Horizons on Both Sides

Tips from the Wise

For our upcoming assignment, we received some advice. We need to go through the theories presented so far, and use them as a tool to explore and play with the interactions we choose to critique. This is a guided brainstorm session, facilitated by these theories. These theories again, are the 4 threads of experience, the 8 aspects of interaction criticism, the knowledge of networks of remediation, and also utilizing the horizons of understanding if you want to as well. All of these have their own nuances – they might be able to help you out of sticky situations, as well as generating the killer insights talked about last time. From these killer insights, then one should float above all of these (which could be a synthesis of insights, or one of your insights as well), which then becomes the claim of the paper you will write. Be sure to include timestamps of important examples as well, as it will help the reader to see explicit situations of the parts of the interaction you are critiquing. One example of a model of our paper was the Buxton paper we read on juicers, whose claim was that usability and experience are two different things, and provided details in the experiential qualities of each of the machines to arrive at this killer insight.

Barnard’s Tips

Many might have considered this reading as tips from Captain Obvious. The main point of this reading is that different things mean different things to different people. In addition, there is a difference between things and meanings of objects and what we create.

This paper makes a make a rational account for how things take on meanings for people and other people. So how does this happen? One way is that one’s participation in culture makes things imbued with meaning. We see and create meaningful things because we participate in culture(s). Examples: expressions and tools used in video games (obviously – some people know and care about these, others don’t really want to know). Sometimes, though, the meaning we can arrive at may overshadow everything else: in the reading from Csikszentmihal, some of the curators knew so much about Cubism, that when they saw a line, they immediately identified it as such and then it dominated the rest of the meaning of the piece from that one line. There is even complexity in just looking at a spotlight – we take in that there is a spot on the wall, but we interpret the electromagnetic waves being emitted to mean this – and even more, it could mean danger if you are a spy or a prisoner! Quite complicated, and possibly humorous, too! (e.g. cats)

One of the main subjects of this reading was centered around medieval church windows. Kinda random for HCI, but there’s a point – they help to remind us of the horizons of understanding or expectation people have and create. These windows also helpful to show that we don’t have the same equipment to interpret these windows in the same manner as people from the 1400s. They can see the windows better because:

1. they are intimate with biblical stories.
2. many of the people in that time were illiterate. A cultural habit was created to visualize these biblical stories to help generate meaning. Today, we don’t develop this skill in a social manner or habit like these people did.
3. these people know certain representational shared techniques: they know the symbols and visual elements which were used, and why they were used and related to each other. Many of us today do not have this special training, either.

To make it relevant to designers, we took a step back and found out the meaning of what this article was trying to say: we need to see these windows in the same, put-on eyes of the medieval person to get the same experience (and furthermore, with the people whom we are designing for). This is called a fusion of horizons. In our discipline, HCI, users and designers don’t share the same meanings. As designers, we have to use our tools to be able to become informed of the second-nature horizons of people. Once we can become informed, we can have a “double perspective”, and then can design something truly human and experientially centered.

And Sengers et al. Has to Say…

This article helps to bring light to a way of thinking in our discipline for the past 30 years. This way of thinking is our discipline’s focus on interpretation, which has been that if there’s more than one interpretation of something, then the designer has messed up. This one interpretation is the authoritative one, and has roots in when we were brought in for workplace support. But now, the context of our discipline has changed (like the 3 waves Bodker was talking about), and we need to reevaluate the role of interpretation. The context of our discipline now is getting some influence from the arts and humanities, where the power of interpretation is one of the things they love to put into their work. Also, in previous times, designers have been called in to force people to have the right mental models of how something should work, but we have to also look at the sociology of technology (pp 100) to help us out. With all of this, and still being user-centered, how do we end up creating designs that foster multiple interpretations? One answer is through the use of ethnomethodology.

In order to do our jobs, we need to design for multiple interpretation, and these authors have presented 6 different ways to do this, and also through many different types of artifacts: the key table, the history table clothe, the drift table (note how people think about control about this artifact on pp 103), mixed reality gaming, etc. So now, we can utilize the role of the infulence of the arts and humanities on our discipline, and realize that sometimes it is hard to come up with the meaning of our designs for many (but that doesn’t excuse us from making bad designs). Also, we need to get rid of the notion of evaluating our designs from just having a hypothesis like we have in usability testing. This is a completely different ball game.

The Cultivate Counter

Our professor said cultivate twice more this week (that I heard), which brings the ongoing total to 11.

Applause-Worthy Note

Since we only had one Associate Instructor on Thursday, he wore 2 ties to ensure that the precedent of this fun activity will continue on. Much applause.

Playing the Insight Game

As a preparation for an upcoming paper, we decided to play the Insight game. This is a simple process of examining something under high scrutiny using theoretical frameworks and creating insights and meaning from them. We were split up into two different large groups, and then split further into smaller groups and took a look at an interaction.

The theoretical frameworks we ended up utilizing were the 4 threads of experience (from Technology as Experience), the 8 main bullet points of interaction criticism, and the main points from networks of remediation. After we were done examining each interaction from these frameworks, we were asked to come up with a killer insight. This insight is from the culmination of many other insights generated through these frameworks, which could be used as a thesis of a paper (which we are encouraged to do so).

“Killer” Insights

One group chose to examine Facebook. Their killer insight was that there is a choosable, variable level of connectedness one can have with Facebook.

Another group also chose to examine Facebook as well. They came to the realization that it is too hypermediated for its own good – their and our professor’s words.

