Three DIAGRAMS of AGENCY
The Double Dance of Agency: A Socio-Theoretic Account of How
Machines and Humans Interact
This paper develops a theoretical account of the interaction between human and
machine agency: the double dance of agency. The account seeks to contribute to theorisation
of the relationship between technology and organisation by recognizing both the different
character of human and machine agency, and the emergent properties of their interplay.
Introduction
The two extreme positions on this
question are those of technological and social determinism. On the one hand, IT is
viewed as imposing itself upon a powerless organization; on the other, IT is seen to
be entirely malleable to the inexorable requirements of the organization.
Thus, for Giddens (1984: xxii), agency relates exclusively to human
actors. Technical artifacts, their enduring materiality notwithstanding, are simply
‘allocative resources’, equivalent to codes and normative sanctions, that influence
social systems only when incorporated in processes of structuration.
If agency is ‘the capability to make a difference’
(Giddens, 1984), then can machines also exhibit forms of agency, what is the
difference between human and machine agency, and how do the two forms of agency
interact to produce outcomes? In broader terms: how does technology act upon social
systems and vice versa?
the development of an account that recognises both the different character of
human and machine agency and the emergent properties of their interplay.
>>> emergent properties or dimensions of their interplay.
The two theories are compared to reveal differences in their conceptualization of agency.
Usage of the theories in the IS field is also studied; it is assumed that these adaptations
reveal something of the way of thinking and priorities of IS theorists.
a new theoretical account or model of the interaction of human and machine agency,
‘the double dance of agency,’ and some implications of the theoretical model are discussed.
Agency and Technology in Structuration Theory
Agency, in Giddens’ formulation, is the ‘capacity to make a difference’ (Giddens
1984 pp 14) which he also calls ‘transformative capacity’.
It is intimately connected with power; in fact this is one of its defining characteristics,
since the loss of the capacity to make a difference is also powerlessness.
Agency in structuration theory is inseparable from its mutually constitutive
duality with social structure: agency is shaped by structure, while structure is
produced, and reproduced, by the actions of humans in social contexts.
In order to enable the structurational cycle, however, Giddens’ theorizes a weak
(‘loose and abstract’ (Thompson, 1989)) notion of structure as ‘rules and resourcs
recursively implicated in social reproduction’ which ‘exist only as memory traces’
Material objects (such as IT) are not, therefore, in themselves structural. Material
resources which ‘might seem to have a 'real existence', …………become resources
only when incorporated within processes of structuration’.
Technology, from a strictly Giddensian viewpoint cannot be an agent, and can only
exhibit ‘structural properties’ when utilized as a resource in social practice by human agents.
Technology triggers organizational change. (does stg, triggers change, displays agency)
The influence of technology on social processes, according to Orlikowski occurs through its
appropriation by humans. Technology is also, however, ‘the medium of human action’,
enabling some actions whilst constraining others, but conditioning, rather than determining,
the performance of social practices.
Technology and agency in Actor Network Theory
An assumption of ‘general symmetry’ between the technical and social worlds, in which no
a priori distinction is made in the treatment of human and non-human actors. Rather, the aim
is to understand the development and configuration of alternative heterogeneous networks of
actors (comprising both human and non-human ‘actants’) and the way in which they
influence the development and stabilization of forms of technology.
The actor network is configured through the enrolment of allies (both human and non-human
entities) into a network by means of negotiations.
For Jones (1999), material agency differs from human agency in lacking intentionality;
it is not organized around plans and goals. Machines do not have minds of
their own, even if they exhibit agency in the sense of doing things which have consequences
for humans.
For Pickering, technology and humans thereby
become ‘mangled’ together such that it is impossible to separate them clearly. He also
argues that the interweaving of machine and human agency is an emergent process. It
cannot be decisively known in advance what problems are going to arise in attempts
to manage material agency, nor can the ways in which human agency will be shaped
by technology be foreseen.
