Why interact?

February 23rd, 2012 § Comments Off § permalink

What is the value in having a toothpaste dispenser automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush, instead of manually pushing a dispenser head or squeezing a tube? Should we design our world where we don’t have to manually touch or work anything at all? Is that the ideal world?

Ah, the future has arrived!

These are questions that I consider as an interactive designer, and I think these are questions that are not asked enough when products are being designed. The implied wisdom is that the more automatic and the more digital everything is, the better. It is easy to put, say, a clock on every device because it is so simple to do so. That is why we have trouble timing our stove clock with the microwave with the coffee maker with the watch and so on. And what if it were all automatic? Is that somehow better? Maybe it saves us the trouble of synchronizing our collections of digital stuff that we live with, but all that does is fix a problem that was created by technology that was not designed conscientiously in the first place. In the first place, we should have asked, “what kind of environment should we live in?”

As we put small human-sized things into the world (aka “design”), it seems like all we can do is make one product that hopefully solves some issue. Better yet, it eliminates the need for other things, combines functionalities or otherwise simplifies our life. Like putting ink inside a pen rather than having a quill separate from an inkwell. It almost seems that we don’t have any say in how our world should work at large, as designers of small things, or in the case of interaction designers, often “virtual” things like email interfaces or whatever. Of course this isn’t true, we have the ability to consider how our world of interactivity should be, and we have the power to shape it. What technologists often don’t have however is a vision that is suitable for humans to live in, and that would actually be an ideal place to live.

Am I... is this thing working here? (a touch-pad for the Sega Genesis. You don't push a d-pad, just slide your thumb across the yellow area.)

In the case of an automatic toothpaste dispenser, holding my toothbrush and having toothpaste just come out is actually a way of de-humanizing my experience in the world, and separating me from physical reality. I touch nothing, I have no control, things simply happen. This is called “agency”, which is an individual’s ability to control things, or your “say” in the world. When we automate those small physical actions, we make our senses numb. Interacting with touch screens and voice activation is all the rage now, and for good reasons. It is a way to combine technologies and make things faster. But at the same time you lose that physical sensation of interacting with physical objects, which is a shame since we evolved to have highly sophisticated ways to reason about the world with our bodies.

What happens when everything happens as soon as we think about it? There will be no more labor of any kind. I won’t even have to lift a finger to bathe myself, get dressed, eat, or do anything else. Perhaps people will tire of this so much that they go to vacation resorts where they chop wood and hunt for their dinner, except people will be so weak and out of touch that it will be somehow made easier for them.

This is where we should turn to older design traditions. How should a doorknob be designed for a most satisfying turn and click? What about architecture, how far away should the wall be from where people sit? Should the sitting areas be in the center of the room or against the walls? Because we have the ability to automate everything, we also have the ability to give new agency to the way we interact with things, and not just physical things. What if I turned a knob every time I sent out my emails, like a release valve of emails flooding out? Or if I could pick up my phone and it feels heavier or lighter depending on how many unread mails I have? What if, when I have some fleeting idea while walking through a park, I could break off a twig and have my thoughts transmitted to the “cloud” via twig? We are already capable of some of those things, although they are just random thoughts, but it begs the question: what is our ideal world of interaction?

Cultural Values in Fashion Copy

February 9th, 2012 § Comments Off § permalink

I’ve been doing research for my capstone project, which is on interactive fashion. I came across this bit as I was doing some browsing:

“The key to commanding attention between shows is to pull a modern-day Marilyn and get swept up in the wind.”

Also note that the word “POWER” is in huge letters across the top, the woman is in a almost completely front facing stance toward the camera, as opposed to profile or semi-profile. She is wearing glasses, which are aviators, which adds a sort of military-esque drama. Her silhouette creates a square, boxy shape which is more masculine. The lines going vertically across her shirt make her torso look more square and the black line across her pants is small but adds to the rectangular, masculine composition, although it could be argued that the black line draws attention to the hips, which are more feminine. The overall composition, with “power”, the aviators, and the rectangular silhouette affirms the above copy, regarding “commanding”.

You can tell a lot about cultural values through language. I think it’s funny that people assimilate these values and think of them as personal values that are integral to their identity… Or rather they don’t think. Maybe that’s the problem.

From Elle.com magazine, “The key to commanding attention between shows is to pull a modern-day Marilyn and get swept up in the wind.”… I want to point out some of the metaphors in use here. In “command attention”, attention is a child or other submissive figure that is told what to do.  ”command”(suggests aggression, a sort of master-slave relationship and paradigm of heirarchy) “key” (keys are for unlocking doors, so in this case the key to command would be a token that would unlock the binary system of control and relationship. Analyzing this metaphor reveals that this is a binary way of understanding relationships of the observer and observed, commanded or commander, locked or unlocked).

Now this may all be sort of obvious, but in our English-speaking culture it is hard to see what the point is of distinguishing the hidden meanings. After all, shouldn’t we want to “command attention”? Should I not want to unlock the key to being a commander of important members of society? Not all societies feel this way about attention, relationships between individual and society, gender or beauty.

Let’s look at another society then. What about the society of America during Marilyn Monroe’s career? The film that this fashion magazine is referring to is the 1954 “The Seven Year Itch”, starring Marilyn Monroe. The scene is iconic in American culture, where Marilyn’s dress is lifted by the subway grate’s air.

The entire composition of her dress is totally different, so is her hair and the lack of sunglasses. I think it is obvious the sort of changes that have taken place with American values towards beauty and femininity. The way we understand beauty through fashion is extremely important in our cultural discourse. The values we place on ourselves as individuals and each other as a society are evident through visual culture as I’ve shown, and also through language, which I’ve analyzed from the copy at the top.

I think it’s funny that people think their values in how they should look or act are really their own. As if those values create their identity. What is painfully obvious is that cultures determine how people feel about most of these things, and people don’t generally deviate unless they are exposed to different cultures for an extended period of time. If a girl dressed like the first picture in 1954, it wouldn’t take her long to conform to the values of the time, and vice versa. But these values are not our own, and we shouldn’t feel as if they are and defend them mindlessly like some cult. I think it’s funny that the current cultural values would look at the first picture and see something rebellious and positive.

