Becoming More Professional

During the past couple of months, I ended up doing some things that I have never done before, which have helped me to see how much more of an HCI professional I am now than a year ago.

Going to CHI


I went to the conference on Computer-Human Interaction in Boston, USA. The experience there was fantastic. I was able to see how not only how respected our program at IU is, but how the community at large welcomes each other to comment and critique each other’s work. I was also able to meet some wonderful people from the MIT media lab and Cornell, and was very excited to hear about their work and their PhD programs there. It helped to make the possibility of further education even more exciting and tempting. I also got to see the sights of Boston as well. Overall, it was a very exciting and expensive trip, but it was well worth the money and week off from school to go there (even if I had to wake up at 6AM every day to get to all of the festivities).

I will definitely plan on being at next year’s CHI. If you plan on being there, please write a comment here and I would be more than happy to discuss anything on design, technology, HCI, and what is currently going on.

The Capstone

For the past month here at IU, there have been some wonderful capstone presentations. A capstone is a yearlong project that every student gets to complete and then present their work in a public forum. This year, there have been projects on using technology to help the lives of the elderly, to creating new types of interactions, to using technology to help cyclists be seen by motorists. I’ll have to start this journey soon, and if you would like to see a topic, please feel free to suggest something, though I have a couple ideas of where I would like to start.

Keep it tuned here to see the latest in what is going on here!

Upcoming Facelift

After a long time with this current theme, I feel it is time for me to flex my own web design muscle here and gift this site a deserved facelift. Keep checking here often to see what it looks like, and feel free to give your own two cents as to whether you like the updated look and feel or not. There’s also going to be more new content put up here, so that’ll also give you, the reader, something else to snack on as well.

Metaphors, Not Puns

Exhibit Tips

We first began class with some advice on our exhibit project. We should be looking at museums and brief our team about the experience. As we are doing so, we can see what works, what doesn’t, and add more tricks to our repertoire. In addition, we should be looking at the space and the types of interactions that occur in that space, and become inspired by that.

It’s Metaphor Time

Basically, a metaphor is a comparison of two different things, through which understanding is communicated through something else. There are three aspects of metaphors: the tenor: the thing one is trying to express; the vehicle: the thing one is comparing it to; the ground: what unites the previous two.

This type of language is pervasive in our language, and is used often in rhetoric as a way of ornamenting language. Very often, it is hard to say stuff without using metaphor. Metaphors are central to cognition – how we perceive and how we act – and our conceptual system is metaphorical. For example, the phrase argument as war: this phrase relies upon us realizing that fighting and violence is a central aspect of arguing. If we were to use this metaphor with dance instead, our whole concept of arguing would be fundamentally different. We have to try to make these metaphors in a balanced and aesthetc way.

Today’s pony to add is on pp5, the essenece of metaphor:

is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another – Lakoff

The authors give types of examples of metaphors to help make it easier to understand and classify them:

  • structural – one term as structural unit of another – time is money
  • orientational – gives direction, space or time or both
  • ontological – reification, abstraction becomes entity, personification
  • anthropomorphic – making something have humanlike qualities
  • conduit – the use of language as a vessel of understanding

The whole point as to why we’re looking at language is help direct understanding – this is the whole point to our video prototype and what we are trying to express in our exhibits. If we continue to work in our current practice, then we will always be choosing metaphors people will be interacting with. Examples of common metaphors are the desktop, and Apple’s Time Machine.

We also took a look at Bill Verplank’s way of working in interaction design. He gives us the intelligent system metahpor, the system as tool, the system as media, the system as a form of life, the system as a vehicle, and the system as fashion. He also describes this process as 4 stages: motivation, meaning, modes, and mappings. We then took a look at how metaphors are used in popular software programs (GarageBand).

Cultivate Counter

It’s now at 12.

Empathy in Action

Learning About Empathy

In class, we became engaged in learning about an aspect of the human condition which we can use to help in our design process. This is having empathy, an “understanding for an other or the user”, as McCarthy and Wright put it. This paper emphasizes the importance of feeling like another person, which is a contrast to what previous waves of HCI have dealt with (cognitive representations of users and their mental models)

The writers of this paper (McCarthy and Wright), give twi theories as to how to gain empathy. One is identification reenactment, which allows one to get access to the emotional state (this draws on the notion of recognizing and perceiving the emotion of another person). The other is the “intersubjective accomplishment and fusion of horizons”, meaning that empathy is a “shared thing”, where the designer and the user can integrate their reactions together continually to gain a perspective of the other.

In order to get to this state, we turn to the philosopher Bakhtin, who tells us about “aesthetic seeing”, which is a “valuational response” to what we are seeing and feeling from our senses. This, of course, is subjective, which is a polar opposite to traditional scientific research (which must have a testable, strict hypothesis, repeatable results, have an algorithmic process, and allowing for the “brute data” gained from the experiment to speak for the scientist). This then led to the question: can social sciences be modelled after physical sciences? This question has been looked at for a long time, but we are referred to 2 papers for further discussion: Kline’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism and Taylor’s Interpretation in the Sciences of Man.

Getting back to Bakhtin, we can also use his theories on dialogism as a means to structure our relationships as designers to others and to users. There is meant to be a dialogue, where both designer and user can attune to each other (like radios) in order to come together and meet as peers, rather than having a “power relationship”. The attuning may help both sides not have linguistic clashes with each other (smells like ethnography here) This power may end up having designers either just look at people and get data from them and then never be seen again. This is a major faux pas. This dialogism will also help to protect those who are being studied from being exploited commercially as well. In addition, when used correctly, it’ll also help to create an open-ended discussion between designer and user (or study-ee), rather than degenerating to the power a designer may have over people or an “assumed” relationship the two should be having.

This aesthetic seeing is completely affective and emotional, and has very little to do with the cognitive aspects that HCI has been doing in its history. Historically, the use of cognitive and mental model approaches have led designers to formalize and abstract the people whom we are designing for. These measures were taken in the form of quantifiable data (productivity, behavior, etc.). When one discards the importance of dealing with felt life and emotions, a big picture about the people whom we are designing for is lost, potentially leading to a sub-par experience for these people. This is selling them short.

Lastly, for the fans of word games, here’s an analogy for you to play around with that sums up this whole post empiricism: behavior :: aesthetic seeing (dialogic, empathic, creative, empathic, hermeneutic, value-positioned, subjective): experience.