02.28.2008 Lecture–Critical Review

The critique assignment is due by midnight, February 29 (thank leap year!).

• make your writing concise and don’t go too much over the word limit
• iterate on your ideas throughout the process from constructing your outline to written drafts
• use the writing tutorial services , number = 812-855-6738

Critical reflection on the course:
We began the course by drawing on perspectives (e.g. Dilthey, Dewey, Turner, etc..) to understand what experience is (and the distinction between experience and an experience). This month we’ve been focusing on critical approaches to interpreting experience and how this can help inform design practice. The course will soon shift to applying this collective knowledge to experience design projects. The critique assignment gives you an opportunity to apply the dense theoretical work we’ve been talking about to specific phenomena (in the form of critical judgment–not a mere opinion!).

All of the works we’ve read this month have certain underlying themes in common:

Criticism / Judgment

• differs greatly from opinion–they are analytical and oftentimes explicit about criteria (for criticism)
• involves taking an explicit stance
  • case example: universal accessibility (e.g. universal design)

Hermeneutics

Remediation

How do you establish critical competence? How do you yourself distinguish the validity or viability of your own thoughts and emerging critical perspectives of phenomena? There’s no framework or cookbook for doing this, however the following can play an important role in helping you along the way:

Theoretical vocabularies–help you think about phenomena and use a language to engage in productive (and thus critical) discussions

Many examples-encountering and examining a wide scope of related phenomena in the world

Many experiences–drawing on a wealth of experiences of acting (and reflecting on these interactions) in the world

Critical self-reflection–reflection, or meta-analysis, is an important part of the process to constructing a critical argument (ties closely with Donald Schon’s theorizing in the Reflective Practitioner

*These elements are constitutive of cultivating critical discourse. Feel free to use this blog to engage in critical exercises.

Also, for those interested, there’s an interesting discussion of critical design featured on designobserver..

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).

Are designed experiences “real”? (and other initial thoughts on Dewey and experience design)

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.

Parting Shots from 2007

I’d like to thank all members of the class for participating in this blog during our class. As I mentioned, I intend to keep it alive going into the new year, and you are welcome to continue contributing (and I hope people will!). I wanted to close with a few random notes and announcements.

I was pleased overall with the final exams and papers, and I hope all of you will consider sending your paper to Tyler for "publication" in the top secret, draft-only collection he is assembling.

If you would like feedback on your paper and/or you wish to discuss moving it forward for submission to a conference, please schedule a half hour to meet with me.

The real reason for this post is that I got tired of seeing "Drunk Women on Facebook" heading up our site for over a week. Sheesh! Can’t we be a little more artsy?

Speaking of artsy, I watched some lovely films earlier this week. One is My Life as a Dog, a Swedish film from about 20 years ago or so. Not only was it poignant and moving in its own right, but it also contributed immensely to my understanding of the cultural logic underlying the phenomenon known as Erik Stolterman. The other is The Double Life of Veronique, which was made by Krzysztof Kieslowski, who also directed Trois Couleurs: Bleu, which I showed a bit of in class (the car crash sequence). Veronique was a dreamy film that didn’t make a lot of logical sense, and yet somehow felt right. Plus it was beautifully shot and scored, of course, being a Kieslowski film.

Happy holidays to all!

Post lecture notes?

Hey Chief-

This is a friendly reminder to post your lecture notes (such as they are) to oncourse so we may profit from your hours of preparation and hard work.  Excluding any blood sweat and tears is appreciated.

Attention Economy of Memes

We discussed meme’s in class earlier this week in relation to complex systems and HCI. As we mentioned, meme’s are a unit of cultural propagation similar to gene’s for the propagation of DNA. The Internet is responsible for dramatically increased rates of memetic cultural proliferation. However, the rate of memetic proliferation on the Internet has led to the discussion of a (sort of) new phenomena, the attention economy.First coined by the one and only Herbert Simon in 1971.

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” 

Recently the notion of an attention economy has entered popular interaction design discourse. Specifically, the attention economy has gained a foothold in terms of customer retention on e-commerce sites. Keeping customers involved on a site with relevant information that enables purchasing decisions is a taxing enterprise. The most common solution is to use some sort of recommendation system, but we’re starting to see the limits of those systems as the complexity of e-commerce systems increase. Another concern of the attention economy, especially as it pertains to e-commerce, is the use of potentially private browsing behaviors for corporate gain. Essentially, what right does Amazon have to use my browsing behavior to improve the effectiveness of their recommendation system to increase their future profits? Sure, I might get a better recommendation too, but you can see the gray area.Now to go back to memes. Are meme’s subject to the attention economy? Will meme’s hit a “wall” like recommendation systems? Will the proliferation of meme’s expand so fast and so far that they we lose our ability to focus on any of them or are meme’s impervious to the effects of the attention economy? Or will those meme’s simply be replaced with others that do grab our attention?One last thought for the road.Recommendation systems are an attempt to control attention by providing helpful and relevant information. What systems do we have (or might we have) to control memetic propagation online? We’ve seen plenty of examples in previous posts about how designers embed values into designers (intentional and not) so how are we embedding memes in our designs?