Personally, I see something that is aggressive, confrontational, and causing trouble. While sunglasses are nice for the individual, they create a feeling of coldness for the society. I understand their necessity however, as the world today can be pretty scary with how people behave, always staring at strangers. But these glasses reflect that feeling of fear and defensiveness in an aggressive society. The overall message of “command” and “power” along with not being able to see the eyes, the stark black straight hair, the masculine silhouette, is something that is currently culturally valued and even regarded as “liberal” thinking. Of course, ask yourself this: if you were to dress as the first picture, would you get more or less attention than if you dressed as Marilyn dressed in 1954? Not in costume, of course, but in that mode of dress. Obviously, the second photo would be much more different than the first one in contrasting with current fashion. So it is not really about getting attention at all so much as it is about reaffirming and living up to current values about “power” and “command”.

Visual Thinking; a reflection

January 29th, 2012 § Comments Off § permalink

The work of Rudolf Arnheim is a cornerstone in the philosophy of the art and design traditions. As for myself, coming from the classical music tradition before the design tradition, I appreciated that Arnheim frequently gave thought and credit to the work of musicians. His works, however, focus on the visual portion of sense-perception and experience.

Arnheim argued, in the 70′s, that when we see things with our eyes, we are not just passively receiving visual stimulus, but we are actively thinking about our world. The mission of his work, stated in “Visual Thinking” originally published in 1969, was to approach art from a psychological standpoint, and to approach psychology, namely cognition, from a visual standpoint. At that time, this was a controversial approach. Arnheim describes in the first chapter why that is. Traditionally, Western philosophy was served by dividing up our world in as many ways as possible, including the external and the internal, with respect to an individual. In Western thought, an object we see is an object existing on the outside, and after the work of the eye is done seeing, then it is the work of the mind to reason about it. Arnheim argues that the mere act of seeing is not so simple, actually a lot of thinking is going on just in the act of perceiving the outside world. In his chapter, “The Intelligence of Visual Perception” he says,

My contention is that the cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. I am referring to such operations as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, as well as combining, separating, putting in context.

 

In another book of his I have been sampling, “Art and Visual Perception”, he uses many visual examples, as well as scientific studies using human subjects, to illustrate how our mind and eyes work together to reason about our visual world. He used the example of a square with a black circle in it to demonstrate how our eyes are not passive but active. We feel like we want the circle to move toward the center if it is slightly off, or towards the corners if it is too far towards the edge. He illustrates the results of a study using human subjects with this image. The lines refer to where the subjects felt the circle “should” move to.

arnheim visual example
from Art and Visual Perception, The New Version. UC Press

By far the most interesting implications about this to me is that an explicit depiction in the world doesn’t necessarily result in a human’s explicit experience. That should be obvious I suppose, at least in general thinking, but in specific this is significant. It is no wonder that I have seen so much development in this line of reasoning since Arnheim’s work in the 60′s and 70′s. To give one example of what I mean about the explicit world, consider the line. In nature, if you look at the boundary of objects and environment at least in the way a human perceives and distinguishes between the two, you will notice that there does not exist a thick black line like in illustrations, unless you are looking at something illustrated. Observe your hand placed in the air; it is hard to pinpoint the exact location where your hand stops and the environment begins. For sure, that separation happens at roughly some area at the edge of your hand, but there is no line, like in our art and illustration. Indeed, the line is a human invention. To select a quote that was curated in Mo Zell’s “Architectural Drawing Course” (2008),

Line does not exist in nature. Line is an invention of man; so, in fact, is all of drawing… There must have been a reason for the invention of the line. Yes, it is a guide for those who would venture into the formlessness that surrounds us on every side; a guide that leads us to the recognition of form and dimension and inner meaning.

- George Grosz, painter, 1893-1959

To put on my user experience designer hat, I would say this kind of thinking about experience is just as important as reading Donald Schon, David Cross, or John Dewey. This kind of work is important for reasoning about design in general, but I suggest that every interaction designer should read about the theories behind visual perception and cognition as well. Arnheim just happens to be a great source for that.

Vitruvius, Architecture, and Interaction Design

January 22nd, 2012 § Comments Off § permalink

Marcus Vitruvius Pollo is the name of a Roman architect (b. 70bc), who wrote a famous treatise dedicated Caesar, entitled De Architectura Libri Decem, or “The Ten Books on Architecture”. The reason that this is significant is because what he says about architecture can be seen as strongly related to the meaning and practice of interaction design. The way that Vitruvius felt about what architecture means and what it takes to be a great architect, is how I feel about interaction design and what makes a good designer.

The 1521 Cesare Cesariano Italian Translation

Here is an excerpt from “The Ten Books on Architecture” by Vitruvius.

The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory. Practice is the continuous and regular exercise of employment where manual work is done with any necessary material according to the design of a drawing. Theory, on the other hand, is the ability to demonstrate and explain the productions of dexterity on the principles of proportion.

Caryatides, from Fra Giocondo, Venice, 1511

Just as important are his views on what constitutes a properly educated and trained architect. If you just replace “architect” with “designer”, you will see how this is relevant.

“For an architect ought not to be and cannot be such a philologian as was Aristarchus, although not illiterate; nor a musician like Aristoxenus, though not absolutely ignorant of music; nor a painter like Apelles, though not unskilful in drawing; nor a sculptor such as was Myron or Polyclitus, though not unacquainted with the plastic art; nor again a physician like Hippocrates, though not ignorant of medicine; nor in the other sciences need he excel in each, though he should not be unskilful in them.”

I wonder if our modern society creates more specialists than highly educated “generalists” like in Vitruvius’s society. Vitruvius often speaks of the importance of understanding music and history, and he gives concrete examples about how such knowledge is employed in the design of architecture. He also elaborates how knowledge of law is critical for the architect, so that they can make correct decisions in the planning of homes. Interaction designers should also be informed of many fields of study, for similar reasons that Vitruvius gives.

