Be kind Rewind: Remediation alive and well

Film Premise: VHS tapes in a local video store (operated by Jack Black & Mos Def) have all been magnetically zapped and the stars of the film must remake the movies (starring themselves) to satisfy their customers (I haven’t actually seen the movie, but this seems to be more or less the plot). This film touches on many of the dimensions of remediation that we’ve talked about in class–particularly in terms of the reflexive (and postmodern) notions of hyperimmediacy and, more broadly, intertexutality. Following this line, trailers have popped up on YouTube that reinterpret the actual Be Kind Rewind trailer. Take a look for yourself..

The original trailer

The amateur produced YouTube trailer

The official website for the film takes remediation one step further by applying the theme of the movie to the Internet itself (effectively erasing the Internet), allowing users to submit sites they’ve remixed (or “sweded” as they say in the film). The definition of “sweding” offered on the site is aptly similar to the notion of remediation itself.

Goobbye 2007–reflections on the self

This is a repost from my blog.  On a personal note I would like to thank Jeff for the amount of himself that he poured into this class, and the seriousness with which you, my classmates, treated all of our work, while still having fun (at least I did).  I don’t have any logical or philosophical foundations for my claims, it is simply my opinions and the design ramifications that follow.

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Last night I attended my last class of 2007.  I was very happy about it. Now is the time in my life where I get to do a lot of reflection anyway, I’m writing my statements for PhD programs and I get to take the largely seamless analog whole of my life and interpret it into something discreet and digital and coherent.  At least my professional life and research interests.

It’s not the easiest thing to do.  I mean I need to show how I’m unique, how my interests fit into the departments I’m applying to, into the program, how I will contribute, how I will be enriched.  This is a classic example of the constructedness of identity.  The question remains however, am I just showing different facets of myself, or is there no unity to the self?

Is there one true self, who you REALLY are?  I would say no.  Do  you have a soul? I would say yes.  How can these ideas coexist?

Happily they sit together, drinking tea.

There is no one true self, there is no way that you WILL be, that you OUGHT to be in the sense that if you don’t become that person you have betrayed your true nature.  While I do think it is possible that you may not have lived up to some kind of potential that exists in each of us, there is no preset amount of “greatness” that you could have accomplised.  Instead you have a soul, a part of the universe that is uniquely you, but what that soul is to become is up to you.  It is constructed by you and co-constructed by your environment, your peers etc.

The fragmentary nature of who we are is OK.  You will be someone different with different groups of people.  You are not being two faced in the same way as when you say something to one person and then do something else because you lied about it.

How does design fit into this kind of view?
Design should recognize that we are who choose to be.  Our constructedness and multi-faceted nature need not be made inorganic or undesirable.  Design should realize that we like to try out different roles, and then possibly take them off again.  Designs that support the exploration of self, what it means to live, to be, to become can be very powerful and affective.  I think games can do this extremely well since we can embody different characters and people as we play.  It is part of what makes it so great to play.  Games aside though I would like to see additional designed interactive artifacts that support this view of identity.  Ultimately I hope we have a way to manage all the data that represents us and doesn’t necessarily try to make it coherent for us, but rather it can let the data self-organize, or we can choose to let it be or make it more recognizable.

interface space

An interesting piece on some artistic explorations of interface culture.

I actually think some of the most interesting parts were in the comments:

“I mess up in real life and my left pinky and index finger motion for CTRL-Z.”

“After using a computer pretty much daily for 18 years, I have already tried to undo something I was drawing with a pen and also felt the need to press find when I was looking for something in my bedroom.”

“I have done this in regards to tivo. Something happens in real life and I try to rewind it and see it again.”