One group chose to take a look at Pandora internet radio. They found out that this site uses the strengths of the radio and internet media to create a fluid music experience.

Another group chose to also look at Pandora internet radio. They came to a conclusion that Pandora starts off with a trust-making behavior, but has aspects of it which can break one’s trust with Pandora.

One other group decided to take a look at Twitter. They realized that Twitter is still an emergent medium, and the meaning of Twitter is still being discovered and in its infancy.

Were there any other killer insights?

Playing Mad Libs With Media

Starting With…

We began class with another aesthetic experience: wishing our professor a happy birthday. You can take a look below at the video I recorded during the celebration process to get a more nuanced look at how graduate classes at IU are actually experienced.

Words of Deep Concern from Bolter and Grusin

So we engaged in the writing of Bolter and Grusin. These writers help to engage in what a medium is and how we can interact with it. For these writers, a medium is the physical materials and dissemination of content. In our studies, we are in a convergence of where these two aspects of a medium come together. We need to be able to talk eloquently and critically about both, and the experience resulting from this confluence.

To many people, the word medium strikes at the content aspect of a medium. Most think about the ability of a medium to contain content, but the formal studies of media takes an opposite stance. The medium also has another quality: the content and its form cannot be separated from each other. These are integral parts of what a medium is – removing one is impossible without removing the other.

So we all have heard of the famous Marshall McCluin dictum: the medium is the message. There is a slightly weaker stance from our standpoint as a class and from the reading – the medium affects the message. For example, a novel may work better at revealing the interiority of the characters, but it may be lacking in pure visceral power of imagery. A movie, on the other hand, especially in the horror genre, may have great visceral power in its imagery, but may be lacking in showing the interiority of the characters.

An example of this debate can be found within machcinima, with the series of Red Versus Blue. This can be found here. The point of this example is that series of movies like these are inherently about the game and everything surrounding the game, which goes to the argument about affecting the message. What is your opinion?

While discussing this, we also came up with playing mad libs with the word media. One topic we touched on was media literacy – can one be literate in a medium. This is touchy, as it all depends on how we operationalize the word literate. If we restrict to just technical knowledge, then the answer is quite simple. Then we looked at many different uses of the word medium for our technical vocabulary. First, there’s immediacy, which is the cognitive effect of looking through the medium and seeing what is there. Then there is hypermediacy, where the medium calls attention to itself. There are other terms mentioned in the link below which also utilize the word medium in a mad lib type of manner.

Looking deeper into these concepts, and we also found that there is never a message without a medium. The message needs a medium in order to become a message, which is perceived by our human cognition. Because of this, it is inherently subjective, but we may also try to use our own objective means to try to interpret it, but even so, this process is subjective. Media are also always changing, but each, and its messages are situated in time or place. For example, it is really hard to define what a novel is, without tying the definition to a time period. With this in mind, it is truly hard to have something as universal. In addition, media also have the aspect that they cannibalize other media; there can’t be new media without old media being consumed or utilized in the process.

Media also have an intertexuality to them you can look at how one works, and one can see the other histories leading to that medium. Normally this is reserved for physical media like books, but this also applies to media as well. These allow us as designers to innovate – we can then decompose the super-complex stuff to much more handleable stuff that we can learn about and find meaning in each of the parts. We also need to remember that when we are making a new artifact (or medium for that matter), we are changing the cultural practices centered around whatever we create.

The Next Mad Lib – Remediation

Remediation is representing one media from another (synopsis from the link below). There are four aspects of this trait:

*social – this aspect examines the continuation and transformation of social practices as we move from medium to another (e.g. cinema)
*technical – this aspect looks at the continuation and transformation of technology (e.g. cameras)
*material – this aspect looks at the continuation and transformation of the material level of something (e.g. madden, genre)
*economic – this aspect looks at the continuation and transformation of economic practices related to something (e.g. monetization of music)

Take-Away Items

As we are designing, we need to keep in mind these aspects of remediation, and we cannot change one of these aspects without affecting how the other aspects work. We also need to keep in mind the debate as to whether or not the new medium we create is superior to the older ones out there. Is it? Lastly, sometimes when a new medium is created, it ends up taking over some of our beliefs – for example a movie may help us to say someone’s name or impress upon us what the characters look like (called “multicultural gandalfism”, in class). Then we will refer to the new medium, instead of focusing on the one we originally dealt with.

And For More Action…

We get to bring this paper, the interface criticism paper, and our Technology as Experience book with us to class next time, as we get to perform an opportunity that will allow us to become engaged in this material and terminology.

FYI

For those struggling or wanting to know more about the many different words we have been using which contain the word ‘media’ in them, you can look here, and this site will help to explain the nuances between them all.

More Fun

Here’s some timeless moments you may have missed while being here at the Informatics department (or viewing from the web)

There is a handy HCI crocodile hanging out in the West Building – can you spot him (assuming gender) now?

It still is snowing – Indiana weather sure is weird.

For Fun and Amusement

So there has been some funny stuff I have been watching which I have not put up yet on this here blog, so here’s a second I have to do this:

Awesome Meme

I hope people start adopting this around the internets and here at Indiana. Just watch and be amazed.

A Reference Some May Have Missed

Props to Augusto (the master of triangulation) for finding this awesome video about Joachim Phoenix and his interview on Letterman a while back. Quite awesome, and quite commentable.

Have some fun with these. Please let me know what you think.