I am impressed by the parallels between architecture and interaction design. Interaction design, a much younger field that is restricted to “interactive” and, generally, “digital” systems and artifacts, requires understanding many fields of study in order to design conscientiously. In architecture, one must understand art, science, philosophy, law, and so on. Vitruvius explains that the architect should understand law so that he can, for example, design homes where the water system does not leave the burden of negotiation upon the residents and land-lords. They do not have to decide the right way to split labor or access and so on because the architect is already familiar with the judicial rulings on the matter and more importantly he designed the system in such a way that it is already fairly decided.

Take for instance, in the case of understanding law, I am sure companies like eBay had to deal with many design challenges that are also ethical and legal challenges. How do you deal with simultaneous bidding? Do you make it easy or impossible to retract items for sale? What sort of system feedback should the user receive if they encounter one of these issues? What is the law on the matter; perhaps there are areas where laws have not been written yet, after all this was a new medium of trade.

As communication between systems and people improve with the increasing capabilities of computing, we will see a vast uncharted space of interactivity open up before us. When that happens, new questions of aesthetic, legal, ethical, and environmental concerns, just to name a few, will appear in our field. These issues are already of great importance, so it is critical that designers are educated much more broadly than a specialist should be.

I think studying architecture in this way can enable us to peer into the future of how interactive design will inform and shape our lives. Maybe it should be interesting that we can see the future through an ancient treatise.

Issues in Understanding Hearing Loss, Testing, and Device Design

December 6th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

I went to the International Workshop on Multimodality in Multispace Interaction (MiMI 2011) in Takamatsu, Japan last weekend. This conference is hosted by the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence. This particular workshop is focusing primarily on conversational analysis, but towards a focus on technology as well.

One presentation I found particularly interesting and relevant to HCI and UX design. This was Maria Egbert’s presentation on her project with understanding hearing loss and hearing aids, particularly with a focus on analyzing the social dimension of hearing loss. I thought her presentation was most compelling because it described how hearing is viewed as an information processing mechanism. Egbert asserts that in reality hearing is more complex, and primarily a social issue, because our hearing skills mostly go to work in listening to other people and interacting with them. Moreover, people have trouble recognizing their own hearing loss because interacting with people involves much more than simply listening.

hearing aids help people connect

During the diagnosis of hearing loss, physicians will sit behind a computer while the subject puts on headphones and listens to tones, and tries to press a button whenever he or she can recognize the tone. This is problematic because while they are supposedly testing their hearing purely, the subject must receive instructions and interact with the doctor. Furthermore, the subject can pick up subtle cues from the doctor as to when the tones are going and so on. The doctor doesn’t record their subjective ability to communicate with him, only their ability to press the button on time.

The complex and poorly understood nature of hearing loss and this experiment is evidenced in the subject reporting things like, “I have the feeling that I sense it [the tone] before I hear it”. Is this a physiological phenomenon or a social one? Egbert mentions that people describe hearing sounds with visual metaphors, which indicates that people have a hard time understanding and describing hearing.

a typical audiogram

This interests HCI because this is an instance where the framework for understanding the issue will change how the human-computer interaction for the hearing test is designed. You can see here there is a social schism between the doctor and patient, with the computers inbetween. The computer and headphones act as passive social actors, so really there are 4 agents in the room: patient, doctor, sound equipment, PC.

So if an understanding of hearing loss included the social dimension, perhaps there would be seperate kinds of testing, which isolate social “hearing” and more technical “hearing”. The tests could involve interacting with a person and then with a computer which sends tones to the patient. While I was considering the kinds of hearing tests that a new understanding of this space would result in, Maria mentions, “what kind of hearing are we testing here?”. Because depending on how physicians understand and test hearing loss, this impacts what kinds of hearing aids are selected for the user, not to mention the design of the aids themselves, which is much more our territory as HCI designers.

there are many social issues surrounding hearing aids

I was inspired by this case where social research, conversation analysis done by Egbert’s lab, can inform HCI design using strong empirical evidence. People who suffer from hearing loss actually live shorter lives as a result, and there are social problems like stigma of hearing aids, or young people who have hearing loss and don’t want to admit it. There is room here not just to solve a consumer problem, but to improve people’s lives in a very real way through HCI design. My question is this: if we create a new framework of the phenomenological understanding of hearing, what kind of hearing tests and hearing aid designs would we see?

 

Experientialist Design

November 25th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

The way we interpret our world is limited and shaped by our cultural values and our embodied human experience. Evidence of this is seen through analyzing the metaphors people use in language. The ways we are limited and affected by this understanding absolutely limits and affects our ability as user experience designers. These are the issues I have been thinking about ever since I have had the good fortune of reading the book, “Metaphors We Live By”  (Lakoff, Johnson 1980).

In this book, the authors point out the central importance that metaphors have in human cognition and experience. In fact, they use the evidence that they gathered about metaphors to argue that human experience supplants the dominant paradigm of objectivism, by accounting for more phenomena than objectivism could. In objectivism there is such a thing as “absolute” truth: an account for reality that is not altered by the conditions of the humans who experience it. For example, the statement, “the sky is blue” is true whether an English speaking person says so or if a parrot is merely repeating the sounds it has been taught by a trainer. This objectivist way of thinking is largely useful for people and without flaw, except for when it attempts to understand the meaning and importance of metaphor: specifically what it means for the human experience.

Generally when someone talks about human experience, one may think that this person is coming from the Romantic tradition, or “subjectivism”. Proposed as a way of thinking altogether different from objectivism, this kind of thought claims that imagination is infinite in scope and possibility, and that the true way to live is by developing artistically and looking within ourselves. Subjectivism fails in that imagination is not in fact infinite; as Lakoff and Johnson show, an individuals’ understanding of their world is ineffably tied to the metaphors that they live by, in other words, their values are apparent through the metaphors used in their environment.

To give some of the simplest examples: “more is up”, and “time is money”. “More is up” refers to a physical orientation that humans have in embodied existence: when you have *more* books in a pile, they add “up”. This metaphor is extended beyond physical things, but the metaphor remains the same. For instance, “the prices rose”, although nothing physical is going up, we used our embodied experience of “more = up” to understand “prices”. These metaphors provide evidence that people mainly experience a world that is neither entirely “objective” nor “subjective”, and thus our model of reality should not be “objective” or “subjective” either.