“I often wish I could “save” my progress in daily life and then try something wild and crazy, and upon failing just “open” my “document” and return to the point I was at before I got “experimental. Unfortunately, this damn life-thing doesn’t even come with an auto-save feature…”

We’ve always been able to select, cut, cut, paste, undo, find and delete things in the physical world. Except now we want to “highlight”, “Ctrl-C”, “ctrl-x”, “Ctrl-v”, “ctrl-z”, “ctrl-f”, and “delete” the physical world, which are all quite different from the physical analogies they were originally built on. Not only have these original  metaphors lost their original referents, but we now actually want our physical world to conform to these new meanings the original metaphors have taken on.  That is, we often want the physical world to be more like the digital interface we’ve gotten used to.

We are continuing to develop touchscreens, TUIs, and other new interaction paradigms that provide more powerful, pleasurable and intuitive interactions with the computer. Still, in the future as we as we figure out how to better connect the physical world to the digital we may still find ourselves holding on to keyboard commands, mouse gestures and GUI icons, not simply because they are efficient, but because they have become embedded in our culture.

Tagging as Identity Construction

For my paper, I’ve been looking at tagging on sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr.  Lots of interesting design opportunities here (e.g. vocabulary problems, identifying communities of practice, adapting to site navigation). One thing I found particularly interesting was how much you can learn about someone from their tag cloud (and how eager some people are to share their tag clouds). Yes, tags clouds are useful interfaces…but an individual’s tag cloud also says something about them; a community’s tag cloud says something about that community.  In this sense, they are similar to facebook and myspace: they are ever-changing interfaces of the self.

This echoes some ideas from Manovich: “…creating a work in new media can be understood as construction of an interface to a database. […] As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items.”  This cultural logic of the database manifested in new media has led to a database complex, “an irrational desire to preserve and store everything.” [e.g. lifelogging, lifecaching]

The other key form of new media that Manovich talks about is navigable space.  “The subject of the information society finds peace in the knowledge she can slide over endless fields of data, locating nay morsel of information with the click of a button, zooming through file systems and networks.”

How do we make sense of all this database information? This multiplying abundance of digital things?  How do we make sense of navigable space? Our spatial meanderings? Our digital memories?

Tagging is one way; a language for talking about experience in cyberspace…for constructing identity through an interface to a database of experience.

Tagging and tagging interfaces are wonderfully simple. The tagging interface reverses the search interface: you freely associate terms with resource you are tagging so that you can find it in the future.  The notion of a tag, as metadata, isn’t new.  But the idea of letting anyone assign any label they want to anything IS new.

So why tag clouds are a good construction of identity?  First off, we actively collect and manage them (as opposed to search histories or page view histories).  With a folksonomy (i.e. collaborative tagging), there are no predefined categories or hierarchy, no natural ordering.  Tag clouds are a good way to construct a (usable) interface to a database of yourself because you do not need to decide who you are ahead of time.  Tags can be simple and understandable, as well as rich and expressive.  The virtual flaneur may not have time to keep a narrative diary of her travels, but she is willing to tag up digital destinations she finds meaningful.   [is this authorship?]

Current applications that use tagging focus on the utilitarian aspects of tagging for the user and community (e.g. searching, navigating, and browsing content).  Many studies focus on the empirical, quantitative insights that can be drawn from analyzing tags.  This is all quite fascinating. However, there doesn’t seem to be much focus on the experiential, qualitative aspects of tagging…on tags as related to identity and ongoing construction of an interface to a database of the self.

 A few interesting design directions…

 Merging/alternating hierarchies and clusters.

 EX:  the ability to “bundle” tags on delicious gives people more (top-down) control over the management and display of their tags

 Merging/alternating database and narrative; making syntagms more explicit.

 EX: visualizing the evolution of “interesting” tags in Flickr with a river and waterfall metaphor.

The final paper ongoing..

When designer is describing user.

