Post-Structuralist Contradiction or Complementation

Certain aspects of a post-structuralist perspective are very cohesive and useful for analysis.  But how can post-structuralism prematurely claim we cannot discover truth about the world without stating this as its discovered truth?  Perhaps this might be perceived as a play on words, but doesn’t every theory attempting to explain the world indulge itself in some proclamation of truth?

structuralism account in design methods

I think I would like more think about things in structuralism approach. And from this account, I thought, there is no totally new things or innovative things.  Hypothetically,  human have 100 English words in total to compose a sentence in order to describe  an object. Based on the permutation and combination, there are definitely limit sequences of how we compose the sentences. If all the writers,  movie editors use those limited sequences to describe the world,  this world will become boring and tired. And we know, all language has limited words.

However, everything is changed since the time is always flying and you can’t just ask the God to freeze it; anything is also changed.  For example, when I am planning  to write down an entry to put what I thought in mind into a paragraph,   I open computer, and began to type; During this process of writing, I translate my mind into languages. When I finished this entry, I read the entry again and I found it is a little bit different from what I thought in the beginning. Then I realized that all the things in this world are design because of different situated space, time, and context.  You use a different body position to read a paper in bed is a design, even your body have this exactly same position before this moment, like when you are in bathtub.

When we first see a cell phone has  function of mp3 replay,  as a combination of communicator and mp3 player device, it is design. 

By the way, I think as the first step of design new thing, observation, imitation and thinking  is all necessary.  Da Vinci began his artist career from drawing eggs again and again. Because his teacher told him that every egg has different shape depending on when and how you watch it.  Further more, what is the second step of how a amateur becomes a pro,  I think is not thinking, instead, is imitation or copy.  Any design is a small  valuable improvement based on existing thing in the world; and before that, you have to study how the design of  iPhone is so popular. Multi-touch is not invented by Apple, just Apple use it very well.

 And thinking is the third step. 

On the way to find and fight for the meaning

“Wa, look at these mp3 players, they looks just like iPod, and the price is as same as iPod too!…”

“But they are not belongs good brand! no brand at all!”

“Who cares! Do you know that now in China every mp4 players looks just like iPhone, same interface, touch screen, the difference is that it is not a phone.”

…….

“I think Google’s stock would be reduced, because it has no more new products, every other campony could do it, even though search function need to be supported by a huge database …”

I care neither Google nor Apple here, but find interesting when I heard this kind of conversations. In this world this time, the information was spread even faster than generated，and there is nothing could not be copied regarding technology except one thing– the designer’s brain. A good designer’s brain is advanced about several seconds, days or months than others. Once the design product was published, all the others catches up, and the designer’s brain goes further to somewhere else. This is truly a culture logic in my opinion. Once we know a piece of news from others, we could believe that everybody knows, if only they want to know.

Sometimes people followed, such as all of those mp4 player’ “designers”. But could they in advance to create the better next generation before Apple designers? I doubt it because they don’t understand the meanings. Sometimes I heard someone say that “This is easy, I could do it!”, but it is difficult to say that “This is easy and not very good enough, I could do it better, and it’s customer will be mine!” Make it better based on deeply thinking and understanding. Create is much more hard that critique. I guess this is the operational layer we are focusing. We are on the way to find the meaning for ourselves.

paper idea continued: mobile phone faceplates

I think more about my paper and try to narrow down the topic today.

For now, the rough title is: Design mobile phone faceplates: appearance as experience and interaction.

In this paper, I would like to focus on how mobile phone faceplates improve user experience. Mobile phone faceplates in Asia are designed by the following three groups of people (which are classified by me):
1. mobile phone company: Nokia, Motorola….

2. professional graphic designers (or in related field): the pictures in my last entry are belong to this category. They do not work in mobile phone companies. probably have own studios.

3. amateur. Here is an example( from Yinnimei Yahoo blog.):

In my paper, I am thinking to focus on the last two, especially the third one. I intend to explore general people create their own meaning when using digital products. Users design not only their own ways of using the product, but also the appearance of that. I would like to study the latter.

Besides the reading we have in the semester, literature review might also include: emotional design, ensoulment, experience design, waves of HCI……

Theories used: I am thinking of using structuralism to analyze one or two examples of mobile phone faceplates. What the codes and the languages suggest. Also, I found that people in Asia design their mobile phone faceplates in a similar way with other personal belongings, such as schedule book. I wonder if it is counted as “cultural logic.”

Do these make sense? I hope this narrowed down a little bit.