The point they make is that neither objectivism nor subjectivism can account properly for what metaphors really indicate. So they argue for “experientialism”: accounting for the human experience in understanding “truth” and reality.

What does this mean for User Experience Design? Well to give you some examples, our practice is inescapably full of metaphors. I am currently writing on a Mac”Book” Pro, the “desktop” in my background, “windows”, the World Wide “Web” (like a spider’s), even online products, Facebook uses the metaphor of a book full of faces much like a year-book. Basically what this means is that we can never be some disembodied humans just existing as sentient minds roaming cyberspace as is often suggested in science fiction. Our embodied human experience is core to our understanding of everything, no matter how far into the future we go.

What this means is that ultimately as “experience designers” we are not solving technological problems, we are solving human problems. And when we attack these issues, most designers are not at all aware of their stance on understanding the world. Are they objectivists, who believe there is one good, true answer to this problem? Maybe some engineers at Google believe that they can run statistics until they achieve the one true good design. Or are they subjectivists? Some people started calling themselves “experience designers” to cash in on the UX trend without understanding its foundations; maybe they just design a superficially pretty UI out of “artistic inspiration” knowing “internally” whether it is good; no need for user research, prototypes, or testing!

If UX designers are not unwittingly practicing an “experientialist” stance, then this is what it would be like if they did. This stance calls for empirical evidence and “rationality”, while also being aware of the human embodied experience and the distinction between metaphors common to all humans and those specific to particular cultures. So when a designer has to make a leap of faith in a design decision, they are actually employing their decades of experience as a human to produce something that naturally other humans from the same culture will understand. That is why when “The Facebook” was named using this metaphor without any sort of “empirical evidence” that it would work out well, it worked well anyway because people familiar with faces and books understood the metaphor.

What does this mean, practically for UX Design? The meaning is right there in the words, “User Experience Design”. I want to pick apart our use and understanding of two of these words in particular, “user” and “experience”.

User: a physical, sentient, individual human. We should question this. Why do we point out a “user” instead of, say, “people”? This refers to the Western understanding of the fundamental unit of humanity: an *individual*. Perhaps in other cultures the common people, or a family unit, or other units of humans are of more importance than a separated human being. The individual is of utmost importance in our cultural paradigm, and moreover, in technology they are almost stripped of their humanity and identity by being called a “user”, which is the term that sys-admins use to talk about their computer networks. “User” not only indicates the separated individual, but that the point of perspective comes from the computer, viewing the “being that is using it” as the user. Quite ironic that in a field that talks about “human-centered design”, we should be talking about humans in such a non-human way. This innocent word, “user”, with its implications of a single separate human whose identity is that of a computer-operator, points to our cultural understanding and attitude towards humans in the technological context. It should be no surprise then, that people seem cut off from each other and the world with their mobile phones, ear buds, and laptops;  to be by themselves as “users”.

Next, there is “Experience”. Experience is our understanding and interaction within the world, shaped by our real physiological limitations. For instance; I can only see from my own perspective and two eyes, not through anyone else’s. I stand with my head up and my feet are down. These are common characteristics of human experience, and there is more evidence coming out all the time in response to Lakoff and Johnson’s theory, like how the physiological experience of anger in humans means that there are common metaphors across all cultures and languages concerning the experience of anger (e.g. anger is hot: “you should cool down”, “chill out”, “he has a short fuse”, etc.) . This means that while we are separated by cultural values such as “time is money”, we also have in common many ways of understanding our world through our human experience. This should be studied for anyone serious about designing products for more than one culture, or who seek to effect positive change by uprooting dangerous metaphors. (labor = resource, which implies that cheap labor = cheap resources, when we are really talking about the inhuman treatment of  ”labor resource”, e.g. people, in “developing”, e.g. exploited countries.)

Language is not just a matter of mere words. As objectivists might understand words, they are merely “vessels” that deliver “meaning”, which is impacted by the ability of the recipient to understand; as if meaning is separate from the language itself. Indeed, the way we talk about User Experience Design is often how we understand it. The meaning of this practice is still emerging, that is why people are still discussing the proper way to describe “user experience”, the meaning of this practice and its place in research and industry.

There is hidden meaning in the way people talk about everything through metaphor, and our practice is no exception. A more studious understanding of metaphor can make the experientialist designer a level above their peers by knowing what concepts are particular to cultures, discourses, technologies, etc., and what concepts are common to all humans. An experientialist designer understands that he or she is designing for the sake of solving problems that are stemming from an embodied human’s understanding of the world, rather than looking at technology as some object that exists objectively in of itself with values irrelevant to the people who experience it.

Photo Ethnography

October 31st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

I am researching Japanese mobile phone usage (called ケータイ　or “keitai”) versus the usage touch-screen smart phones (called スマーホー or “sumaho”), and users who use both simultaneously, with an eye towards Japanese language text entry. I am taking a few different methods, mainly ethnography and eye-tracking tests. These cover both seeking insights into complex situated actions from the ground up (ethnography), and finding specific quantitative measurements of usability via eye-tracking and usability.

These are some photos from my ethnographic observations. Chihiro is a very cool person and friend of mine who is studying Turkish. She allowed me to follow her around her normal day as I took pictures of her when she used her mobile phone. In these photos she is reading and writing emails to her friends.

Chihiro Smiling

The way Chihiro’s social life is organized and maintained is very different from that of her parent’s generation. The way that she schedules meetings, finds her friends, and organizes her day are all very different from the pre-keitai era, and the day I spent photographing her provided several instances of this. For instance, Chihiro had seen her friends earlier that day during class. They decided on meeting “around lunch” and “somewhere”, to rehearse her drama club’s dance routine. Neither the time or place was specific, but as they approached lunch time, all the invited parties slowly began to email each other more and more, until finally they convened within fifteen minutes of Chihiro initiating contact.