Over time, he argues, this process may be seen as a
‘dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ as humans seek to shape material agency
towards particular goals in ways that are not wholly determined either by the intentions
of the human actors or by the material properties of technology, but by the interplay
of the two. Thus, in encountering problems (resistance) in using a technology,
human actors adjust (accommodate), for example by revising goals or practices, or
adjusting technological parameters.
Perceived autonomy that humans may attribute to machines.
Humans and machines can both be understood to demonstrate agency, in the sense of
performing actions that have consequences, but the character of that agency should not be
understood as equivalent. Human agents have purposes and forms of awareness and
that machines do not. The two kinds of agency are not separate, but intertwined, and
their consequences emergent. Those consequences are also the subject of human
interpretations which provide part of the context for future actions.
Double Dance of agency
From structuration
theory we learn that it is meaningless to study agency without studying the situated
context in which it is exercised. Following Knights and Murray (Knights and Murray,
1994) we call this context the conditions under which agency is exercised. Knights
and Murray define ‘conditions of possibility’ as ‘conditions that make certain course
of action feasible while ruling out others.’
From actor network theory we learn that a theory of human and
machine agency should be able to account for the process of the interaction between
machines and humans over time. How is it that the two forms of agency combine and
influence each other over time to produce particular outcomes? From the comparison
of the two theories we learn that human and machine agency is not the same, and we
focus attention on this difference by theorizing the different properties of human and
machine agency.
A traditional way of understanding the effect of machine agency on human agency
is as enabling and constraining. The fact that a machine is designed in a certain
way, and operates in a particular set of conditions, implies that certain human courses
of action are made more feasible, and others less feasible (or so overwhelmingly difficult
as to seem impossible). ‘Technology influences human agency by ……inviting
specific courses of action’ (Kallinikos, 2002).
In the organisational context, the choice of one technology over another may
have a relatively strong influence on the actions of individuals, and the trajectory of
the organisational group. Humans (for example managers) may explicitly seek to use
this aspect of machine agency to reinforce their own intentions
as Pickering (1995) argues, machines may ‘accommodate’ some human intentions, but ‘resist’
others.
Humans for their part may also resist or accommodate machine agency, recognize
these traits in others, and focus them towards their own intentions.
from configurations of technology to configurations of practice..
human and machine agency have different properties, but that the outcomes of their
operation are emergent from the process of their interaction (rather than being determined
by either); and that these interactions take place under conditions that shape
outcomes, but may also be transformed by them.
understanding of these effects of technology on social practice should be informed by an awareness of the material
capabilities of the technology, rather than relying solely on the perceptions of the social actors.
fruitful for handling the possibility of mistaken attributions of material agency.
In its view of the organisational effects of information technology as the product
not solely of human agency, but of its interaction with machine agency, the ‘double
dance of agency’ model may be seen to be closer to actor network theory.
>> the effects are not only the products of human agency but its interaction with machine agency
The Double Dance of Agency model focuses attention simultaneously on the
interlinked agency of humans and machines and the socio-material conditions, which
are both context, and outcome of that agency.
Conclusion
1- Structuration theory teaches us that agency is both creator and product of its context.
Unlike Giddens, however, we choose to understand that context as both social
and material. This allows us to directly theorize the impact of technologies upon
agency and vice versa.
2- Actor network theory encourages us to take the actions of
machines seriously, and to understand how the agency of human and machines is
mutually dependent and intertwined. However the comparison of structuration theory
and actor network theory demonstrates that human and machine agency cannot really
be thought of as equivalent.
The metaphor of the ‘double dance’ attempts to encapsulate both the intertwined nature
of the interaction of human and machine agency, and its part structured, part improvised
emergent character.
one impl ex: Many large implementation projects are still run according to conventional
project management models, which disregard machine agency (here the on-going
effects that the IT system has on the organization).