On Poststructuralism

I feel completely absurd writing a blog post to introduce poststructuralism, and indeed, I am *not* doing that here. Rather, I will do two things. I will try to restate the summary I made at the end of class today, and I will refer to the wikipedia entry on poststructuralism, which I think is not a bad summary account. And, as noted in my earlier post, the goal of this class is not for you to master philosophical traditions, but rather for you to recognize that design concepts and strategies rest on philosophical positions, and inherit their strengths and weaknesses. If you understand the gist of a tradition’s strengths and weaknesses, and you understand that a given design concept or method rests on that tradition, then you’re ahead of the curve.

So how did I summarize poststructuralism? From structuralism, it takes a focus on artifacts, and in particular, sees artifacts as rule-governed combinations of elements, that is, based on “languages” or “language games.” But unlike structuralism, it rejects truth claims (that any statement can be said to be true), and instead understands both an expression (i.e., artifact, such as an interface) and the language it is constituted from as existing in space and time, that is, in contexts. In this sense, it treats meaningful artifacts kind of like phenomenology treats people–as conditioned by historical circumstances and always disconnected from the Truth.

Further, it considers individuals not as coherent entities (e.g., that there is a true Jeff Bardzell), but rather as collections of constructs (the well-dressed professor, the well dressed driveway hockey star, the well dressed spouse). So, the identities that I project are performances (sounds like Goffman so far), but performances that are themselves discursive. That is, each of my performed identities is itself a text.

So all of this is pretty skeptical. The notion of the individual as a coherent, unified being is rejected, and the notion that any language can ever claim to be true is rejected. So how do they do business? Well, we’ll talk more about that in class, but one of the strategies is to discover cultural logics and show how diverse levels of culture participate in them, whether or not anyone is really conscious of it.

Measuring Wittgenstein’s Language Games

For a brief moment in class today, I toyed with the idea (in my head) of asking just what if there were a way of measuring language games so that one could arguably state that language game A is better than language game B, what could this measurement be?

If we by some miracle could catalog understanding into levels of better (clearer?) understanding and worse (unclear?) understanding, then could we arguably say that a language game A is better than language game B because there is less misunderstanding?

There are of course some assumptions here. Ones I’ve identified:

• There is a truth out there (lampness or butterness depending on your preference of condiments over other artifacts)
• We can somehow get at that truth in a clear, meaningful way
• We can categorize (clearly, meaningfully) levels of understanding

So what I’m proposing is that for posterity’s sake we accept those assumptions and play with the question and perhaps even the meaning of “better” when asking if language game A is better than language game B.

The Corporation

When we were thinking of examples of a pair of things that we normally don’t necessarily associate with each other that we could apply cultural logic to, as defined as

-a broad pattern, set of practices, or set of rules that crosses many levels of a culture

I thought of the comparison of the two things (in this case in order to make a statement about society and the corporation) in the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and its corresponding film The Corporation. Essentially the authors take the practices and characteristics of a psychopath as defined by some standard, accredited source (I cannot remember if it was an international/American medical or psychology foundation or something like that) and applies that checklist (set of rules, patterns, and practices) to a corporation, coming to the conclusion that a corporation is by definition of its practices and views logically the same as a psychopathic person. Below is the trailer for the film:

I think the interesting notion is that a corporation, though comprised of a group of people, is like a person, an accountable entity unto itself, in the legal system, but does that imply then that a corporation itself has a morality and responsibility? That in removing one individual from the legal accountability of the corporation gives fodder in supporting the argument that one can then remove (individual) morality, responsibility, and accountability? That is, can “good” people be leaders of “evil” corporations?

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.

lecture liveblog 9-27-07 (poorly written)

OK so my disclaimer here is that I was just not in the liveblog zone today. It takes a certain amount of cognitive function to both absorb and get what’s happening on the computer at the same time, and discussion is especially hard for me. Jeff, Marty, Mike or whoever has editing powers, please do feel free and add/take away from what I have here.

We all voted that we continue with presentation that we hadn’t quite finished on Tuesday, but first HyeWon’s question:

 

It seems that over time stuff that starts very amateurish becomes more and more professional over time. Where does this leave professionals? Will these really good amateurs end up “beating the pants off” those of us who have managed to get degrees.

–

Forgot to capture discussion

—-

Jeff says that the idea of a singular ;linear progression from amateur to professional is crap.

 

Disney is intellectually and morally bankrupt, but lovingly produced

 

Neil Cicerega quote from before–

He is now making harry potter puppets stuff on YouTube.

So it’s hard to say that this distinction of amateur and professional is a productive one at all. The guy who made Still Seeing Breen now making his real life living doing all this kind of thing

Marty says that the idea of an auteur is coming forth in the amateur and Aaron agreed that the amateurs can be more artist-like, but Jeff and ___ disagreed saying that they DO have deadline and constraints.

Christian says that if people are making this stuff with the idea of getting professional credit or putting adwords on the page and making money that way.

Jeff brings up the fact that, yes, people are making money doing this amateur stuff in SL.