Of Violins and Interaction Design

October 25th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

The classical music tradition is rich in its cultural heritage and the values among its community. Compare the old tradition of classical music with the new tradition of computing and digital consumerism, and we have a very interesting study on the quickly changing nature of our  culture, as well as further studying what is “human centered” about “human centered design”.

Seeing the classical music community as one which embodies a tradition very different than the fast paced consumer oriented cultures which interaction design practice usually caters to, I wanted to discuss this user group in an effort to further pursue and expand the horizon of understanding of what it means to design for sustainability, personalization, and a feeling of humanness or “ensoulment” (“Ensoulment and Sustainable Interaction Design” 2007. Blevis, Stolterman).

I also see this topic as leading into the issue of personalizing computing for the contexts where something which improves over age, things which are very personal, and things which act as heirloom (Blevis 2007) or valuable items over time are highly regarded and prized. This is a timely topic because computing, being a very new field, especially the concept of personal computers and mobile devices, is coming to terms with a number of newly relevant issues. Moral issues arise like sustainability, homogeneity among products which seems to impose a homogeneity over people’s individuality, and an either implicit or explicit cultural hegemony as a result of interfaces being created in one culture and then either shipping to another culture, or cross-pollinating with another culture. This last case can be exemplified in many cases, for instance the QWERTY keyboard, the idea of a “universal” web seperate from physical place and space (“Personal, Portable, Pedestrian” 2005. Ito, et. al), and mobile computing paradigms like QR code are all inseperable from the cultural contexts from which they emerged. Traditional cultural developments that have occured over human history took place with a much slower pace than those of computing. Within only a few decades, the world all over is familiar with the English-speaking world’s keyboard, perhaps further eliminating plurality in written languages in exchange for inter-cultural global communication in English. It is therefore important that we study how traditional practices have strived to maintain and respect cultural plurality while retaining identity and cultivating its community so that computing can adopt some of these values.

Taking to heart the interaction design credo of studying very specific, even extreme, user groups, I have taken a focus on the people of the classical music world for this essay. HCI and interaction design both often fail to take into consideration the consumer groups that are more resistant to software and digital products, which a conservative group like classical musicians may appear to be. This makes this user group particularly satisfying for an HCI researcher because they are so unusual to the typical digital consumer. The culture that these individuals are surrounded with are typically very low-tech, traditional, and rooted in traditions that have not changed much over time. The hierarchy of orchestra chairs, music school faculty and fellows, composers and performers, all reflect a Western tradition that has changed very little in comparison to technical fields. In addition to the social dimension, the physical objects and spaces of this group is generally more low-tech and traditional than other groups as well. However, this group can consume digital products with a healthy appetite, albeit they have a detached feeling from personal computer products. Compared to the violin of a violinist or the sheet music we see ubiquitously in music schools and concert halls, electronic products do not share nearly the same level of intimacy and connectedness that these physical items offer the musician.

Take a violin, for instance. It grows with the player over time like a symbiotic relationship. The violin has a history of it’s own, like a human being. It was created some years ago, passed through some hands, played in this or that hall and country, and now it is in your hands. In fact the wood of such instruments vibrate over and over with the way that the musician plays, eventually molding the very wood itself to accomodate the way the musician plays. The wood will “open up” over time and sound better the more it plays. Unlike computers which slow down over time and become outdated, quality instruments improve over time. Their sound, the vintage appearance that develops, their value, and the relationship the player has with the instrument all improve over time. Players who change instruments often report feeling like they themselves are changing to accomodate this new instrument, much like beginning a new romantic relationship, both partners are developing together.

Now that the advantages of a ubiquitous computing environment are paramount, how can we design future products in a way that will defeat obsolescence? How can we transform the path computing products take from highly relevant to obsolete over time, into a path like that of quality classical instruments- improving over time? Is this even within the nature of computing, to have a single organic product improve over time and with use? Or is this something planned, as a result of hardware being manufactured by companies which derive profit from selling new products rather than re-selling old, boutique products which add value over time?

Classical musicians revere history, tradition, and hard-won skill. Their instruments and culture are a reflection of these values. While computing looks primarily to the future and the promises it holds, human traditions like music reveal the values that humans have held in common for a long history. When we design the future of computer products, we are designing our ideal human environment. We are building structures of ideas the same way architecture does with physical buildings: providing access, facilitating movement, creating spaces for communities, and improving the ambient quality of life of the inhabitants. By looking across disciplines at traditions like classical music, we can hopefully design a future of computing that is sustainable, personable, human, and improves over time. Maybe one day we can design computers which grow with us over time, the way a violin grows with the violinist.

The Argument for our Practice

October 17th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Recently, creator of C and Unix Dennis Ritchie passed away. In his 1984 article, Reflections on Software Research, he discussed the story of designing one of the most important inventions in modern computing. During Ritchie’s time, the norm for to-be computer scientists was to study not computer science, but physics and math. The creation of computer technology at the time relied upon these fundamental discoveries and developments like C, Unix, electrical currents of super-conductors, and so on. So how is it that we are seeing the discourse of computing open to every form of study, including anthropology, linguistics, psychology, even art and design?

What happened is that the explosion of development in computing transformed its meaning in our lives. Fundamental research like materials science and engineering enables more application through systems engineering, which enables the mastery and design of computing tools to accommodate people’s needs in a more holistic approach. That is where the domain of the “interaction designer” lies now. He or she can examine the problems that people have and use methods from almost any discipline to inform design or critique. There is a long intellectual history of discourse that led to the adoption of certain techniques over others, by this group of professionals we refer to as “interaction designers”. When it comes to employing methods of user research, it is taken for granted by the industry and professionals where these techniques came from, and what is their use or relevance. In (Dourish, Button, 1998) we can see the roots of ethnomethodological adoption among researchers and professionals. It is important not to lose track of where our practice comes from. Although mostly for the purpose of interface design, interaction design is also a valid base of skills to approach interaction critique (Bardzell and Bardzell, 2008) in academic discourse.

