syntagmatic interactivity

I thought an interesting issue came up during our discussions of paradigm and syntagm last week. The concept of syntagm helps us to understand how the sequence of different signs in an expression is constitutive of their meaning. This would seem to be a useful concept for HCI, considering that interactions, as much as any other ‘medium’, develop and unfold over time. The interesting part though is that in an interaction design, the ordering of parts is often not specified and is rather left open for the user to determine. True, some task-based software might have a fairly predetermined ordering. However many artifacts, such as websites, give the user a great deal of control over the syntagmatic differences every step of the way. What are the implications of this and how should it be dealt with by designers?

To me, this suggests that structural critique of an interaction is much more complicated than critique of film. A given interactive application can have so many different meanings depending on the user’s choices. The user is playing an active role in constructing those meanings. Sometimes understanding the possible meanings might be a matter of doing the math, enumerating all the possible paths through an application. Othertimes, though, an application might be so open-ended that it would hard to say much about the application in general. In that case, it seems you would have to do some observation and then structurally analyze particular user interactions.

Paper Idea: Avatar Creation and Online Identity

There is a reasonable amount of existing work in the area of avatars and online identity. Many researchers have commented on why people style avatars like themselves (or not like), identified the avatar as an extension of the self, etc … However, I do not know if I’ve ever seen a formal structural analysis of an avatar creation system which was then tied back into some critical identity theory.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I am entertaining the idea of performing such an analysis and relating the results (somehow) back to identity theory/politics. I’m leaning towards a structural analysis of the World of Warcraft avatar system for the following reasons.

1. I am very familiar with World of Warcraft lore, players, interactions, etc. I’ll be able to focus my efforts on the analysis and creation system without spending lots of additional time just learning about the space.
2. The avatar creation system is fairly simple compared to other MMOGs. There’s definitely enough content for a full length paper but I might be able to avoid getting lost in the minutiae of avatar systems like those in Second Life.
3. I “get” phenomenology but feel like my understanding of structural theory/analysis needs more practical reinforcing.

What I worry about is confusing the “phenomenological” questions with the “structural” questions. I believe players choose certain avatars to represent identities they want to explore in the game, but that seems to deal with an individual’s intention which is more of a phenomenological inquiry. Structuralist inquiry would center more on how the structures/interactions/limitations/options/etc of the interface shape the avatar and identity choices available to the user?

Perhaps the paper needs a bit of both approaches to have some real explanatory power, but I definitely want to focus on structuralism. I think.

Thoughts?

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.

A structural analysis of Emergency3: Mission Life

Emergency3 is obviously the third in a series of a games. This game is often considered a serious game, but I would say it’s more of a real-time strategy game that makes you really appreciate how difficult being a first responder or incident commander can be.

This game takes on an isometric view with adjustable camera work. This kind of view is often associates the player as an omnipotent, neutral third party participant, almost god-like in power in some games.

The physics and graphics are realistic, 3-D, and high enough fidelity so that it looks good, but not so high so as to prohibit slower machines from running the game. This indicates that the designers wanted to make the experience as real as possible within certain constraints, which are probably market considerations.

The music often adds to the tension the player is feeling, but after playing the game for a rather short period of time it becomes repetitive, and because it is diegetic it feels extraneous, and artificial at that point. [Note from JB: do you mean non-diegetic?]

While this game attempts to be realistic, when you bring different kinds of people on the scene they simply sit there, until you guide them move by move what do to. lack of realism in a key component of the game constantly forces the player to break out of a flow state and try to figure out controls and movements instead of solve in game problems.

Well that’s it for now, but I thought I would give it a stab.

 

Structuralism

I know that today we were trying to find the code how to interpret those movies. We were talking about one detail give us clues about what would happen later, and the camera positions tell us blablabla. However, David mentioned that the director forced us to see the focuses and the next screen, we have no choice as an audience. Then I found I was trying to guess the directors intentions about why they put some certain background things into the stage, and how the directors put those clothes onto the actors’ body in order to express the roles’ personality.  My question is that do I come back to phenomenology from structuralism when I tried to guess and explain the directors’ intentions? Or I am using the structuralism method as far as I still decompose the movie into cloth, camera position and other aspects.

Portfolio site interpretation –final paper idea

I know my portfolio site is so terrible, but I just get a headache when I think about to make a new one, because that two words–portforlio site means maybe more than ten hour work! But finally,  I could not tolerate anymore!  I felt shame when I look at it and call myself a designer. Yesterday, I finally decided to make some change on it. When I looked around on others’ portfolio site, and lots of free templates, I got an idea about my final paper.

The idea is I’d like to analysis some portfolio sites by using structuralism and phenomenology theories from designer’s perspective.

