IS 272 Week 4 Class Notes

Move toward uses of technology and technology design

Week 5
Pivot week in the course
Garnett Hertz joining from UCI -- critical making pamphlets
Critical making and critical echnical process are two philosophy of building
Brings in yet another philosophical/theoretical viewpoint of critical theory/critique
A political econmy or cultural criticism approach to looking at how these things are approached

Agre: is mentioned in HCI Remixed volume
Sengers: hands-on article
Ratto: Most hands-on; lab as example of how to bring in critique into practice

Critical technical practice

Critiques are due next week
Have critiques ready before class so ppl can review thm
Upload them as drafts and then redo later, if you want
Come ready with the stuff you’ve been reading for the conversation with Garnett
Firm final deadline of Friday 5pm

Put up your paper as a link on Key Works in HCI in wiki

Week 6
Be ready to discuss the principles in the syllabus
Design desireables/guidelines to think abt whether designs work or not
Rules of thimb

Weeks 7
Second workshop need to prepare in advance
Choose a collection of your own (MT: fortunes?)
Howard Besser
Information organization class exercise in which students organize reorganize and create metadata for his tshirt collection
Figure out how you think about and organize your collection. What are the featues that matter to you, come up with a graphic representation
Whatever vectors you think are important for organizing thinking abt the features of this collection
MT: what if it’s a collection of junk and chaos? Able to find whatever I need.
Browse through the visualization information on the wiki

Persona is abt the user’s relationship to the tool
Scenarios are the sort of processes that the ideal user would have

Pattern languages is another approach
Christopher alexander (architect) pattern language. She’ll post some pages abt this

Certain elemental features of design
Comprehensive set of patterns for architecture

Jennifer tidwell’s whole book is accessible from ucla library online
Read her article on common ground. Took pattern language idea and applied to interfaces

Find a good website, and then determine what kind of persona it was designed for
What kinds of patterns do you find?
Group responsible for comng up with elementary persona or pattern to present what you’ve developed

Week 4
Humanistic readings
Can see how the idea has developed over time – this school of thought
Much more recent
Cognitive.human actors/factors 1980s
Phenomenology 1990s
Digital humanities current

Moving from engineering focus to cultural/contextual/emotion focus
Task/plan→experience
Meaning
Constructivist co-dependence (Drucker) Co-creation of the user experience
Technology as machine→technology as tool
Ubiquitous
We shouldn’t even notice technology
Moving past generic users and getting into a very specific type of user experience
Who is sitting down to use the system
Deconstructing “user”
Can you really design user experience?
Culture of design
Function + form: aesthetic, art + science
Means versus ends
It’s not the thing you fling, it’s the fling itself – northern exposure
Play—engagement “as dramatic as the stage”=dramaturgy, evocative MT: relate to curiosity??
Non-discretionary versus discretionary

How you think about design is shifting in parallel to this

Umberto Eco, Mac vs. PC

Talking abt scholarly controversies
Catholic versus protestant

Performance
Linked to the notion of play
Play to be construed as enjoyment engagement
MT: ask Leah about the role of curiosity in this
Play as a centerpiece of the way ppl live in our advantaged society
Playful approach to how ppl engage with each other, devices, social linkages in the world, how they make society, relationships
Very class-based

Performance/performativity
Cross-dressing as a performance of gender
Classic ethnography of cross-dressing and drag in the late 70s mother can’t
Performance in the sense of display and manifestation in the world
Means doing sthg, making sthg real
Judith butler Gender Trouble
Sex and gender are different
We identify with gender, not necessarily with sex

Performance is culturally important we perform them all the time
Performativity has to do with the ability of a thing/person to make through performance
“performativity of language”
immersion→flow

MT: designers and flow
At what level can we create affordances, devices, etc., that become means for having that experience?