Keywords: Ambiguity, Interpretation, Editoriality(Plausible), Authentic design  
I am not sure if I am successful to finish this final paper, since I have still studied in my interesting areas: The interpretation of experience from narrative to storytelling or from storytelling to narrative: recursive system or not. This is my current problem domain. I realized the relationship between the narrative of user and storytelling in my individual research. More specifically, I am curious how designers can create narrative/storytelling of Inter-subjectivity/subjectivity for interaction design by interpreting the language of user’s experience rather than the issues of interaction quality. This is not only introducing today’s researches of the interpretation of experience in HCI area but delving into the methodologies to interpret user’s experience and context. I will explain my curiosity based on hermeneutics cycle and post-modernism. Both the theories are representative to deploy my ideas (however, I won’t limit my ideas to the two theories only). In order to resolve, I will use Eco’s point of view, Abduction, which means un-canonical in terms of Interpretation and over-interpretation. (This predicates the issues of interpretation between two competing and polarizing paradigms: on the one hand Post-structuralism, De-constructivism; on the other hand Hermeneutics) In addition, I found the analogy between interpretation and editoriality, mentioned in the book, editorial engineering by Mathoka Seiko(松岡正剛), a visiting professor of Tokyo university, in that both are not objective but subjective, making us witness unexpected creations abundant. As a result, I came to think that the editoriality pursues the certain kinds of plausibility, the possible design solution for user’s ambiguity, in meta-interpretation process depending on intention/ editing axis. This is also likely to be useful in pointing out the limitations existed in HCI that usability methods such as heuristic manner reveal that the final result might be more difficult to understand user’s experience. As mentioned before, in the case study, I will introduce how designers/developers try to interpret user’s ambiguous narrative and how they as storytellers apply it to creating design story based on literature study in HCI. In this paper, I hope that the meaning of design is more comprehensive rather than merely pursuing the end for a certain goal that in the relation between designer and user and its interpretation, designing is to approach for “discovery” or “development”. Finally, I want to ask for myself what the authentic design methodology for user research is again.    

This is my current thought for the final paper. Not yet elaborated. I guess there are a number of weak points. Please let me know if you guys have good ideas. Especially, I am still confused with what kinds of case studies might be good examples for this theme, and what kinds of issues to analyze the case studies might be effective to deploy my idea. I don’t just want to introduce the case studies in the part. I want to analyze them by using the criteria that I set. However, I have no idea about it. Hmmmm      

Q&A: Pierce @ Bardzell

Jimmy has sent me a deluge of questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them here. Some answers I am more confident about than others.

AMM
>What are the defining characteristics of AMM? What is it NOT?

I think the defining characteristic that I am settling on is creativity practiced by populations, rather than the individual or a small team of homogenous professionals (e.g., professional designers). It typically involves the following clusterings of technologies: low-end authoring tools (e.g., iMovie), or high-end authoring tools used in narrow ways (e.g., 10% of Flash; 5% of Lightwave); a Web 2.0 environment. New multimedia releases come out with blazing speed. Works with impact are copied and iterated on. They usually aren’t made for corporate profit or any deliberate “mainstream” use, though they are sometimes appropriated that way.

Platforms v. Products
>Why is this distinction important?
>What does implications does AMM have for the design of platforms?

The distinction matters, because with platforms, the thing produced by the Big Company or mainstream publisher is incomplete; it offers the capacity for completion, but not the content. Examples include Second Life, Facebook and MySpace, GirlSense, SlideShare, blogs, Twitter, and anything with an API (from WoW to Flash itself). Users create the content with the platform.

As for implications, that is harder to answer. I think they need to do better to support social production, criticism, and interaction; quick authoring (especially with prims); accessibility (anyone can pick it up and do basic stuff with it in a couple of hours).

“unfinished aesthetic” & “aesthetic of crap”
> Can you elaborate on this?
> Is it an aesthetic of products, process, tools?
> It makes me think of some notion that there is not final product…

“Unfinished aesthetic” comes from an essay by Peter Lunenfeld. The idea is that rather than delivering finished media (like a traditional film or a published novel), publishers instead offer incomplete media, which are completed by the end user. Video games and Web 2.0 are examples of this. I guess really all software with an end user is.

