Epistemology and Design: The Place of Judgment

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:

confirmation

… that Sadie cannot be trusted to be free during the day when I am working on campus

thanks for eating my pillow, dog

WWJD (What Would Jeff Do) ?

Worst case scenario:

Ethnomethodology fails because you can’t dive into the users’ culture for a year and even if you could, first you’d have to acquire all of their special training, education, experience, etc.

Ethnomethodological phenomenology fails because you might ask the user the wrong kinds of “why” questions, or ask them the wrong way, or be misheard or misinterpreted, or create a Heissenberg Effect or a Hawthorne Effect in the process of asking.

Structuralism fails because, you probably won’t share all of the codes necessary to understand the user, let alone do a proper analysis of their needs.

What then?

Who doesn’t have a life?

THIS GUY. And probably some of you too.

I came across the following video, http://www.break.com/index/we-didnt-start-the-viral.html on Digg today. I’m kind of a Billy Joel fan so I decided to watch it. How many of those videos do you guys recognize? I knew a saddeningly high %.

Anyway I posted that mainly because I thought a lot of you would appreciate it.

This brings me around to my topic for the week. Notice the Judge Judy post on someone’s previous entry “no longer exists.” It irritates me that companies like Viacomm bitch and moan and freak out about their “content” being posted on the internet. Its kind of along the same lines as “This telecast of the National Football League is for the express use of our viewers only… any reproduction or discussion of the game is prohibited.”

Why does it matter?  Yes yes I know advertising. And yes yes, I know DVD sales. But to me, watching the highlights of John Stewart on Youtube is the same freaking thing as watching the highlights of John Stewart on Comedy Central. Is DVRing a television show, skipping the commercials,  and only watching x par of y show any different?

I’m glad we spent a lot of time talking about video, like the viral video I posted, because I think it raises an interesting point. WTF does it really matter who’s site the content is on? They aren’t saying “this is MY CONTENT, MINE!!!!!” they’re saying this is “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” In fact every time I watch a funny clip of a show online, if I’m not already watching that show, I usually say to myself, “SELF I should watch this show (Thanks Emeril.) It just really strikes me as being a dated practice from a dated industry who need to figure out a way to get themselves into the 21st century before their companies dry up and go out of business.

Magic Circle or Firewall: Phenomenology and Game Security

I wrote a last minute paper for the CHI workshop on Secrets and Lies in Computer-Mediated Interaction: Theory, Methods and Design . Here’s the abstract for the paper I submitted.

Deception in massively multiplayer online role playing
games is a complex and nuanced issue. Anonymity and
the deceptive behavior it enables are required to
facilitate the role play activities that develop and
support the game world. However, the same anonymity
and deception are key contributors to the cheating and
fraudulent behaviors that threaten the quality and
viability of online gaming.

In short, my paper briefly charts a completely untested theory that the anonymity that facilitates online role play also facilitates deception which can result in bad things and that players are largely not away of this.

Some (read: crazy people like me) might even say this is a problem of intersubjectivity. In games, there’s much discussion of the “magic circle” which is a sort of separate reality (”lifeworld”) that’s distinct from normal reality. Gamer players enter this magic place and semi-separate themselves from the outside.

However, bad guys are not entering the magic circle and partaking of the separate lifeworld. Their ability to do bad things is largely a result of the disconnect between the horizons of the magic circle and those outside of it. Bad guys prey on a lack of intersubjectivity.

I’ve probably stretched a few too many theories a bit too thin for one blog post, so I’ll stop now. Comments please!

my rant for the day… WTF?!?!

So I was watching MTV last night (I know… you can feel free to make fun of me the next time you see me) and I saw one of those text messaging commercials. I’ve looked on Youtube for a video of the commercial, with no luck of course. It went something like this:

Text Game A or Game B to 88288 to win $10,000

What is the capital of the United States?
A. Miami (Text game A)
B. Washington DC (Text game B)
Win $10,000! Text Game A or Game B to 88288

Just wanted to let everyone know that I was pissed about it… not even sure why, it is just completely ridiculous. I’m really wondering how the company responsible can afford advertising on MTV.

Also, when searching for a video of the commercial, I came across this MTV commercial which I thought was fantastic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_OyzRJpw5s

I think it would be interesting to do a structuralist analysis of MTV in the 80’s versus today…

HCI+Games=HCI/Ludology right?

So back to the topic of games, I’ve posted a few times on this… but games are important: we spend more money on online games than music.  Gaming is the #1 online activity.

HCI studies technology with very different methodological and philosophical bent than Computer Science or it’s many sister sciences, that of phenomenology.  This embodied approach to computing and it’s concomitant commitment to human-centered design and usability is badly needed in most end-user systems.

Currently game designers and developers tend to be, like CS, in the positivist/reductionist way of thinking.  While this can be helpful we need more than that. It’s also pretty clear to me that many games fail, or are less successful, because of usability issues, and I’m not a huge fan of many of the game UIs out there.  For example: ,I’m an avid gamer, and I was bewildered by the WoW interface when I started playing.  I hate to think of a gamer n00bie trying to grapple with WoW.

The study of games, or Ludology (the fashionable Latinate title it goes by now) is in my mind a subset of HCI.  It seems clear to me that video games are a human-computer interaction.  Do I need to back that up anymore?  If so I need to do some more thinking on that issue.

Building on my post from yesterday I think that philosophy plays a significant role here, and of course both HCI and it’s subsets are still working on a coherent language of description and criticism.

At IU School of Informatics we have HCI/Design and HCI/Security (and HCI/Music?), so I think we ought to think about HCI/Ludology or to be a little more layperson friendly maybe HCI/Games.

There has been talk for years that this could be a possibility, and I want it to happen, we could have another first in the US.  First School of Informatics in the US, first PhD program in Ludology, or at least HCI/Ludology right?

(This is a repost from my own blog, thought I would do something fun that also counts as homework)

The other thing I’ve thought about on this issue is making it a campus-wide initiative or institute, I don’t know how that works, but that would be cool.

Guns

I didn’t want to make the comment in class, plus the video is way funnier. Eddie Izzard who you might know from Ocean’s 12 and 13 and the Riches, is also a comedian and has a great stand up routine (Dress to Kill) from a few years ago.

Here are his thoughts on guns! (Guns don’t kill people…) Just a heads up, some bad language. About 1 minute long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsN0FCXw914

Prewriting, Confusion, and Bowie

I too would like to thank Marty for the great introduction/explanation of prewriting. His examples were helpful and his presentation made perfect sense. I left class last week on Tuesday thinking that prewriting would be a breeze ☺

Even with a decent starting point (emphasize “decent” here) and Bowie playing in the background (I took your advice, Jeff…. ) it didn’t ch-ch-ch-change my world. I quickly veered off into some crazy tangents, all while utilizing the wonderful examples Marty provided us (stickiestorming, freewriting, clustering, diagramming, etc). I guess the assignment was somewhat designed so that we had plenty of room to succeed, or fail. Because my topic wasn’t extremely solid to me in the beginning, the whole thing proved to be a struggle for me, most of the things I was doing felt somewhat forced. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind @ the time to do prewriting, maybe I didn’t have a clear idea in the beginning what I wanted to talk about, I could’ve been thinking about other projects as well at the time, either way I was completelty distracted from leading myself into a solid phase two.

Jordan clarified my experience extremely well in his post. That a “solid Phase 1 leads to a solid Phase 2.” And that although my phase 1 wasn’t as solid as I would have liked, the exercise was a learning experience. I’m assuming that like anything else that we do, prewriting will become a more successful venture the more we practice to do it…