Taking A Look Back and Forward

Here’s A Wrap-Up of the Course So Far

The class can be summed up in 7 parts (of which, I arrived during step 5):

1: Experience design is so hot right now (catch the Zoolander reference?)
2: As designers, we need to know about experience and what it can tell us
3: Anthropology and others have already given us a good theory set on what experience actually is, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel
4: It is not necessarily easy for us to get at everything philsophers and anthropologists work on (so sometimes dissecting their work is tough)
5: We can get at experience through our practice
If we do this critically, we can get at experience through the use of both studies and with critical thinking. This is sort of how we approached the analysis of the films we saw in the beginning of the semeseter. If we do this systematically, we can get at the relationships our knowledge we help to give us, and then we can become close to the actual experience and begin to design with these insights in mind. We can also use the frameworks given in class to help us get at this data and develop this closeness.
6: When we get at what the nuanced experience actually is, we can then design for it (like mentioned in 5)
This is the critical eye we are trying to develop, and to develop that understanding. It is not just theories (although they help), but it is the capacity to use these as an analytical tool to get at the critical understanding we need to develop for when we work in the field, or in our work as a distinguished HCI practicitioner. This can be summed up by the following quote referenced in class: totally, tenderly, and tragically. If we can take this to heart, we can develop true empathy with the people we are designing for and also to create better designs for them.
7: The need to design for experience, and not just making of stuff (because stuff is just stuff, and we don’t need more stuff).

So then we decided to look at the different types of thinking in the history of our discipline, while reflecting on Bodker’s waves of HCI.

Another Look at Rationalism/Cartesian Dualism

This type of thinking relies upon the principle of mind-body dualism, where we get an idea, we form an intention, our mind creates instructions, and our body is just a vessel to carry out this intention. This type of thinking is typical of traditional science, as it tries to be as objective as possible. This is nicely summarized on the quote on pp24, in which we learn about this type of thinking and its discursive practices. This type of thinking is embedded in our methods, as they are abstracted and algorithmic. This allows the data generated to be as objective as possible.

But there are problems with this type of thinking, at least with focusing on the experience people have. This type of thinking transforms the computer into an idealized input/output machine, in which the person is just a thing to make this machine work. This is also present in the Michael Garrett’s IA framework/representation. This creates a mental model of a website that anyone can understand – but unfortunately, this reflects the rationalist way of thinking, in which a person is just a mental model holder. There is also no consideration to the context in which something happens to this person. This was sort of solved by Winograd and Flores’ paper/book about that rationalism is not enough for proper HCI thinking.

Phenomenology (With a Song Cue)

This study helps us to understand understanding and sensemaking. We look at artifacts as transformative of tradition, but still allowing people to do what it is they still want to do. This then helps to drive new needs from people, while still partaking in the activities and traditions they want to continue. As we design, we will have to adapt to this continually changing traditions – it’s a never-ending cycle, which means we may get to keep designing and having jobs for a while at least. As we are designing, with this mindset, we can also tap into sustainability, as we can put this thinking into very simple practices to allow people to keep doing what they want to do, but still be practice whatever they are doing in a sustainable manner (and we should look into the work of Anne-Marie Willis and Ontological Design as well). This, esentially, is trying to get at the geneologically, and try to examine how we have gotten to where we have gotten, and then we can get a better idea about the traditions and practices we have ended up creating. This practice also wants to look at the collectivity of lifeworlds, as this is what we need to tap into to make better designs and utilize the way people go about their buisness.

Talking About Ethnography

If one really wants to delve into this world, one should really take a look into the work of Geertz – but that’s an FYI tidbit. From today’s reading, we learned that this study boils down to an interpretive description of what occurred. There is also an especially insightful quote on pp34, reflecting on the type of discourse this field is. We also ended up talking about this study as observing the changes in oneself while observing another culture, and one is in the thick of interpretations (which are inevitable). This is a fundamentally subjective way of studying other cultures, in which the ethnographer produces a substantial descriptive text, which enables the reader to try to get into the lifeworlds of the culture that is studied. This is quite a complex field, and one has to remember one may end up changing forever the culture he/she wants to study.

Political Thinking and Design

So has design been management centered (pp37)? Though we would like to design for the user, sometimes design ends up making an artifact that takes the user out of play. For example, the McDonald’s (sometimes broken) register. It has been reduced to just pressing numbers and buttons to make many more sales, rather than having an employee learn and become satisfied using the artifact. This design also reflects the difference in powers there are in the normal work structure – the manager has power over the employee, who’s job is to listen to the manager. The designed artifact, the register, allows the manager to use the employee’s time as much as possible to push the most amount of hamburgers out the door. As we are designing, we may have to keep this power, ethical, and judicial struggle in mind – especially if we work for the government, or McDonalds. As a side note – it’s always good to treat the employees well, as we found out that Costco employees steal less than those from Sam’s Club. How bout them apples?

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?

Do You Want to Be a Critic?

Now it is time to touch on a subject which can get people flustered: the prestige and use of objective and subjective reasoning. So here we go, and some may troll, but that’s part of the fun and reasoning behind this writing.

