artificial intelligence (2006), very much mirrors the modern perspective on HCI/d that Indiana U teaches. This technical research in this paper clearly suggests that artificial intelligence specialists need to look at language acquisition and understanding as an emergent property of social context and shared interactions.

Just like Dewey.
” ,

Experience Design = Driving Force in Modern Day Economics or the Next Frontier?

A recent entry on the logic+emotion blog discusses David Lee King’s forthcoming book on digital experience design. In this book preview three main components of experience design for digital media (particularly websites) arise, namely: