Trust in Museums

This is an interesting blog post that I came across.
In the class I think we did not discuss the issue of trusting the information presented in the museums.

Trust Me, Know Me, Love Me: Trust in the Participatory Age

Definitely worth a read.

Websites related to Dissabilities and Accessibilities

http://www.diveintoaccessibility.org/

—>Dive Into Accessibility, 30 days to a more accessible web site

http://www.diveintoaccessibility.org/by_disability.html

—> Browse Tips by disability (This I found useful to me, esp. those cases.)

http://www.w3.org/WAI/mobile/

—>Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices

Examples of experience prototyping in Computers

Going along the example sean gave of the text editor, i was wondering if you can add on to a list the instances where experience prototyping or designing has made a big difference in computers. I dont have that many examples but from the top of my head i can think of -

1. Picassa collage function - Google picassa has this collage function where a new picture can be made which collages a series of picture. It is like taking a picture of lots of pictures put together.

2. Twitter ?

Please add on if you have any..

6 billion Others

6 billion Others is a project by Yann-Arthus Bertrand ‘aiming to create a sensitive and human portrait of the planet’s inhabitants’, which I think is an avant-garde ethnographic project with aiming ‘the enlargement of the universe of human discourse’ (Geertz, 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures).

The project team conducted 6,000 interviews in 65 countries and shot 4,500 hours of film, asking participants about meaning of life, happiness, love, anger, tears, discrimination, dreams, their parents, and other topics related to their ‘felt life’.

Listening to testimonials is listening to History on an individual scale. Feeling is what we experience from the inside, our emotional perception, an irrational element that moves us all. An individual process, it is also a universal language….

website: www.6billionothers.com

The Real and “an experience”

This is the question (really, the paragraphs…) I emailed Jeff the other day.

I’ve been thinking about this concept of The Real that we’ve been talking about lately, as well as the concept of “an experience” from earlier. It seems that part of the definition of The Real that we’ve
been dealing with implies that a “thing” is more real when it is more easily incorporated into daily life…taking your mp3s everywhere with you so there’s a “soundtrack” for life, the ability ability to take
DJing anywhere via the Scratch system and mp3s on a laptop. To me, these aspects theoretically make listening to music or DJing less of “an experience.” In the case of the mp3s/iPod, listening to music is no longer really something that has a definitive beginning and end to separate it from the “experience” of everyday life. And as for DJing, from Will’s description it seems that in its first conception it truly was “an experience,” contributing to the community gatherings in a significant and definable way.

These are kind of just musings, but the basic point is that for me, there seems to be a disconnect between the developing concept of The Real and the definition of “an experience.” So, is there a way to
reconcile these ideas? Do they only seem contrary to each other because of these specific examples? Are the concepts of The Real and “an experience” not really that related? Is our class’s working definition of The Real just still in its formative stages?

Class notes for Tuesday, 2/19

Here are the notes from today’s lectures:  (Get better soon, Bob!  You’re much better at this than I am! LOL)

Announcement:  One of the authors of the article we are to read for Thursday’s class is Phoebe Sengers, and she is:

1.       coming to our class on Thursday , SO PLEASE DO YOUR READING FOR THURSDAY and come with questions to ask her for the discussion (she is not lecturing); and

2.       giving an Informatics Colloquium on Friday at 3pm. Be sure to get there at least 15 minutes early to get a seat (even earlier if you want to sit next to your friends). 

Bolter and Grusen review:

Remediation is “[1] That which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and [2] attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real”.

Let’s look at the example of LP evolving into CD involving into MP3—doesn’t it go against this definition?  No. It is OBJECTIVELY true that the LP will have better fidelity than the MP3.  But, Bolter & Grusen are talking about subjectivity.  The unit of analysis is the felt experience of interacting with the medium, whether that medium is a good reproduction or a lousy reproduction.

Another example:  Bioshock is a video game with audio that sounds like it is am quality…made to sound that way on purpose, to make it sound old.  In doing so, the experience is actually better than if the audio was pristine.  In that sense, the realism is not about the medium’s capacity to faithfully represent some source, but about the medium’s capacity to produce some kind of experience.  In other words, the real that Bolter and Grusen mean is not the real of objective reality, but the actual subjective experience to that reality.

Two approaches to the definition of reality, each with its own value and output:

1. Reality is a social construction. It isn’t an objective thing that’s sitting out there that we all have perfect and impartial access to;   it is something that we all agree is out there. (People looking at media tend to take this approach.)
2. Reality is what is out there (and we have partial imperfect access to it.)  This does not mean there is no objective basis (that we’re all just making up shit).  (Scientists tend to take this approach.)

To bring this back to the Madden NFL example, when it makes the claim to “take you into the locker room and onto the gridiron like never before”, it’s taking the first approach above.

Basically, what Bolter and Grusen are saying is that when there is a claim with a medium that it says it’s better at reality than other media that came before it, but we shouldn’t take that seriously; instead, we should look at it critically.  They are trying to develop a language to look at the ways that values persist and the way they are transformed over time

Barnard reading about Hermeneutics

Remember Godamer’s discussion about lifeworlds/horizons?  Recap:  Subjectivity is my own subjective response to something; intersubjectivity says that people who are in groups tend to respond to things in similar ways.  Lifeworlds/horizons are just vocabulary to get at that idea.

When you do design, you don’t design for one.  You design for groups, so your unit of analysis is defined by the group.  You have your lifeworld as a designer, and the people for whom you’re designing have their own lifeworlds.  If your lifeworld is out of synch with theirs’, there will be problems with the design.  So, you do user research to understand the groups’ lifeworld.  That means that the group’s lifeworld (or reality) is a social construction (the first approach above).  There are two possible roles of these lifeworlds and horizons:

1. they are prejudices/distortions; it’s your job to suppress your own horizons and try to understand your horizons as if they were your own;
2. you only understand anything because of your horizons

As a designer, you will be using both roles.

All hermeneutics is about is synchronizing your lifeworld with the lifeworld of the group for whom you are designing.

HINT:  Think about what lifeworld the vacuums you’re critiquing for your paper that’s due a week from Thursday!

What is “real” anyway?

Last week Jeff talked about an mp3 player being more “real” of an experience than a CD player because you have access to an entire library of songs, and thus can choose the song that is most appropriate to any given situation.  But there’s a bit of a problem to this theory.  There is an underlying assumption here that the “appropriateness” of a song exists entirely in the world of the mp3 player, not outside of it.   For example, there are songs that I appreciate because they were given to me as a mix-tape (that’s cassette) in high school.  Those songs are not only attached to that time and that person, but also to the experience of having it as a tape.  I couldn’t “skip” songs as I can now, so when I encountered a song I didn’t like, I had to fast-forward through them, old school style.  It wasn’t instantaneous, and I often had to jam through “play/fast-forward/play/fast-forward/play,” leaving memories of those physical acts, as well as the sound that comes from it.  Additionally, I was more prone to listening to that song that I didn’t like than I would be were I to be listening to it on a digital technology.  That mix-tape had a distinctly different experience associated to it than if it were a mix-playlist.

To circle back: I can listen to a song from that tape now off of my mp3 player, but the “appropriateness” of that song is influenced by the non-mp3 experience I once had.   Which brings me back to my point - is the “real”ness of an medium determined in as much as it reflects something in the past?  Isn’t every experience in this sense a new experience in and of itself, building upon the memories?  If so, then the meaning of the situation is continually developed, and a less “appropriate” song picked is still as “real” as any other song.

Class Notes for Tu, 05 Feb 2008

All,

My apologies for not getting these notes to you earlier. I ran out of room on my account (but have since rectified that):

For Tu, 05 Feb 2008:

• Freemind Format (open in Freemind)
• XHTML Format

I should have the notes from last Thursday (31 January 200 posted later this afternoon.

Regards,

-Bob
rmolnar[at]indiana[dot]edu

Design: Nemesis

Most of people say that there is merely no dichotomy theory to divide an idea, or identification or explanation to explain about a certain phenomenon in an obvious way since there are the numerous things that we cannot explain. I am so tedious with this opinion since I was also telling to LB, and Sean also said to me it as if that is the life.. How is irresponsible! (Sean sorry, it’s just for me, not you!, and sorry to LB

I am just thinking that as if we, human beings don’t try to own any other purpose of life but instinctive goals, this kind of behavior seems like we might give up to take up the responsibility to think, question, and then answer to our own questions to exist here . I might not open to door of thinking space.  

If we don’t refuse to take up the responsibility… even though we already know we have not stopped to find the coherence meanings in hermeneutic cycle and the fundamental characteristic of the world has focused on phenomenological issue, that is, we already used to be, are trapped and will be trapped in our own thinking forever, why we cannot to stop analyze and categorize our own language into a sort of structures, creating new breakdowns or subjective interpretations on the other hand. (Anyway we know the both sides of a coin.)  
      

As a designer who tries to be authentic and flexible, I am also asking to myself. If the thing, we call knowledge, can be coined in a certain consensual domain, design knowledge should be there against the notion of innovation or creativity? (I have no idea if the notion would be called deconstruction or postmodernism or not. Whatever..)   

If putting designer’s own meaning (interpretation) into the center of design consideration will give designer a unique focus that other disciplines do not address, how can they deal with which individual users understand their artifacts and interact with them in their own terms and for their own reason? How do they know the boundary of interpretation in terms of meanings of user in use? Finally, how do designers argue the design knowledge in order to create the consensual area?      

Thus, is it the conclusion by me that design is not subjective or not objective? Hmmm..

I am not confident. I can’t trust myself. Can I be a designer? Do I really think that I am a designer?     

I have no idea why I am unsettled yet. The more I have gathered the evidences to argue my idea, the more my assumption has been agitated. Maybe.. I am worry to collect them since my limitation of design knowledge and ability as a designer would reveals… Maybe.. I would already think I am not good at getting the authorship of meanings of users aroused through their internal and external world.   For me, Designing is like Nemesis that I could not get out of its trap forever. I have no idea why I want to be in the trap, why I want to challenge to it. I could not trust if there is design axiom that could resolve my confusion. Where can I find it?       

If I am avoiding from the nemesis, do I have to be an irresponsible designer who gives up being human? Unreasonable thinking of mine!! :)   

Hey! Sean! I don’t get my answer to my humble question yet. Yes, I am just finding my answer as you said to me. However, I have no idea if I can get it finally or not. In HCI filed, I have to think what the design is again. I will learn it from my smart colleagues and thoughtful professors again and will apply the new realizations to existing design knowledge of mine. I guess this is also my duty as a human being who tells what design is and transfers design knowledge to other disciplines. I just try to do it. I just love the design.

Of Experience…and movies.

One of the thing that really amuses me is watching movies and the experiences that it creates. Thus it was befitting that Jeff started the class with the movie! After a couple of readings, I am trying to answer this question why a movie creates a better experience , which is a better than watching an image, which in turn is better than a plain text.
Well… i am sure you would agree that the degree of experience is not the same in all of these. Most of the people would say that the movie watching is perhaps the best experience amongst all. I agree to that as well.

So getting a bit more into the anthropology of experience, we try to analyze why this is the case. Why a movie makes me go more wow as compared to a novel?
The answer lies in the way we define reality (what is there is there… ), expressions (how individual experience is framed and articulated) and experience (how the reality presents itself to the consciousness).
Experience is valuable only if its affecting the inner consciousness and that affect stays with us for long. Expressions or an experiences are short lived and we tend to get over it soon.

We know as discussed, that experience is a collection of a group of expressions or the “an experiences”. Anthropologists and ethnographers aim at experiencing the cultures and look at retelling in their words. This often leads us to believing what they say. However, there is a difference in the life lived ( the reality) , the life experienced (the felt) and the life expressed (the told).

Now there are two kinds of experiences. Felt experience and the Told Experience. More often than not, these two fail to match up. This thus, results in the an indifference in the way we interpret the experience and the way the person narrating the experience tells it. As Kapferer puts it, “I do not experience your experience, I experience my experience of you.” This means that the actual experience of the thing is lost.
There are also some inexperiences that are called the inchoate experiences i.e. the experiences that we are unable to understand. Like many a times we say, I feel good, but don’t really know why we are feeling good. These experiences are the ones that are the most often left out in the process of retelling and narration.
Quite often we tend to confuse between the experience and behavior. Experience is more personal, whereas behavior is what some outsider describes. Experience thus is more self referential. Therefore it is concluded that experience is also subjective.

Which brings me to my question!
How can we as designers of user experience, create designs that are objective in experience? How can we remove the element of subjectivity and try to look into a common thing amongst mind of users across a demographic, who will experience the design in the same manner in which I as a designer am experiencing?

There have been different ways of conveying experiences. The oldest way was perhaps Narratives. (Rosaldo, Bruner) This was often in the form of speech or written text. Story telling also forms a part of the narrative. However, if an incident has occured to the narrator, there is often a case of over emphasizing a certain chapter / portion in order to enhance the experience while saying it.
However, the narrator fails to understand that in the absence of an imagery, there is a picture in the mind of the listener that is constantly changing. Thus, the felt experience of the listener and the told experience of the narrator is not the same.

However if the context has been set, if the images (Fernandez, Kapferer) are used to give a clear indication of the culture in which the enactment had taken place, the listener (user in case of a design) is more likely to develop a better picture of what is being said.

And when this is attached to a movie, where we not only have a cultural context prior set, but also some parameters that help in increasing that experience. There is an enactment (Stewart, Babcock, Schechner) A movie is composed of those numerous expressions or say numerous moments of an experience. A movie makes us go wow, because these expressions are not just a collection, but a proper connected timeline of whats going on. This consummation of experiences over a period of time when presented to us, increases the felt experience thing and hence we get a better experience.
In a movie the reflexivity (Gorfain, Boon, Myeroff) factor also plays an important role. Here we couple the frames with our reflection with our own interpretation and hence the experience is enhanced.

As Kapferer puts it, we transcends individual experiences through the participation in the cultural expressions. While watching a movie, we are so deeply engrossed and our mind is full of these expressions, that we forget completely what is outside. This engrossment further enhances the overall experience.

Movies are thus, a field where the art of creating experience has been perfected!
It is now completely understandable why I watch so many movies!
Yes, its the experience!