 

So back to the question: What distinguishes amateurs from professionals is the level at which creativity is happening. In a professional setting it happens in a smaller unit in a design team or whatever, but web 2.0 is massively collaborated to bring about new genres and do things together. Jeff may be full of it but he does the best he can.

 

So is there a language of HCI? No there are a bunch of languages out there and they don’t interrelate.

 

Gillian Smith talks about the language of film, and punctuation in film: wipes, fadeouts etc, and so for HCI we don’t have “a language” and maybe we never will because of how different HCI is compared to film.

 

So back to the presentation:
Fashion

We have a stabilized critical language of fashion

 

Disclosures/policies-

So there was a series of incidents where people were blogging about friends stuff so they came to a consensus about disclosure.

Seen in world, review copy, friends list

 

Common Characteristics (See slide)

Made out of readily available prims

Composited out of libraries onto a specialized technical canvas

Liberally borrow from external visual languages

Fusion of external and internal languages for meaning

And comment on both, often as parody

Inside jokes and reference to your micro community

All this with low production quality

 

 

When I hear the mainstream media talking about SL it makes me want to pull my hair out, and that’s bad because I spend a lot of money on my hair, and it’s coming out anyway.

 

Out of the subculture and into the Mainstream

 

So while this started in this small communities it ends up in the mainstream

We started saying the tools shape amateur media, and amateur media influences and shapes mainstream culture therefore the tools we create in HCI are in fact influencing on a massive scale.

 

Star Wars Kid Montage (as foreshadowed by David “thuderstealer” Royer

 

This is a golf ball retriever

 

Researching Amateur Multimedia: Towards and Agenda

 

Summary of Problems

Massive number of dispersed users (not easy to do ethnography!)

Multimedia content is non-textual primarily (which is harder to analyze, or at least all the tools out there are for text)

Meaning emerges in micro communities (much of the meaning only comes from the understandings in that community)

Knowledge/information versus affect/experience

 

My Strategy: Habitus or Sensibility

 

Stoltermans sensibility:

A developed taste for a material’s special qualities

A wine lover’s wine; a literature lover’s poem

 

Borudieu’s habitus

A “system of dispositions” that incline actors to perceive and act in certain ways, a “feel for the game”

It can be shared by large groups (e.g. a social class) (for example what Hillary Clinton says is filtered by one’s political standing)

 

A hermeneutics of AMM

 

Understanding arises by fusing AMM participant’ habitus with the researcher’s

 

Philosophically problematic (sorry)

To cultivate this habitus, we need to understand an

The field of digital culture production

 

“field” is understood in bordieu’s sense

A socio-cultural-economic space of possible positions, and in which actors must take positions

Good versus crappy animation, high vs. low are, symbolic capital, innovation

 

AMM Network Theory

 

Not simple networks, but networks of networks

SL fashionistas blogs, MySpace, virtual mags

Postmodern identity factories

Loosely anchored to the RL self( in a way I have a network relationship to myself) OY!

 

AMM Critical languages

 

Criticism

Complex systems theory

Emergent systems

Memes (elements of “cultural DNA”)

 

Participating in Participatory Culture

YOU NEED TO GET IN THERE!

Learn authoring tools as a prerequisite

 

Conclusion

(See slide)

 

The idea of getting in there, doing your ethnography, fusing lifeworlds and creating habitus, then abstracting back out and using the series of oppositions

 

Death of the author

That is the sentence in my mind after our Thursday’s lecture. Roland Barthes argues that readers cannot detect precisely what the writer intended. Instead of discovering a single meaning, Barthes think readers discover that writing in reality constitutes a “multi- dimensional space.” His argument reverses the balance of power between author and reader. A friend majoring in Comparative Literature explains this idea to me in a direct way: Once writing is finished, there is no author anymore. The author is dead because no one can precisely know what his/her intention when he or she is writing. Readers would have various interpretations to the work, based on their own experience.

To me, Barthes’s argument seems to be a representation of phenomenology. There is a wall in front of the text and nobody can really reach it. We can only define and understand the text by “various mental capacities”, which are prejudices, lifeworld and horizons. What I am thinking is, can we use structuralism to interpret Barthes’s argument? The text has no meaning, unless we construct it. What matters is the text itself, not the people who create or receive that. If so, it is not only the author who is dead, but also the reader.

I am convincing myself that phenomenology and structuralism are not adverse to each other. Rather, they complement with each other, which enables designers to know our world well. Structuralism cannot live without phenomenology because I believe we are always influenced by mental capacities when analyzing objects. Even so, it is still tough for designers. How can we know what we understand is what should be understood? How can know what we interpret is what should be interpreted? How can we know what might be an appropriate way to understand and interpret everything? Hemingway once said the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Yeah, “a good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or an action”, because it is designer’s work.