It is challenging for an interaction designer to look back at the course of computer history and trace a path that makes sense. Everything happened so fast in computing, within industry and research alike, that we can barely see the forest for the trees. Take a glance through the job ads asking for “interaction designers” and it is clear that there is much disagreement and misunderstanding about who does what in IT. But given the effort, we can see that thanks to brilliant researchers like Dennis Ritchie, the foundational developments like C, Unix, and so on allowed us to employ more anthropological, or “user-centered” approaches that we enjoy and champion today. These humanistic approaches that interaction and user experience designers employ today are only in place because of their proven efficacy through industry and discourse.

Because computing now occupies every part of the modern person’s life, every part of the modern person is viable for study, and subsequently design. Computing benefits medicine, social welfare, political democracy, education, freedom of expression, and so on. Computing has the potential to do more for humanity than any political creed or organization has ever had the ability to do in the entirety of human history. But along with its capability there is culpability. Pollution, e-waste, Foxconn, broadening social divide as a result of access to information and knowledge, threat of security systems, lack of privacy, identity theft, and other concerns are on the minds of more people than just paranoid luddites.

There are no limits to the various disciplines that could benefit designing for the user. We need as many physicists in computing as we need poets, philosophers, and composers. This expansion is exactly the horizon the interaction designer is faced with in their practice, or the should be faced with it. In other words, through the broadening scope of the capabilities of computing, simply designing the user experience is no longer the task of the interaction designer. What we are really doing is designing a better world for all people. As we will see more and more, this is not simply rhetoric, but our reality and our responsibility.

It helps to pause occasionally during our interaction design practice and consider the argument behind the methods we use.

 

The Language of the Mind: where will text input go in ten years?

October 13th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

The recent loss of interaction visionary Steve Jobs has signaled deep questions about the future of human-centered technology in the computing communities. While Apple has never had an official charitable arm, they gave the world products which brought the old tradition of Design to the new tradition of computing. Now with the loss of Apple’s leader, people are wondering who or what will replace his vision. While Jobs himself was an important figure in the forward looking technology that Apple produced, much also has to do with the thousands of engineers and designers working for his company. Nevertheless, this represents a changing of the guard. Consumers, manufacturers, and companies are again looking for a visionary leader in the design of products that look to the future rather than mimicking present products to earn a profit.

The mainstream perspective on the idea of “innovation” seems to be that some rare figures in space and time, like Bill Gates once was and Steve Jobs recently was, are the forces which purely strive to bring consumers the very best, by way of invention. This is a bit romanticized at best and a lie at worst. Actually the scientific and computing communities have, and are, envisioning future technologies using research and modern engineering. However, the insights (from research such as belonging to fields like HCI and Design) and the capabilities (engineering, computer science) gathered by these communities will not reach consumers right away. Common sense in business dictates that the less capital you expend in exchange for more profit, the better. This is why we will only see incremental updates on products, because they will continue to sell this way. People were surprised that iPhone 4s followed iPhone 4, as opposed to seeing iPhone 5. A company as profitable as Apple knows that these small iterative advances are the most economical way to move forward.

The nice thing about the sciences is that we can predict where technologies can and should go in the future, without having to worry about profit margins. Researchers in HCI like myself can try and use the information around us to paint a picture of a more ideal interactional model of our world. Being a student of HCI/design, I take an approach to research much like I approach design. The first step is to identify a problem. Since the area of study is Human-Computer Interaction, that is a bit too wide. So today I will be talking about the subject that I am currently researching, and that is text input on mobile phones. More broadly, I am talking about the idea of “writing” text through a computer interface and the challenges that it holds, especially for the non-English speaking world.

In the study of linguistics, there is a field that is concerned with the way our brains “compute” sentences and messages. It is called psycholinguistics, and this is a field which I have been getting to know more closely as I approach this problem. In this field, researchers use many methodologies (although historically purely theoretical) to try and paint a model of how people, or “users” receive messages, process the meaning, and return utterances. The reason I am getting to know this field is because I have identified a problem in HCI for the Japanese language. Briefly, the English speaking origin of many input technologies (QWERTY keyboard for instance) means there is a significant cognitive load on those people who are not native English speakers, or even roman alphabet users, because they have to translate their message through the interface in their mind by inputting roman text, in order to write a message in their native tongue (in this case Japanese). However, mobile computing is a wonderful land of new interactions, interfaces, and opportunities for designers and researchers alike. Especially in Japan, where the users have some familiarity with English and the roman alphabet, but are very much “thinking in” Japanese, there is a whole lot of crazy stuff going on with mobile products.

I want to show you some of these things, because this concerns my research, so you will see it soon enough. But that would be another, probably much longer post than this. For now though, I wanted to give some thoughts on the iPhone 4s new feature of Siri, the way of interfacing with the iPhone through speech commands.

The problem with this is that it is highly linked to cultural context, and is incompatible with many contexts. This doesn’t mean it isn’t a cool feature, but I think it is not a coincidence that Siri is not enabled with Japanese yet. In the cultural climate of Tokyo for instance, talking out loud to your iPhone would simply not happen. People are way too private, the trains are too crowded, and people are too polite to actually use this outside of their home. Anyway, I commend Apple on trying to go to the next step of putting our ideas through a computer (text input -> voice commands), but let’s be plain: the ultimate way of inputting text would be without an interface at all! This is what we are getting closer to, and in research we have equipment that can sense words that a person is thinking of speaking, but not uttering or even mouthing. Until then, interaction designers must come up with ways of interacting with computers that are fast and convenient. I am here to remind everyone that different cultures have different interactional requirements (such as polite Tokyo vs. auto-city Los Angeles). This leaves us with a very timely problem, in the face of globalizing technological forces like Apple and interface paradigms like QWERTY.

The problem is thus: how can we create “universal” human centered designs, adequate for the entire world, while catering to different cultures? How can an industrial model of manufacturing possibly accomodate diversity? Is cultural hegemony an unavoidable byproduct of the global-sized resources required to create advanced technology?