Language and Agency by Laura Ahearn
agency is:
- the socioculturally mediated capacity to act
- emergent from discourse
- constrained by practice (Giddens)
- link between reproduction and transformation of social/linguistic structure
- more than resistance - may be colloborative, collusive
Agency may be individual or collective
The level of analysis appropriate for scholars interested in agency
should not automatically be considered to be the individual, since
such a tight focus on individual agency is likely to render invisible
larger social structures such as gender, race, and class that shape
possibilities for, and types of, agency. (Ahearn 2000: 13)
Scholars analyzing agency must also decide whether agency can
act below the level of awareness. What sorts of actions are truly
'agentive' (or 'agentic' or 'agential')? Must an act be fully,
consciously intentional in order to be agentive? How could a
scholar ever know?
Must agency be conscious, intentional, or effective? What does it
mean for an act to be conscious, intentional, or effective? (2001: 113)
Whichever aspects of agency researchers pursue, it is crucial that
scholars interested in agency consider the assumptions about
personhood, desire, and intentionality that are built into their
analyses. (2000: 14)
>>> Here, It seems necessary to define those relevant aspects/dimensions for agency!
Agency as Free Will
Agency as Resistance
Structuration theory
>> Where is agency located?
>> Must agency be human, individual, collective, intentional, or conscious?
>>Some studies of agency reinforce received notions about western atomic individualism,
while others deny agency to individuals, attributing it instead only to discourses or social forces.
>> It is absolutely crucial that theorists consider the assumptions about personhood,
desire, and intentionality that might unwittingly be built into their analyses.
>> to begin to distinguish among types of agency—oppositional agency, complicit agency,
agency of power, agency of intention, etc.—while also recognizing that multiple types
are exercised in any given action.
Some sociologists prefer to use the term practice or praxis (drawing on and
redefining the Marxist term) in addition to, or instead of, agency (Giddens 1979,
p. 56; Sztompka 1994). Sztompka, for example, distinguishes the two terms in
the following manner: “Agency and praxis are two sides of the incessant social
functioning; agency actualizes in praxis, and praxis reshapes agency, which actualizes
itself in changed praxis” (Sztompka 1994, p. 276). Thus, agency can be
considered the socioculturally mediated capacity to act, while praxis (or practice)
can be considered the action itself.
Desjarlais presents an illustration of this within the United States itself in his study of
a homeless shelter in Boston, in which he argues that the forms of agency he observed
emerged out of a specific sociocultural context. Agency was not ontologically prior to that
context but arose from the social, political, and cultural dynamics of a specific place and time
it is important to ask how people themselves conceive of their own actions and whether they
attribute responsibility for events to individuals, to fate, to deities, or to other animate
or inanimate forces.
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Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making
and mutual incorporation
Concept of social understanding: as an ongoing, dynamical process of participatory sense-making and
mutual incorporation. This process may be described from
(1) a dynamical agentive systems as an interaction and coordination of two embodied agents
(2) a phenomenological approach as a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both
participants extend and form a common intercorporality
Intersubjectivity, it is argued, is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the
movements of others but means entering a process of embodied interaction and
generating common meaning through it.
>>> This approach in this sense is ver compatible with the ANT's view of symmetrical and dynamic agency and
Barad's view of agential realism, in which agency is attributed to the relations between agents rather than agents
themselves. Both dynamical agentive systems view and the concept of mutual incorporation can be used as a
theoretical basis for our investigation of shared agency, which involves multiple degrees of influence of one agent
on the other one. or by taking a Critical Technical Practice view to invert the basic assumptions and metaphors on the
traditional thrid person representative approaches on social cognition.
Social cognition from a representationalist sense: Research into the socalled‘social brain’, particularly into the mirror
neuron system, has also favoured a third-person paradigm of social cognition as a passive observation of others’
behaviour, based upon an inner modelling process in the individual brain.
we present a non-representational, enactive and embodied concept of intersubjectivity. On this approach, social
understanding is not realised by ‘snapshot’ activities of one individual’s theorising or simulating but arises in the
moment-to-momentinteraction of two subjects.