Laurel
Mimesis – the debate about the “realness”, “virtuality”
Representative
Interface is mimesis because it represents reality
Emotional investment
Pleasure engagement

MT: does Laurel say anything abt curiosity as a means of evoking emotional investment

Want to do, not to use – thrownness (Heidegger)

“Designing for thrownness” article by paul somebody that I should read

willing suspension of disbelief --dramaturgy (this happens on the audience side)
interactivity is important – different from play inthat there is interaction
tension arises because we don’t talk abt interactions w ppl in this production consumption sort of way
increasingly our dealings with these technologies are less like consumption and more like conversation/exchange/group process
games are very much like this, but there are some things that go beyond what laurel expected
interactivity seen through first-personness

Technology as experience
What computers can do → what users can do
Consumer as actor
Emotional – the felt life and felt interaction
These readings are the different ways writers are trying to deal with this idea – subjectivity
How you experience, feel, emotional pitch, attitude, affect, belief

Relationships and communication have affected technology (email, texting, IM)

Interactivity: every app that is wildly successful lis interactive
It’s conversation, self-representation with ppl you know
[task vs. relation] very typical way for ppl to break out the components of what goes on in doing work
technological determinism vs. social construction/subjectivity

MT: anonymity and internet – able to project whatever persona you want

Culturally embedded computing
Reflection (reflective practice)
If we move far enough off the task orientation, we’re creating a class of devices that are “tools to think/feel with”
Sherry Turkle-ish
Allows us to think differently abt what our action is in the world
Features only becoming obvious when they break down
To think deeper and to know more than we would if we just took it for granted
Sengers: aren’t you interested that when you do X this other Y happens? Does this make your next step different?
Sensor data – tracking data personal – “quantitative self”
Really hard for the machines to figure out affect, but easy to track biometrics
Physiology self quantification – ways to improve one’s life a change of behavior
Think abt the GPS art dude and the music heart rate dude
Affective computing

Beatriz da Costa
Trying to bump us out of the taken-for-granted space
Giving up all kinds of information to databases
Art making, design, provocation
Functionality – academic thought experiments

For sengers (and dourish a bit too) convergence between art-making sensibility and software coding
Critics, writers, artists using the technology in sophisticated and unexpected ways
MT: how does information/curiosity play a role in this?

Rode
Feminist HCI
“male” interface design
users are not generic

essentialism – tendency for some ppl to see pple only through a lens of ethnicity, gender, etc.
personas, in a way, contradict this
MT: bbg women’s issue; Della

Interface Theory
Things to consider when building
Embodied of users
Non sequitur relations/breaks

Montage/ Juxtaposition of images – cognitivism
Experimental film the insight that it’s a continuous singular experience
The core of moving images
You become the link between the images
His was the most actionable piece
Don’t want to overfragment the user (just as we don’t want to overconsolidate the user)
Have we gotten to a point with computing as a medium, means of expression, interaction, reflection
So many possibilities for interfaces
A diversity of design choices that might address some of these concerns
Leah: The internet of the moment is pretty banal. Seeing fixes/refinements

Recap
Over the last three weeks
A ;ot of these ideas will resonate next week
There is an arc in what’s happened in our understanding of computation who the users are, what they use it for, what it takes to get them to a level of meaning, not just using, also meaning, understanding
Trajectory from fair;y straightforward archetypal persona still used
Going from that earlier pd more toward greater embeddedneww, emphasis on affect, interaction, sociality
Away from task, more toward relation
It’s gotten more complicated
Our toolsl however, give us a few more choidces abt how interaction designs can or might work

At the moment of TKTK for input-output (IO) devices
Still talking abt a physical obj with particular kinds of qualitiwes moved further from text and more toward image manipulation
Different understandings of how images work
But also we’ve held on to a sense of screenishness
This 2D thing that is at the heart of our interfaces. It’s still core to our whole way of thinking abt what computers do
Looing more like a device for consumption in her opinion

Next week, post critiques they don’t have to be long – look at hci remixed

Workshops