The “aesthetic of crap” is my term for the value expressed by Neil Cicierega and others that bad animations (e.g., animutation) is better than good animation (e.g., Disney). There is a severing of the notion of “high quality production” and “effective message.”

Mass collaboration and the role of the individual

> Does AMM collaboration reduce the role of the individual in some sense? Or enhance?
> MAss collaboration and authoring leads to multiple identities?!
> Creates microcommunities? more domains/cultures?
> What IS the role of the author in this setting?

I think the role of the individual is lessened. This is a philosophical predisposition that I have to begin with; that is, I always think that the individual as a unified, coherent agent is overrated. This will come up later in the class, but the short version is that the structuralist and especially poststructuralist traditions vigorously question the individual as a single, coherent entity. Phenomenology does too, by the way, but not to the same degree.

The idea of multiple identities is simply that in each software interface, I have a different identity (set of permissions, set of capabilities and limitations, and representation or construction of my self). That is, my avatar has a blog, a Second Life friends list, a MySpace page, etc., but each of these is distinct from the others, and very distinct from my Facebook or Oncourse identity.

We will talk lots and lots about the role of the author. I personally do subscribe to the poststructuralist “death of the author” concept and that is reflected in everything I do. A recent reviewer of a journal article I wrote asked me if I left any room for the designer, or if I killed the designer off too. I guess I probably killed the designer, too, but only in a special, technical sense, which deserves elaboration that I don’t want to offer here.

HCI creates culture
> Does HCI accellerate the production of culture?
> What do you (JEff) exactly propose as ethical or moral responsibilities of HCI, given your understanding of AMM and argument that HCI produces culture?

I don’t know about “accelerate,” since that implies a measurable amount of production that can be increased or decreased. I definitely don’t know how to do that. But I am comfortable saying that culture is being produced primarily with technologies today, and that means it is mediated by interaction design. To what extent are interaction designers cognizant of this? My interactions with Adobe and Macromedia designers suggest the answer is “not very much.”

I think of ethics and morals as two different categories. I think of ethics in the Greek sense, about the practice of living the good life. I think of morals as a codification of rules that are collectively designed for an ethical life. Ethics is a philosophical practice; morality is policy, implementation.

HCI has an ethical obligation to stem the effects of technological nihilism, which is what happens when technology (and the rhetoric of technological “progress”) replaces human agency in the design and development of new software, interactions, practices, institutions, and social arrangements. This is a difficult force to resist. One way to do this is to critique interfaces and interactions (and the social practices they effect) in terms of the major categories of the humanities: enlightenment, self-transcendence, social justice, bliss, etc. Digital technology mediates practically every aspect of our lives. It’s not just in the workplace anymore, and it’s not good enough for it to perform well and be usable.

HCI must examine the extent to which our interactions with technology and with each other through technology adds value to human life.

knowledge/info v. affect and experience
> Can you clarify this distinction? Why is it important?

> Is the distinction between reflective and experiential cognition?

Knowledge and information are not the sum and total of human existence, though looking at information science and HCI, you might think they are. People who celebrate technology often promise that it will lead to a knowledge society, where people have more access to better information, and thus are able to make better decisions (e.g., democracy). These are laudable goals.

But we also need to be entertained and loved; we laugh, fear, have sex, feel bliss and rage, cultivate our tastes, play, speak nonsense, dress up, pet cats and walk dogs, miss our parents, mourn, wax nostalgic. So much of life isn’t about acquiring more information to make decisions; it’s about experiencing the fullness of life, the decency of our fellow humans, dealing with the fears that threaten to paralyze us, the joy of our senses. When technology mainly helped professionals do their jobs, knowledge/information was obviously a priority. Now that technology is a part of every part of our everyday, everywhere lives, we need to expand the desired outcomes of interactions to include more than just information/knowledge, and I use affect/emotion and experience to get at this more robust notion of human life.