Lots & Lots of Picutres

I have a final paper question that I had planned to discuss with Jeff in person, but I’ve decided to make it a blog post instead - just in case anyone else is struggling with the same question.

Topically, my paper seeks to analyze the editor UI’s of three popular 3D modeling programs (3dsmax, Maya and Cinema4D), with each representing a specific, historical moment in the evolution of this ilk of UI’s.

My line of inquiry holds that the long march through the years and these three UI’s manifests a shifting from procedural to transitional to purely object-oriented approaches and philosophies.

What’s important is that I am using a lot of images to make and illustrate my points. And thus, a large portion of my 8-10 pages has already been consumed by images. And bear in mind, these images have all been just as carefully researched and composed to their respective ends as any chunk of text that I might write, so I’m not anxious to see them second-classed to my text in the final accounting. I’ve chosen them carefully and leveraged them rationally and I believe each to be worth a good portion of the “1,000-words” they supposedly embody.

Still, I can’t help but wonder how Jeff’s red pen feels about this?

Experimental Experience

Recently, in lecture, in another class, one of my professors (a very cool and intelligent one IMHO) was venting a little steam about how people commonly over- and mis-use the term “experiment” to describe what he refers to as “experiences”.

Experiments, as he described them, take place in a completely controlled environment, in which there are two, and only two, changing variables: a “control” variable that can be manipulated and an “experimental” variable that is then watched for changes resulting from those made to the control. What’s so powerful about this model is the trustworthiness of the cause-effect relationships that can inferred from experiments. Done well, experiments offer quantifiable, qualitative and reproducible proof. Experiences, on the other hand, are less-structured “What If” endeavors, in which one or more things are set into motion together and then observed. Perhaps something will happen, perhaps it won’t. Perhaps anticipated, perhaps emergent. Who knows? And as this professor saw it, in the world of inquiry, it is a regrettable and all too common an occurrence to see something presented as an experiment, while it is in reality, merely a staged experience.

For me, this distinction between experiments and experiences was a valuable thing to hear articulated. Not just for purposes of differentiation, but also in that it got me to thinking about the relative merits of each. Part of my background includes about a decade spent studying and researching in microbial genetics. Part of my background also includes about a decade creating and researching in new media design. I did a lot of what could be classified as experiments in the former and a lot of what would be more aptly described as experiences, in the course of the latter. And while I found experiments to be very useful in “proving” things in the lab, I found staged experiences equally useful in “revealing” things to me in the study of new media. Experiments are a great tool for proving what we already know (or at least suspect), whereas experiences are an equally great tool for showing us things that we haven’t imagined yet.

In CHI, there is a great example of the scientific use of staged experience in the so-called “Wizard of Oz Experiment“. It’s an experience, but a very rationally conceived one, that can be used to produce real and useful knowledge about a system being designed. Experience is a great teacher, not just in life, but in the world of inquiry as well.

Identity as Advertising

Without getting into the deeper philosophical concept of identity as performance or sign, i find the recent news of MySpace founder Tom Andersen’s alleged age-shifting mildly amusing.

“Tom Anderson, the co-founder of MySpace and the first friend to anyone who creates a MySpace profile, isn’t really 32 like it says on his MySpace profile. His Wikipedia entry, which says he was born in 1975, is also incorrect. How old is he really? We first heard 40. We dug a little online and came up with nothing. But then we got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record at the Web 2.0 Summit last week: this person confirmed that he’s really “36 or 37″ and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet for some time.“
(Source: TechCrunch)

In considering identity, and its perhaps often fractured online nature, i had never given much thought to the idea that the identities of higher-profile folks would be knowingly and grossly manipulated as a branding move. As the first mega social networking success story, MySpace has been a lightning-rod in the past for the criticisms that people in social networks lie about their identity. It is usually treated as though dishonesty on MySpace is a violation of its intended use. The funny fact here is that every MySpace/user relationship begins at the outset with false identity when a 40-year old Tom Andersen, claiming to be 32, becomes everyone’s first friend, so perhaps it is the people who are truthful about their identity in MySpace who are transgressing its intended use.

Categorize Your Posts Or I Will Beat You With a Hockey Stick, Aaron Houssian

When you submit a post, there is a list of categories at right. Pick one. If none fits, make up a new one (or if you can’t, email me and ask me to add the category for you). Uncategorized posts are a scandal worthy of public hockey-based practices of shaming that will be used.