Social cognition is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the actions of others but emerges from the
dynamical process of skilfully interacting with them. Such a view on social cognition has recently been described as ‘participatory sensemaking’— the process of generating and transforming meaning in the interplay between interacting individuals
and the interaction process itself (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 2008; De Jaegher 2009).
The dynamical agentive systems approach observes and describes the interaction as a
coordination process between intentional and embodied agents. It regards their
actions as exhibiting an inherent and ‘visible’ intentionality and as being related to
each other in a meaningful way,
The phenomenological approach takes an immersive perspective, starting from a first- and
second-person take on the same process and describing the experience of the mutual engagement
in phenomenological terms.
Critic of existing views on social cognition> nicely summarized in the paper.can be quoted.
Enactive intersubjectivity:
1. Social understanding is as much an interactional as an individual affair.
2. Intersubjectivity relies heavily on embodiment in a rich sense of the word, i.e.
on dynamical and embedded whole-body actions.
3. Intentions are not opaque and hidden but are expressed in action and can be
perceptible to others.
4. Intentions are not pregiven and static but can be generated and transformed in
the process of interacting.
>>> social understanding is both interactional and individual affair. so this is also compatible
with our finding in the first workshop that core part of the agency versus dynamic part of the agency.
to what extent intentions are opaque or trasparent to other agents and how do intentions emerge?
Are they pregiven or generated? Probably some intentions are pregiven and someother are generated intentions.
Now, this process of emergence and transformation of intentionality is very important.
What do we try to do? do we try to understand the ways and conditions of this process through performance
workshops utilizing machine interfaces? by means of various agent couplings?
But when we are testing these relations by means of these tools, how can we eliminate the effect or
influence of these tools on the other agents. Probably, we can not do that. Thus we will be:
developing or applying these views to a multi-agent system consisting of not only human bodies in a space,
but also computational mediating tools. and investigate how well they explain the dynamics of the relations
in these interactive systems, How are intentionalities generated/transformed? How are different degrees of influences
perceived and negotiated? How do the hybrid intentionality between human-machine-human and
human-machine-environment and human-machine-human emerge and change.
What are the ways and conditions for shared agency and hybrid intentionality. How opaque/trasparent is
this intentionality?
Ways of evolving into another space of possibilities (from ind core agency to shared agency)
Conditions of transition from one agent coupling to another one (tool mediated!)
Social cognition emerges from embodied social interaction or, in Merleau-Ponty’s term,
from intercorporality. In elaborating this concept, we will describe it first from an
enactive approach, namely as a dynamical coupling and coordination of embodied
agents. Then we go on to analyse the same process from a phenomenological point
of view as mutual incorporation.
Enactive Approach: dynamical coupling and coordination:
From an enactive point of view, organisms do not passively receive information
from their environment which they then translate into internal representations; rather,
they actively participate in the generation of meaning. Thus, a cognitive being’s
world is not a pregiven external realm represented by the brain. Rather, it is the
result of a ‘dialogue’ between the sense-making activity of an agent and the
responses from its environment .
Analyses of social interactions and conversations show that participants unconsciously
coordinate their movements and utterances.
Interactors’ perception–action loops are coupled and interlaced with each other. This includes
processes of synchronisation and resonance, in-phase or phase-delayed behaviour, rhythmic
co-variation of gestures, facial or vocal expression, etc. social agents are able to coordinate
their sensemaking in social encounters—that is:they can participate in each other’s
sensemaking
>> Then what makes an interaction a social one? what is the role of tool or external element?
