mix tapes vs. digital playlists (mediation, meaningful objects and sign values)

Last week, I conducted some user studies to learn about music libraries. One of the participants commented on how cool mix tapes were yet how rarely he creates playlists in iTunes.

I started to wonder about the differences between old and new music media formats. In particular, I was interested in the differences between mix tapes (cassette tapes created by the user from other cassettes or CDs) and digital music playlists (lists of current or saved songs in digital music players like iTunes or Windows media player). I found various theoretical concepts helpful in thinking more precisely about these differences and how we might improve the design of digital music technologies.

Semiotic dynamics

I’m in an informal reading group with some of the gang from complex systems, cog sci, and linguistics. One of the papers we’re reading for today really illuminated - in an HCI/d way - the talk Jeff was giving yesterday about the shared collective space of intention, meaning, and understanding. Since I know Dewey and Turner, et al, can seem a bit flimsy to some students with a more technical background, I thought the opening page of this paper made a great concrete example of how the complex emergence of meaning impacts our future technical designs.

Here is a link to google scholar (you still have to click the top link “Semiotic dynamics for embodied agents” by L. Steele to get the PDF): http://tinyurl.com/yqv2ov

To make this relate directly to our discussion yesterday, you might just consider semiotics as “words”, dynamics as “interactions”, and embodied agents as “people.” If you’re intrigued, move on to the later pages where you’ll see how the modern research in artificial intelligence (2006), very much mirrors the modern perspective on HCI/d that Indiana U teaches. This technical research in this paper clearly suggests that artificial intelligence specialists need to look at language acquisition and understanding as an emergent property of social context and shared interactions.

Just like Dewey.
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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.

Paradigm and Participatory Design

I have a bit of a rambling story to share with the Interaction Culture crew today!

As some of you know, I’m immersing myself in postmodern and poststructuralist theory. While google searching for some images describing postmodernism I came across the following comic.

Note: I know the comic is too big to fit in the page, so click on it for full viewing pleasure.

The dinosaurs sparked something in my brain from a story I read a few months back about the best online comics. Another google search revealed the Qwantz strip at http://qwantz.com/.

Qwantz is a comic that uses the exact same dinosaur graphics in the same order for every comic in the series. The dialogue changes with the release of each new comic. To me, these seem like pretty obvious examples of syntagm and paradigm.

I started to think, again, about the first dinosaur comic about postmodernism. You’ll notice that the Copyright section at the bottom of the comic is scribbled out because the author of Qwantz did not make the comic about postmodernism. Someone stole the Qwantz formula and “made a funny” out of it. [Extra Credit for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live action movie reference]

Now for the real leap. Someone appropriating the Qwantz formula reminded me of comicboarding from CHI 07. Comicboarding is a participatory design method for use with children in which a comic about some design situation is prepared with missing panels. The children are then asked to fill in the panels to complete the story. The researcher can then interpret the desire and intentions of the child through their completion of the story.

If you extend the notion of syntagm to the design process (yes, I know I’m breaking all sorts of rules), does paradigm then become a notion of choice with an area of constraint. In all participatory design, not just comicboarding, the designer is in ultimate control of the process and has designed some sequence of steps. Participatory design gives users a chance to enter that design sytagm and push for a paradigm of their choosing. Maybe.

Food for thought and an excuse to post a funny comic.

Paper Topic: Visualizing Energy

For my capstone, I aim to create a website that helps dorm residents become more aware of and reduce their use of electricity. To do so I plan to hold an energy-saving contest and then display real-time data from electric meters on the site. My inspiration comes from a project done at Oberlin College: http://www.oberlin.edu/dormenergy/

For me, the most difficult design challenge is in how to represent energy–something invisible, abstract and taken for granted–in such a way that makes visible, tangible, and meaningful.  For my paper, I want to look at the Oberlin site, and analyze the paradigmatic choices for representing the data. For example what meaning is communicated by the use of: a horizontal bar chart, colors ranging from green to red, a dashboard interface metaphor, the ability to change the units of measurement, etc? What different design choices could have been made in these cases and how would that have changed the meaning?

I hoping that this exercise will produce some actionable design concepts to make my capstone project more effective. I would appreciate any comments or suggestions for improvement.

Paper Topic

So…here’s the short version:

A structuralist/semiotic analysis of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in the game BioShock and how signifiers are decoded by users and how user experience is affected by whether or not they pick up on dated references.

Part of what makes BioShock such an incredible game is the setting/environment and sound is a huge part of this. BioShock takes place in 1960 in the underwater city of Rapture, a failed attempt at utopia by a strange and psychotic Nazi scientist. The soundtrack includes music fromt the 1950s and there are many other dated references that the user may or may not pick up on. If the user does pick up on these references, he/she has a particular experience. If the user doesn’t pick up on these references, he/she has a different experience. Neither experience is less significant or enjoyable than the other, just different.

If ’sound’ is not a large enough area to get a paper out of, I will consider looking at the setting/environment of the game as a whole as there are many dated references in other areas.

Q: What is the difference between authorship and use?

Manivich says that “Although more complex types of interactivity can be created by a computer program that controls and modifies the media object at run-time, the majority of interactive media uses fixed branching-tree structures.”