Just like Lacy’s paper, I want to analysis portfolio sites by discussing the relationship between style, color with the professional field the owner in. And also how and why sounds becomes popular in a website. Is there different visual angles (virtual camera?) ? Or let’s say, where is the focus suppose to be? How big our screen the designers think we are using? Do you have some other ideas about this?—PLEASE tell me!

How do you think this idea? I have no idea about what kind of conclusion will I get, but is it necessary? Could I just analysis they way portfolio sites were created, the strategies and theories people are using to create portfolio sites and get a brief conclusion? Should I really come out a guild line of how to create portfolio site at the end?

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)

Breaking syntatic and paradigmatic rules to produce meaning

In class this week we talked about structuralism and syntagms and paradigms. We had examples sentences like :

The cat ate the mouse.
The mouse ate the cat.
Cat the ate mouse the.
The lady read the book.
The noun read the book.

The third example is nonsense because it breaks syntax, it’s not a valid syntagm in English. The fifth example break paradigm as noun is not in the class of things that can read. Yet on this/my blog Royer said, “Roedl doesn’t trim his beard, his beard trims him.”

This sentence breaks all kinds of rules! It’s not valid, yet it has some kind of meaning. We seem to be able to break rules in very deliberate ways to produce meaning, and even then we seem to be able to apply some structuralist rules to the situation to find meaning, and maybe we can find some ways in which structuralism won’t be helpful to what we are doing.

We could do a quick structural analysis of what Royer said.  For this particular example I would say we share the same code and the genre is an informal blog post and ensuing comments between peers.  It has valid syntax, but the it’s not a valid syntagm because beards can’t trim their owners.  Given the genre and context I think (know?) Royer is joking, and he is showing humor, but breaking the rules.  What exactly he is saying is ambiguous because he broke the rules, but it’s funny.  It probably has something to do with the fact that Roedl’s beard seems to have a life of it’s own and may, or may not be taking him over, much like when Homer Simpson got a hair transplant from Snake in Tree House of Horror IX (the first skit, appropriately titled Hell Toupée–we just can’t get away from artifical hair talk in this class can we?).

It’s not just in comedy though, we often also break rules in poetry.  By using words and sentence structures in unusual ways we make new meanings.

What I am pointing out though is that we can break the rules in certain ways and still have it produce meaning, but if we break the rules in ways like the last sentence example from class it means nothing, except that perhaps the person who wrote it is insane, doesn’t speak english, or something else.  In short there are rules governing how we use structural rules and how we can break them effectively as well, but these other rules seem to be obscured, and until they are made explicit structuralism becomes mirky, and a lot less scientific than I think most structuralists would like.  If these rules can be brought out and made explicit maybe that would help, but it is possible they cannot.  I guess I’ll have to think on this more and do some more research.

Questions about concepts from structuralism and phenomenology

I got a question from today’s lecture, and tried to answer them by myself, however, I don’t know if my understanding is correct or not, and hope someone, for example Jeff could help ^_^

about “Connotation”:

If connotation associates with emotional things and is “subjective”, what is the relationship between connotation and “horizons” in phenomenology? They both related or shaped by individual’s personal knowledge, feelings and experiences, aren’t they?

My answer to this question is that:

Because phenomenology is trying to understand the sender’s intention, so therefore the message sender’s horizon and life world is more important, if we share horizons with the sender, we could understand her piecework. In structuralism, the connotation shaped by the receivers’ horizons. Correct?

anti-structuralism: Oh, I think I have been used to phenomenological thinking

I guess the most educational part for me in this class is the phenomenological perspective. I have to confess that I was not a very understanding person before. I often got caught in arguments with other people. When other people didn’t think the same way as I thought, my instinct was to take his view as wrong. So I was likely to declare my point in a strong and absolute way. The effect is opposite. Other people tended to take that as arrogance and they’re emotionally inclined to disagree with that kind of declaration.

After the phenomenology classes during the last several weeks, I found it easier for me to understand other people than before. When my view conflicts with them, I know it’s probably because we came from different lifeworld and we have different horizon. It’s also possible that they know something which I don’t know. So I start learning to be modest, and trying to think from their horizon before making any judgement. I am also keeping “I might be wrong” in mind and trying to avoid making any absolute declaration. I feel if your idea is really correct, there gotta be a way to persuade other people.

However, structuralism came last week. But I feel like I am still thinking in a phenomenological way. For the fashion clothes Jeff showed on Thursday, I asked “what if we don’t know it is designed by Vivienne Westwood? We won’t still interpret it correctly.” I take it as a phenomenological question, as it considers people’s knowledge as part of the source where meaning comes from. Jeff said “Vivienne Westwood” was just activating the interpreter of that code in our mind. But people like me didn’t have that interpreter of “Vivenne Westwood” before, so is it saying people’s former knowledge do affect the interpreting?

OK, so that’s where I am right now. I will try to restrain the phenomenological thinking part in my head, and dive into the structuralism in the next few weeks.