I think it is not necessary to use "social" in this formula. It takes us to another domain of inquiry
which makes the research more complicated. (Couplings mediated by a machine. inter-personal,
body-machine-body, body-machine-space(non-mobile elements of space like wall, floor, ceiling etc))
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Technology and Perception: the Contribution of Sensory Substitution Systems
cognitive technologies are not only technical means which enable us to enhance our calculating, memorizing or perceptive adaptibilities, but they actually pla a key role in the constitution of human experience.
Those technlologies can give rise to new modes of perception.
At first the user only senses a series of stimulations on his skin. But as he progresses in his perceptive learning, he
gradually comes to forget these tactile sensations and to perceive stable objects at a certain distance, "out there in
the world" in front of him. Thus, according to users' declarations, the proximal irritation caused by the tactile matrix is clearly distinguished from the perception itself.
the subject needs to perform an action upon the sensory captors in order to build a perception
makes the term "sensory substitution systems" inadequate. It appears indeed that what the technical
device must provide is not only access to new sensory data, but also the power to act upon the receptor system.
It is therefore more appropriate to refer to these systems as "sensori-motor coupling devices".
This essential role of action in the gradual emergence of structured representations shows that what
is perceived, or recognised, are not strictly speaking the invariants of the sensation, but the invariants of sensorimotor
loops that are inseparable from the subject's own activity.
it is by his/her action that the subject seeks and builds rules about constant relations between action and
sensation.
The richness of the perception must therefore depend as much upon the characteristics of the action (mobility,
speed, zooming, etc.) as upon those of the sensation (width of the spectrum, number of sensors, etc.).
The spectacular results achieved by these perception devices highlight an original research method for
studying the cognitive effects of technologies: providing a subject with a novel sensori-motor coupling device
gives us a means for studying empirically how his/her way of perceiving and acting is transformed. Such a
study requires, therefore, a combination of two types of approaches.
On one hand, from an external point of view, it is possible to study the ways in which the device is used
and the new abilities it brings to the subject. But to limit oneself to such studies would be
insufficient. Indeed, the fact that the user is offered an opportunity to acquire a new mode of perception makes
it important to follow, from an inside point of view, the way in which the world appears to the subject.
It is therefore necessary, on the other hand, to study from an internal point of view the way in which technical devices transform the subject's modes of perception, of reasoning or of action. ie phenomenological type of method is required. The
phenomenological approach therefore consists in putting in parentheses the theory of the existence of an outside
world (this is the phenomenological reduction). In the framework of an experimental type of research, such
internal knowledge is accessible only through the direct implication of the researcher, or by creating the
conditions for a sufficiently comprehensive verbalisation of the private thoughts of the subject of the experiment.
FORMULATION: The success of artificial perception devices shows that it is possible to give empirical content to certain
aspects of the question of intentionality, i.e., in the present case, of the subject's awareness of something
existing "outside" (the appearing of a phenomenon in spatial perceptive field), since these devices allow one to
follow and to reproduce the genesis of such awareness in adults. Our aim is to define the minimal technical
conditions required for the emergence of the sense of exteriority of an object in a perceptive space where it can
be located. To do this, we use a sensory substitution device which has been simplified to the extreme, so as to
enable us to identify the limit where this spatialisation becomes possible.
A perception is not located inside a space of representation that is internal to the knowing subject,
separate from a supposedly "external" space. It is built from the sensori-motor invariants of a coupling relation
which implies the body as much as the medium in which the body is active.
our experiments clearly demonstrate that technical devices can be a kind of prostheses that change the body itself.They transform the system of possible actions and place restrictions on the links between those actions and the
sensations.Thus, a technical device can set the rules of synthesis that are accessible to perceptive synthesis. This
is what justifies our hypothesis that technical devices can be constitutive of new perceptive spaces, i.e. of spaces of
representation and manipulation (real or potential) where the subject is distinguished from the objects on which he
can perform actions
The question, then, is to determine the conditions that are quired for different subjects to
construct the same objectivity. one can examine how several individuals, equipped with the same
sensori-motor coupling devices, are able, through their interactions, to construct together shared representations.