 He goes on to claim that we can choose one of two perspectives regarding the use interactive media:

 (i) Author

“…the user of a branching interactive program becomes its coauthor: By choosing a unique path through the elements of a work, she supposedly creates a new work.”

 (ii) User

 .  “…the user following a particular path accesses only a part of this whole.  In other words, the user is activating only a part of the total work that already exists.”

If we assume the second perspective, then, Manovich says that

 ”Paradoxically, by following an interactive path, one does not construct a unique self but instead adopts already pre-established identities.  Similarly, choosing values from a menu or customizing one’s desktop or an application automatically makes one participate in the “changing collage of personal whims and fancies” mapped out and coded into software by companies….I would prefer using Microsoft Windows exactly the same way it was installed at the factory instead of customizing it in the hope of expressing my ‘unique identity’ “.

But now I’m confused.  When does selection constitute authorship rather than use?  Under perspective (ii), couldn’t we view writing this blog entry as “activating only a part of the total work that already exists”, namely this sequence of characters amongst the set of all possible characters allowed by this wordpress blogging software? Doesn’t composition of a text have a fixed-branching tree structure (I select a letter, then another letter, etc.)  If so, where is the distinction between authorship and use?   Can’t we view all acts of creativity as selecting some subset from a pre-existing set?  When does a language become rich enough that we can use it to author new works?  Structurally, how do we differentiate an authored work from a work that was simply a byproduct of use?  Phenomenologically, how do we distinguish the too?

 

Structuralist versus Phenomenological Notions of “Intention”

Mingxian posted an excellent question late last week about the problem of intention. If we look at camera angles in Bleu or La Strada, and we perceive that they relate fortuitously to narrative themes (etc.), and we attribute that coherence to the “director’s intention,” are we leaving structuralism/semiotics and heading back to phenomenology?

My answer to her was no. I’m afraid the post got buried, so see the exchange for yourself here.

Is the syntagmatic behavior on which tasks are modeled problematic?

I just had a question about something that was mentioned briefly in the very last lecture we had covering semiotics.  We were talking about how syntagms imply time as a factor and rules in a sequence and gave the example that certain tasks are structured in a sequence, online shopping for example.  So, tasks are completed in a sequence and we stated that in general this sequence is usually modeled on the behavior of an expert.  But is this inherently problematic, maybe not always but at least sometimes?  If we are designing “something” for people who will be using our “something” who are not considered experts, then it seems misleading to be using a model based on the behavior of those who are experts.  Can we then also argue that this is then not even necessarily human-centered as we are viewing the non-experts as cogs fitting in the system of interaction between our “something” and our (expert) users instead of primarily focusing on and fully understanding our (non-expert) users?

paper topic ideas

 Manovich says “If there is a new rhetoric or aesthetic possibile here, it may have less to do with the ordering of time by a writer or an orator, and more with spatial wandering. The hypertex reader is like Robinson Crusoe, walking across the sand, picking up a navigation journal, a rotten fruit, an instrument whose purpose he does not know; leaving imprints that, like computer hyperlinks, follow from one object to another.”

The web is made up of content pieced together. We create meaning out of it by moving through and between sites and synthesizing content. Hyperlinks and search are our main tools for this spatial meandering.  One idea I was considering for a paper topic would be to explore the use of interfaces such as webrowsers, blogging software and social bookmarking sites and how they related to how we navigate and author hypermedia.  I would  use structuralist analysis of the interfaces and the content produced by them (e.g. sequences and groups of tabs in firefox, the sequence and forms of hyperlinks within a blog entry, the tag names and groups formed on flickr and delicious) to understand how these interfaces constrain and encourage “spatial wandering.”  I’d also draw “actionable design insights” that suggest how we could improve the design of such interfaces.

[more thoughts]

Tabbed browsing is an improvement over window browsing in that it seems to recognize the reading of interactive hypermedia as a form of non-linear meandering rather than the following of a strict linear narrative. A typical blog entry will link to multiple sites for various reasons. Tabbed browsing allows you to, for instance, more easily open all the links and proceed to look at them in any order.

Websites are still separated by tabs and it’s typically possible to only view one tab at a time.  Is this appropriate for how we browse the web? Could web tools allow you to merge content from sites?  Allow you to more easily group and order webcontent?  Visualize and record the paths you take as you meander? Help you backtrack and reorder the sequences of steps?

Tagging and social bookmarking is another set of tools that allows us to create and describe meaning from webcontent. Tagging allows us to group webpages together in multiple locations.  However, tagging doesn’t allow you to easily describe a path or sequence of meaningfully related webpages, e.g. a sequence of youtube videos.  And recalling websites based simply on textual descriptions and tags can be difficult.  What other types of links could be constructed to  help signify meaningful relations constructed with or among webcontent? Visual tags? Historical links of browsing history?

Manovich also briefly discusses the possibility “…to invent a new rhetoric of hypermedia that will use hyperlinking not to distract the reader from the argument (as is often the case today), but rather to further convince her of an argument’s validity…” So maybe spatial meandering isn’t the only way to read hypermedia…What would a new rhetoric of hypermedia? In what sense does it already exists?  (makes me think of persuasive games)