Objective Reasoning

This type of thinking has been much enjoyed in the natural and “hard” sciences, as they need to use pure facts and evidence gained from means where the studier doesn’t alter the environment and doesn’t allow himself to get into the data as well. The type of writing style also reflects this, as it is being used in passive voice (and I also used an example of this in this sentence, too). This helps to create an objective inquiry into whatever one is studying. One can also think of this type of reasoning is an expression of something that is already out there, to use the terminology of what we have been studying.

This type of thinking can also be reflected in some of the methods we have been exposed to in our methods and foundations classes. We can take a look at Goals, Operators, Methods, Selection rules, as this is an objective way of looking at interactions we see everyday. For example, if we were looking at types of productivity software for workers out there, we can run a scientific test/comparison and see which is more productive at the end of the test. GOMS is one type of method to help get us there, but there are so many more. Something like this will also help us to see the tedium involved in people’s lives, and the tedium involved in carrying out this method. We can also be objective about people’s subjective thinking – an example of this is when we ask users how satisfied they are using or doing something. We can compute numbers based off this thinking, which is a type of objective analysis.

Subjective Reasoning

When we decided to tread ground into this topic, we ended up getting knocked off our rockers for a little bit, as we were asked what the difference between an opinion and a judgment are (what do you think?). As a class, here is sort of the consensus we ended up making: an opinion is just a personal preference one may have, whereas a judgment is crafted from one’s training in a system in knowledge (this training could result from an experiences and practice in a field), which is critical, and can be grounded in objective reasoning.

Subjectivity and its reasoning looks at complex phenomena, whereas the natural sciences try to make everything a smaller version of the problem (like one of our profs say, reductive). This type of reasoning is augmented by our educated experience that we have (just like in our class’s consensus), which can help us to shine new light(s) on a complex phenomenon. The nature of these problems and types of thinking rely upon us, which are shaped by our own history (and history of the phenomenon) and personal preferences. Not every single person has the exact same preferences and history, which is what helps to make these problems unique and complex. These can be used to help give us clarity and insights, just like PRInCiPleS do.

Help From Some Experts

And then we take a look into some critical critiques of experiences from Buxton and also Bertelsen. We went into the juicy world of Buxton’s mixers. There was no ethnography or objective studies done on his part to craft his critique of different juicers. An important part of this paper was that we got to learn about Buxton and his views, which helped to shape his critique, and critique over time (multiple houses, wife, etc.). One of the important reasons why he liked the juicer he liked the best was due to the design – it allowed him to not exert as much pressure at the end, while enjoying a cadence of the gears (music to the thirsty ears in the morning).

Buxton did include some objective thinking to help form his critique, though. He took a look at each of the objects and their designs, and related the designs to the experience. Some juicers made noise, and others were just hard to pull. This was a conclusion at taking a look objectively at each juicer – this something each of us has the ability to do, and not necessarily on juicers. Buxton interweaves his subjective thinking with his objective notes about the design and his life to be able to give a high-level critique of what’s going on for him. There were no comments akin to “it’s stupid” or “i just like it”, but rather his feelings which were grounded in the design. We need to be able to articulate these feelings and notes about the designs we deal with, not only as designers, but to other designers to help us note intricate details related to a crafted experience. This can lead us to a potential judgment of a design on our behalf. Can you bring your whole self and knowledge to a problem – the world may never know (that’s a Tootsie Roll reference there).

Beterlsen takes a much more objective approach with a garnish of subjective elements to discussing aesthetics and experiences of people using Word. There is a technical hodgepodge of vocabulary:

***hegemony (power of a majority to force minority to do something their way) – In this paper, office values are foisted onto the user against their will

***genre (type or kind – there are genres of books, movies, but there are also types of interfaces and interactions, which we have begun to study already) – In this paper, what type of genre is Word?

***remediation (the act of correcting faults or deficiencies) – How is remediation used in this paper?

***deconstruction (the close reading of texts (maybe in our case, programs/interactions/interfaces?) to show that instead of a whole entity and given text has contradictory meanings (wikipedia) – How is this concept talked about by Bertelsen?

***readerly vs writely texts (a term given to denote the amount of interpretations for a reader to give to a text. Writerly texts have multiple meanings and force a reader to be able to become an author to truly process and understand a text. Readerly texts are texts where it is geared towards the reader, where the reader doesn’t have to utilize this much effort to understand and process a text) – How is this utilized in Bertelsen?

We can be a critic!

So one could say a mountain (or big rocks) to get out of this set of readings is that we are trying to expand and grow our own critical eyes when we look at interactions and interfaces and whatnot out there. We have at our disposal many different pieces of a “bag of tricks”:

***We have a vocabulary:
Keep your technical vocabulary up to snuff, as we can use these as part of our conceptual repertoire. Don’t also forget to include the concepts you are basing “stuff” off of. That’s important, too.

***Taking the vocabulary further:
Now that we are beginning to get our vocabulary and use that as a basis to filter that through our own experiences and subjectivity. This will help us to create new connections and associations with ourselves which we never thought were possible. Then we can continue and make more associations and try to figure out more about the world and our world as well. The connections will fire everywhere – it’s bound to happen. But if you already know some of this stuff, dive deeper, as these are tools to help us dig deeper and find new details. Doing this for stuff we already know is just going through the motions, and we want to be better designers than that.

The Cultivate Counter

We have an update on this class side note, the number of times the word (or any of its variants) cultivate has been said is now increased to 9.