Sensory substitution devices havc disrupted the classical ways of defining the various sensory modes.If
to "see" is no longer characterised by the use of the eye, nor even by the use of any particular area of the cortex,
then we must redifine all the different senses in terms of the types of sensori-motor coupling relations which they
establish between the body and the environment. Any technical device, from the moment when it enables a reverse effect of the actions upon the sensations, transforms the modes of coupling between human beings and their environments, both at the level of sensation and at the level of action, and affects cognition by offering new invariants to perception.
The understanding of tools as constitutive of specific perceptive worlds opens new
prospects for technological development. On one hand, it should allow us to define the conditions required for an
effective appropriation of the communication and calculation tools which are currently being developed. On
the other hand, it should enable the production of a new family of technical devices aimed directly at adding new
dimensions to our perception.
Enacting the experience of space through perceptual supplementation devices: beyond
the internalism/externalism debate
What we call in Compiègne “perceptual supplementation” systems (and not sensory substitution
systems) are enactive interfaces. Enactive interfaces transform our possibilities of action, and thereby
transform our lived experience, offering new capacities for perception, imagination, memory and
reasoning. The study of their appropriation offers new insights on the genesis of perceptual modalities.
But they also open the possibility of proposing new arguments in philosophical debates between
vehicle-internalism and vehicle-externalism, especially on perceptual consciousness. According to «
vehicle-externalism » (Hurley) or « active externalism » (Clark & Chalmers), cognitive activity,
notably (but not necessarily)1 perceptual activity and/or consciousness, is not exclusively localized in
the head; it is rather distributed across the brain, the body, sensori-motor dynamics of concrete actions,
the environment, and artifacts (extensions of our perceptual body (canes, glasses,…))
Perceptual supplementation systems can help us to frame an enactive model of our experience of
space. According to this model, the space we experience is neither primarily objective (independent
from us), nor the result of some representational (re)production into an inner space; it is actively
constituted (enacted) in the coupling between motor and sensory abilities exercised by the agent. The
constitution we consider here is not constitution in a mereological sense2 (x constitutes y = x is the
substratum of y), but in a phenomenological sense (as the bringing forth of space by an embodied and
active subjectivity).
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Externalism and Enaction
to illustrate the relation between the enactive theory of perception and the active externalist
view of perceptual consciousness,
aim at showing
(i) how technological devices can contribute to the enaction of perceptual consciousness;
(ii) how the space of perception is actively constituted before any spatial inner/outer distinction
concerning particular objects and processes.
How and when is the distinction between an external world and an inner world constituted? How
and when is there a constitution of the space within which an object, and the point of view on that object,are both localized?
(1) understand the functioning of enactive interfaces which lead to the constitution of new perceptual spaces;
(2) to understand cognitive technologies as technical devices and external inscriptions which participate to our cognitive activity.
in particular perceptual activity, is not especially localized in the brain but equally in
the body, the environment and the dynamics of concrete actions. We wish to show here that this strong
externalism enables a better understanding of how tools and enactive interfaces contribute to our ways of
perceiving and thinking. ie agency
by virtue of their extreme minimalism induce an exhibition of the active, concrete constitution of a perceptual space.
minimalist experimental situations concern two tasks:
i. the localization of objects
ii. the recognition of shapes by blind and blindfolded subjects, with the help of tactile devices that mediate
and create new modes of sensorimotor coupling and thus new perceptual modalities [11].
Stages of interaction and learning:
The subject initially perceives only a succession of tactile stimuli that accompany his movements. But, along as he becomes familiar with the device, his sensations are progressively replaced by the perception of a target at a certain distance in front of him. The sensory information being only a temporal sequence of binary 1 and 0 with no spatial information, we can say here that perception cannot be grounded merely by a simple internal analysis of it.
