Interaction Criticism

Here is an article that I meant to share with all of you sooner. It is a framework for critiquing interfaces, from Bertelsen & Pold. You may find it helpful as you work on your papers. From a philosophical standpoint, I have some issues with it. But from a practical standpoint, I’m really glad it’s available. If I had designers working for me, I would certainly encourage them to use this. 

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1028018

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the re-orientation of human-computer interaction as an aesthetic field. We argue that mainstream approaches lack of general openness and ability to assess experience aspects of interaction, but that this can indeed be remedied. We introduce the concept of interface criticism as a way to turn the conceptual re-orientation into handles for practical design, and we present and discuss an interface criticism guide.

Social Informatics

This is NOT a plug for SLIS…
I mentioned it in class last week during our list discussion and so I’m posting the link.

http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/index.php/about-social-informatics

I’ve been reading some of Kling’s work and it definitely relates to some of the issues we’ve discussed in class, especially the role of society while designing technology. The definition of social informatics in this sense (as taken from site):

Social Informatics (SI) refers to the body of research and study that examines social aspects of computerization — including the roles of information technology in social and organizational change and the ways that the social organization of information technologies are influenced by social forces and social practices. SI includes studies and other analyses that are labeled as social impacts of computing, social analysis of computing, studies of computer-mediate communication (CMC), information policy, “computers and society,” organizational informatics, interpretive informatics, and so on.

SI studies and SI courses are organized within diverse fields, including information systems, anthropology, computer science, communications, sociology, library and information science, political science and science and technology studies (STS). SI provides a common meeting ground for isolated and scattered scholars to locate each other as well as relevant academic programs and courses.

Social Informatics is a relatively new term that can serve as a banner for those who are interested in contributing to these studies. The name “Social Informatics” can also serve as a pointer, by which we can help lead others to appropriate theories, key ideas, studies, findings, books, articles, courses of study, etc.

On This Week’s Readings

OK, I’m just back from the UK and see I have a lot of posts to catch up on. I see Hyewon is picking on me, but I’m ready for it.

A few notes about this week’s readings:

• The Barnard reading is not online because you should have the book! Let me know ASAP if this is not the case.
• I wrote a few words in Oncourse about the Humphrey reading, which I thought needed a touch of introduction,  but in case you miss it there, let me reproduce it here:

I think a word of background is useful for the Humphrey piece. It is a publication from and about the Exploratorium, a famous hands-on interactive science museum in San Francisco (Google it). The publication is about a process they developed (called APE), which they developed (a) to encourage prolonged interactions with their exhibits (instead of quick fly-bys) and (b) to encourage museum visitors to take charge of their own experience, rather than following a prescriptive, predefined path.

I have no idea why we interaction designers don’t spend more time engaging with interactive museum exhibit designers, because they’ve been wrestling with a lot of similar issues for a long time and have interesting perspectives.

So that’s it! See you tomorrow (Tuesday)!

Materiality and Qualities (A Prelude to Next Week)

In both major readings for next week’s class, the concept of “materiality” looms large.

In Lowgren & Stolterman, the first several pages talk about materiality–for instance, the notion that a carpenter knows that wood (his material) has special characteristics or “qualities”: wood can be cut into useful pieces (i.e., it can be shaped) but it also has other qualities that are less desirable (it rots; it burns). They go on to suggest that unlike wood or stone, digital artifacts could be considered materials without qualities which makes it a very special kind of material.

Manovich, on p.10, characterizes the method of his whole book as “digital materialism.” (NOTE: Good readers love it when an author comes right out and tells you her or his method up front, so underline, star, read, and reread those paragraphs, because they are important.) Manovich seems to disagree with Lowgren and Stolterman on the question of whether digital artifacts have qualities. He asserts that they do: namely, (a) the principles of computer hardware and software and (b) the operations (i.e., the sequences of tasks that users must follow) used to create cultural objects on a computer.

Clearly, understanding the digital interface as a “material” with “qualities” is going to be very important in our ability to design a language of interaction design. What are some of the material qualities of the digital interfaces you use?

Key Quote from Readings

G. Smith concludes her Forward to Designing Interactions by saying that interaction design as a field has solved one set of problems, and it now needs to move onto a new set.

However, after twenty years of drawing on existing expressive languages [e.g., film, typography, icons], we now need to develop an independent language of interaction with smart systems and devices, a language true to the medium of computation, networks, and telecommunications. In terms of perceptual psychology, we’re starting to understand the functional limits of interaction between people and devices or systems: speed of response, say, or the communicative capacity of a small screen. But at the symbolic level of mood and meaning, of sociability and civility, we haven’t quite achieved the breathtaking innovativeness, the subtlety and intuitive “rightness” of Eisenstein’s language of montage.

That seems to me to be a call for a discipline of interaction culture, which is distinct from, complements, but does not replace usability and traditional HCI. It’s also an opportunity for us not just to learn this new discipline, but actually to shape it.