Reflection on Artifacts and Fictions

October 9th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Putting ink on paper is an issue that is quite serious. Every stroke of the pen is a commitment. Every dot and symbol feels like a matter of life and death. Some success, and we can alter our worlds how we wish, but it has consequences no matter what. I noticed recently for instance, that I haven’t written in this blog for some time. This blog hasn’t really had any awareness of what it’s about so far, in fact the entire existence of this blog was dependent upon its nonexistence. The less solid the entity was, more likely it would be in existence. The less it mattered, the more I wrote. This is an interesting phenomenon of design. When something comes into being, we don’t want to smash it.. We want to “finish” it. Designers must face the tremendous task of never finishing anything. We must spend our livelihood creating things that are never done, things that, when we release them from our hands, represent something that did not exist when we crafted it. That is a tremendous effort that requires strength that I simply do not have. No human could have it. But some how, miraculously, we draw the power down deep from the earth and from the bottoms of our guts, we lose control in a brief moment of unconscious consciousness, and we design something. The world is forever altered. We are responsible for the consequences.

But by posting this, this is the point illustrated: this artifact is not an artifact. It is a process. By publishing this, this is no longer truth. The truth is that what I do is in a process of becoming. The lie is that this article, this artifact, this story you are reading, exists the way it portrays itself. The world at-this-very-moment presents a world of things. These things are numerable and categorizeable, tangible, and appear to have all these familiar attributes we give to things. Maybe because the truth is so strange and subtle that we created this lie in order to go through our days. But the truth about artifacts, and design, is the same idea that people have occasionally had for a long time: nothing is static, everything changes. So what I do is the process of making something, I am not responsible for what the chaotic world outside of my hands does to the artifact. Even the mere perception of my artifact is altering it with their views and opinions. Things do not exist in physicality, for humans things exist in metaphysicality. That is, we do not judge a person by their merit or the length of their hair, we judge them by a metaphysical construct of values that we have created as a society performing a million year-long global act of distributed cognition. It is in this way that things exist in reality.

A pen is not a pen. This pen is a bic. It is the color “black”. It is for writing. It is made of plastic. It comes from petroleum. Once you write with it, you can’t erase it. It is for signing things, like contracts, checks, and your taxes. They are cheaper than other pens. I remember the name, “bic”. I grew up using “bic” pens. They are an unforgettable aspect of my life, and many people’s lives, and they are utterly meaningless and forgettable. But they are also instilled with billions of points of meaning, some more meaningful than others.

So when we create, we lie. But we can have no choice but to lie. For the lie is not in the design, the lie is in perception.

Connecting Service with Computer Interactions; the challenge of UX in Japan

October 5th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

People generally have a mental image of Japan that shares many things in common. And those things are generally true; people are very polite, trains run on time, and there is a small delightful experience with almost all the little things. For instance, the vending machines and convenient stores here are practically miracles for the first time visitor.  Japanese seem to have a mastery over small convenient things. Appropriately, the people in Tokyo never seem over burdened with things like backpacks and suitcases; they often carry minimal possessions with them.

As a customer, the service here could be unmatched anywhere else in the world. There is minimal burden upon the customer, and each customer is greeted with uniform welcome and politeness from the staff. In this sense, people see Japan as being very futuristic still. The ultra-dense quarters of Tokyo seem to be the stage of what the future might be like for everyone, in a sort of Bladerunner-esque vision of the future.

For me however, I have noticed that there are some wide gaps in the services provided in Japan and the computer interfaces people commonly use. There is the common image of ubiquitous cellphone usage among subways in Tokyo, so it seems they must be living in a techno-utopia. Actually, the users experience many difficulties in their interfaces. These difficulties arise from language input, via various cellphone text input interfaces, reading web pages that are intended only for “keitai” (Japanese style mobile phones), the software on “pasocon” (personal computers) which were designed by and intended for English speaking users, QWERTY keyboards, and so on. Indeed, a closer look at the human-computer interaction world in Japan, and it seems they are actually living partly in the past. The web industry isn’t comparable to Silicon Valley, and the consumer base has very different needs from American users anyway. It isn’t uncommon to see many Japanese people switching through various text input systems on a laptop running Microsoft XP still today. I see users switching between a smartphone to browse the Internet and do various visual tasks, and then type messages with a keitai, their secondary device!

This is a time of change for Japanese users, as evident by those things I mentioned. In some ways Japan will continue to be, necessarily, a “galapagos” island when it comes to digital devices and so on, but they are continuing to interface with the world with Japanese products, and American products are adapting to the Japanese market, with mixed results. This is a highly complex issue, and I will be looking more in depth at the mobile phone issue that is going on here, and attempt to explain the underlying theory behind why some devices continue to be successful here and not elsewhere (the so called galapagos devices), and why some interfaces will not be adopted by Japanese users.

How to design a presentation?

July 6th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Anyone who has shown off their work, interaction design or otherwise, has noticed that how they present something as well as when they present it has a huge impact on it’s reception and the result of the presentation. Without a clear direction of the purpose of the presentation, knowing what you want to get out of it, and clear communication of your rationale, you may have a disappointing presentation. Presentations at their best can engage people, gain supporters, bring new ideas to the table; the sky is the limit.

I want to talk about the timing of presentation, and the question of “when to hold ‘em, when to show ‘em, and when to fold ‘em”. I am alluding to poker, where you sometimes don’t reveal your cards, sometimes you show your cards (presenting), and sometimes you fold your cards. This metaphor is apt because of it’s simplicity and usefulness in what I want to say.

When to hold ‘em: Sometimes in our design process, we might be going in a direction that is fostering new ideas, which might seem crazy at first. If you are for instance designing an apple peeler, and you want to make it shaped like a space ship, you might not want to show anyone until you are sure it is a good idea. Or, you might want to show your designer friend who is himself a bit crazy like yourself, but not to your boss, who is maybe harder to convince. In my experience, the crazier an idea is, the more you have to develop a strong rationale and presentation for why you think this is a good idea before you present. People love new and innovative ideas, but they also like to shoot holes through things that stick out. If your design is going to stick out, make it bullet-proof.

