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.