Here are a few of the resources that I mentioned in today’s class …
Boxes and Arrows, a journal “devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design”: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/
“Pencils Before Pixels: A primer in hand-generated sketching” - a great article from the current issues of Interactions: http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1081
(You’ll need to view after logging in to the IUB VPN or using your Interactions subscription id)
Another great resource is the book The Elements of User Experience, by Jesse James Garrett. It’s a little old and web-centric, but it’s great for the basics of IA: http://tinyurl.com/38dzu7
I’d be interested to learn of other resources that you might have. Please contribute …
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.
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!).
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).
In dialog surrounding the reviews of a recent paper a colleague and I submitted, one of the reviewers, resisting our call for a greater emphasis on criticism in interaction design on the grounds that psychology already does it, asked the following question:
How can you prevent the “anything-goes-subjectivism” when the judgments are not objective?
This is the kind of question that drives me–and I think anyone trained in the humanities–crazy. My immediate reaction is that this question is both naive and bigoted, not merely privileging that person’s own scientific background, but categorically excluding the possibility of intellectual contribution from anywhere in the liberal arts (art history, literary criticism, fashion design, philosophy, music, film, etc.).
But after some reflection, I realized that my reaction isn’t good enough. Here’s why:
In the wake of our discussion on Representation and Speculation approaches in HCI, I thought I would write a short post to pose a question. Granted that these categories aren’t exclusive, where do techniques such as personas and scenarios lie on this continuum? Personas are a common technique used in user-centered design and indeed do “speculate” on how certain groups or members of particular demographics go about their daily lives (or work contexts). Ultimately, the aim of personas is to help designers empathize with their target group and create a design that appropriately fits in their lives. While personas have a speculative quality, they are staunchly grounded in representation. User research (or sometimes just market research) techniques are used to synthesize accounts of human experience into one (or a small set) of primary and secondary “users” that objectively represent wide–and oftentimes diverse–populations of people. That’s not to say this approach is bad, rather this example simply illustrates it’s rationalist underpinnings.
So where do scenarios lie? The puzzle becomes more complicated for me. Similar to personas, scenario task descriptions emerged early in the development of user-centered design. Essentially, a scenario describes human activities or tasks in a story that creates a space for exploration of contexts, needs, and requirements. Scenarios are intended to capture personalized user perspectives relating to their activities, potentially leading to the development of new requirements.
During task scenario sessions, users reflect on hypothetical circumstances to generate the best assumption of how they might react in the given situation. These reflective descriptions are then synthesized into objectively reproducible design constraints. In contrast, approaches such as experience prototyping directly engage users in simulations, stimulating the physical and sensorial (as well as intellectual) nature of interacting with an artifact, system, or environment. Via simulation, experience prototyping engages participants directly in their own meaning making processes and designers aim to interpret these rich understandings (based on their own designerly ways of knowing) and incorporate them within specific design situations. It’s debatable exactly where experience prototyping lies on the continuum (I vote mostly speculation), however, in light of this example, scenarios fall strongly within representation. …but do they always?
Along with the growing movement toward human-centered design, new techniques and perspectives are being proposed to take into account the broader effects and unintended consequences design may produce on the world’s environments and inhabitants. Specifically, value-scenarios have been proposed as a method to support critical, systemic thinking throughout the design process about the ramifications of introducing new technological designs into the world. In this case, value-scenarios represent a speculative extension of an approach rooted in representation (i.e. scenario-based design). I think this example is interesting in that it illustrates the boundaries between categories we construct can be quite fluid and mutually inform each other. That’s not to say these categories aren’t good or useful, but rather critical examination of particular practices could lead to future productive synergies.
I have mixed feelings about posting this video, and WordPress won’t let me paste the object/embed code–not sure what’s up with that, so here’s a link instead:
It is supposedly a work of “multimedia art” (in the words of the usually hip Salon.com), shown at the usually hip Sundance, which shows how virtual sweatshop workers can design jean styles in Second Life and then print them into clothes in real life. This is disappointing as “art,” because I expect art to push conceptual limits, to stretch my thinking, and not merely to play catch-up to concepts that are passé to anyone who isn’t a complete noob in virtual worlds.
But it is not as disappointing as experimental e-commerce. Set aside the facile pedantry about sweatshops, and instead imagine these machines not as “virtual sweatshops” but rather as self-service clothing design and purchase portals: now the consumer gets to style and construct, in a social virtual space, the pants that they buy. This design carries on the logic of those build-a-bear stores into virtual reality, and it is reasonable to speculate that the engagement offered by those build-a-bear stores just might translate into everyday RL fashion shopping.
File this under “right idea, but for the wrong reason.”
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.
I502 started with the question of how can we (as interaction designers) design compelling experiences, such as those we experience when watching compelling films. Reading dewey caused me to step back and reflect on the very experiences we design and intend to design. When I see the term “experience design” used, it often seems to imply that designer attempts complete control over the experience of the user, i.e. the particular details of the experience are (ideally) designed prior to and in anticipation of use. In the Language of New Media, Manovich suggests that interactive new media actually exerts more control over the user than traditional media, by imposing the mental structures of the designer on the user, and i think in certain circumstances he may be right, e.g. following links on the blogs can prevent undergoing. Interactive environments such as grocery stores and amusement parks are often discussed in terms of Experience Design, where every aspect is attempted to be controlled in order to lead to increased repeat visits and increased consumption. This notion of “experience” and “experience design” is often used as pejorative.Two common critiques I see leveled against designed “experiences” are that they are (i) vicarious or simulated (divorced from reality) and hence not real or authentic, and (ii) passively consumed. I’d like to discuss some of these criticisms of the potential negative effects of vicarious, simulated, and passively consumed experience and then offer some relevant questions I’ve been thinking about.
I’ve been reflecting recently on the Johnny Chung Lee phenomenon. As probably anyone reading this already knows, Lee is the Ph.D. student at CMU whose work in HCI has gone viral. For example, his head tracking trick for the Wii has been viewed on YouTube, as of now, 1.6 million times.
What has struck me most about this is the sheer number of people–friends, former and current students, even family members–who have sent me links to his videos over the past several months. As far as my inbox is concerned, he’s outgunned the Numa Numa kid. I realized that he has probably touched (directly at least) more people in HCI than perhaps anyone ever has via CHI.
I was reading a book on film theory, French Cinema: A Student’s Guide (Powrie & Reader, Oxford University Press, 2002; currently out of print in the USA), and I found a chapter that I really wish I had assigned to this class (there is always next fall, right?).
The chapter contains a very handy description with some examples of a technique known as “sequence analysis,” which is a structuralist-inspired meat-and-potatoes analysis of a film sequence (usually 7-12 minutes, comprising a single narrative unit). One of the reasons I wish you had all seen it is because, though clearly inspired by structuralism (particularly the notion of syntagmatic analysis), it doesn’t wallow in theory and fancy words, but actually gets very serious and specific about analyzing units of film in a way that anyone can understand and emulate.
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HCI, Interaction Design, User-Centered Design, prototyping | Tagged: Information Architecture, prototyping, Resources | 
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Posted by Bob Molnar