When to show ‘em: That brings us to the presentation. As designers, most of us have to present at various stages of the process, not just the final presentation. The final presentation may only be mid-process, if your portion of the job lies early on in the overall development. I have come to realize that when presenting, you should make your goal of the presentation clear to your audience, and prepare your presentation to accomplish that goal exceedingly. It works in this manner: first identify the problem, diagnose why the problem arises, present your solution, and re-iterate how this is the best solution to the problem in the same way you described the problem.

This is pretty much review for most designers, but I think my contribution would be that we should think about how every time we show what we are doing to anyone, it is a form of presentation. It is nice to ask for advice and collaborate, or to impress people, but even in the most casual and random presentation, we should take care to inform people of what we are doing in a way that they can understand and also sets the stage for the kind of response you would like to get.

When should we fold our cards, so to speak? I think this is a highly underrated part of the process, and it is this “folding of the cards” that makes a process iterative. This usually happens after presentations, we consider changes to what we are doing, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. Certainly, we shouldn’t let people know we are changing our design outside of the design team in most cases, since in our culture this kind of going backwards can seem to be a sign of lacking confidence. Actually, an iterative and occasionally deconstructive approach can be a good thing. After all, you are not going to lose the last design you just made, you will still have the sketches or the files on your computer. Taking a mid-process clean slate and making a totally different design can be very informative. At this point we are testing the boundaries of this space, much like feeling around in a dark room. Except instead of walls, it’s just space and more space, however it can go from “hot” to “cold” in rather awkward places. There is also a chance to discover something brilliant in this auxiliary journey. Although I would not suggest showing this right away, it can be a great exercise to do, if not only to reaffirm why the first direction was the best in the first place.

 

Designing for Physicians – iPad

June 22nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

I have been working on an iPad app for a certain medical product. I am about a month and a half into the process of designing this app, which is intended to be a sort of interactive marketing piece intended to be put into the hands of physicians. I was approached with a brief that went something like this, “We have this awesome new product that isn’t for sale in the U.S. yet. We have a whole bunch of marketing material and trial data scattered across the organization and across the world in forms of print, web, and trade show material. Not to mention the sales reps who are beginning to learn about it so they can sell their pitch to physicians. We want an iPad app for this new product, but we don’t really know why or what for. All we know is that sales reps and physicians are now equipped with iPads, and they want an app.”

Right. So does a problem really exist? Thus went my introduction into the world of medical product marketing. I can’t complain though, diving headlong into problems is how I prefer it. What I didn’t know though, was that problems do exist to solve, only there are too many problems. I soon discovered why they gave me practically this one singular project to work on; it is a “swamp” problem, but not for the reasons you might have guessed reading thus far. Actually the problem is that nobody is in agreement about what the scope of this design is, what situation or who it should be intended for (and why), and not to mention all the content and information is held in tight secrecy across the organization. This last problem has been the most problematic, since unlike the first two, I have very little control over it. The organization I am in has multiple departments which all are responsible for their own budgets, and therefore are not exactly in direct competition, but it means the resources are spread across wide divisions.

My process would have gone much differently had I been in more control of the rate at which I received information about the product. I had to gain access to the information slowly, over a period of weeks, and from multiple sources. In fact I am still waiting for information, which will directly affect design decisions on my part.

The result has been to take what I have and run with it. I imagined that I would have a HCI/D, Bill Buxton-esque process wherein I would do this quick and massive undertaking of research, followed by sketching and collaboration, followed by iteration, testing and refinement. Alas, nothing of the sort would happen. I am assigned to the project by myself, and nary a resource handed to me. I had to learn and adapt quickly, and that is exactly what I have been doing. I seek knowledge on whatever avenues I can, relentlessly, and then design with what is given to me. I get feedback on sketches from pretty much anyone when I need it.

I realized along the way that Interaction Design to me is a form of thought argumentation. You are given an abstract task, a project that has been in no way undertaken thus far (actually there have been some sketches before I got on board, but I didn’t go in that direction), and you are supposed to fabricate something that simultaneously makes sense to you as a designer, and to the company as a stakeholder. But that’s not all, you have to frame the design in a way that makes the audience want to stand up and argue for your design as well! This was a difficult thing to integrate into my strategy, but I think I have learned how to do it. When we present a design or an idea, we are setting it up for success or failure based on how we frame the issue. If I present to you a problem very clearly, then explain the problem, and you are in agreement thus far, then it is very easy for me to present a solution, which re-iterates how it solves the problem in the ways that I just explained the problem. So if there is a problem which has two “causes” let’s say, then my design solution has two rationales (for every design choice) which solve those two “causes”. In this way, not only would you be convinced of the solution, but given the way I framed the problem in the first place, it would make sense for you to see almost no other way of doing it than the way I chose. It is very difficult to stop thinking in the way someone has framed a paradigm for you and say, “wait a second, maybe the problem isn’t the way you are describing it, maybe it is something else”.

Actually designers are the ones who are good at criticizing in this way, so when presenting to other designers it is crucial that even the way you frame your paradigm is supported by strong evidence, strong enough that you could request that he/she provides even more legitimate, overwhelming data that actually contradicts what you are saying, but of course this never happens. Recently I presented some ideas, and though the ideas were an early iteration, I had my audience so convinced of the way I framed the problem, he would accept nothing other than the approach I was taking. Indeed, he was arguing for the very path I chose, while I played devil’s advocate! Since I was taking a different approach than the one initially expected of me, I was afraid I would get some resistance, but instead I won a supporter.

I am still mid-design, but it’s beginning to solidify and take form, slowly molding into something that looks like a “thing”. Which is funny because it seems so obvious after it is created, but it felt like such a mystery before it came into existence. It is not obvious at first glance that this design used to not exist, that a whole process had to be undergone just to target the purpose, the audience, the content, style, etc. I guess that’s why design seems a little bit like magic sometimes! Anyway, soldiering on. Sketches (and writing about the actual project) to come soon.

Sublunary Sphere

May 22nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Here it is, the video documenting our museum installation project for our Experience Design class with Erik Stolterman. My team for the project was Ryan Lefkoff, Alex Sulgrove, Pascal Lola, and myself. It was TONS of fun, and I think it shows. Albeit it came out a little silly in the end, that’s all right, I guess we are silly people!

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