Consequently, in such absence of spatial information, the perception of the localization of the
target in direction and depth is only accessible by means of active exploration. We may say that he
minimalism of the device forces a spatial and temporal deployment of the perceptual activity. The latter can
then be studied on the basis of observable movements.
As soon as the movements stop, the perception disappears!
Spatial perception requires the synthesis of a temporal succession of actions and sensations.
In order to trigger a perception, a prosthetic device must be an instrument of coupling
which modifies the body by defining new repertoires of action and sensation. Then, perception is more the
result of dynamic coupling between the organism and its environment than an internal representation.
The schema is realized by a “gestural strategy” which, by using exteroceptive and
proprioceptive sensory feedbacks, produces a set of movements that make possible to inscribe the shape
and to grasp it as a whole in a unitary gesture of anticipation.
He starts out with large-scale exploratory movements, but as soon he obtains a contact with a line, he converges
to a micro-sweeping movement of small amplitude around the source of stimulation. This process is truly
an operation of localization: the position of a fixed spatial singularity is constituted by a stable anticipation
of the tactile stimulus according to the movements of receptor field.
These technlogical devices bring forth a novel perceptual modality. Space of this perception, which is specific in each case, is actively constituted according to the possibilities of actions at the disposal of the subject.
In a new way: is inner everything which moves with my point of view, whereas is outer what my point of view moves in
comparison with. Space appears as the systemic structure of reversible displacements of this point of view, and of objects relative to the point of view.
the concept of spatial perception defended here is, in a way, neither externalist nor internalist, the space of perception and its contents being constituted in the coupling between a living organism and its environment. It is only on the
basis of an “inbetween”, the relation between both, that a perceptual space is emerging, i.e. a lived world for
the organism. Space is the form of this couplng, the structured domain of the invariants that can be constituted.
This externalism would be an appropriate epistemological and theoretical framework in order to
account for the effectiveness of situated cognition. Technical devices and environments transform our
possibilities of action, and thereby transform our lived experience, offering new capacities for perception,
imagination, memory and reasoning.
As a result, the space of lived experience is co-extensive with the space of action and perception.
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Perception with compensatory devices
Dominance or Deference?
The case for dominance made by Humphrey (1992), Block (2003), and Prinz (2006) is
based on the traditional distinction between sensation and perception with an emphasis on the
felt sensations. According to these authors, given that TVSS users keep on feeling tactile
sensations, their perception with such a device remains in the substituting modality. Thus,
their case for the dominance thesis relies on the criterion of qualitative experience. The
sensationalist line of defence for dominance developed by these authors can be criticised for
overemphasizing the role of sensations in perception. As pointed out by many theorists and
particularly eloquently by Hanson (1958), in seeing an object such as a house, we do not have
two consecutive visual experiences, one of coloured dots and a subsequent one of a house.
Instead, we immediately experience the perceived house.
The deference thesis has been defended by Hurley and Noë (2003). According to them,
the substituting modality is ‘overruled’ by the substituted modality and TVSS users acquire visual experience.
However, as will be detailed below, perception with a SSD goes beyond assimilation to either the substituting or substituted modality.
Beyond dominance and deference: sensory substitution as perceptual extension
We propose an interpretation of perception with SSDs which not only goes beyond dominance, but beyond deference as well: an interpretation based on the idea of an addition, augmentation, or extension of our perceptual abilities. Under this view, SSDs should be seen as tools that extend perception in entirely novel ways. But might perception with SSDs not lead to a new form of perceiving and experiencing?
‘mind enhancing tools’ (METs) and cognition provided by them canot be reduced to something already available before their use.Similarly, SSDs: they provide novel forms of interaction with the environment which cannot
be reduced to perception in one of the natural senses.
A second interpretation of METs has been proposed according to which METs do
transform cognition in a qualitative way (Clark, 2003; Menary 2006, 2007). Novel tools not
only facilitate established cognitive processes, they can also allow for the appearance of novel
cognitive operations, which simply would have been impossible without them.
Thus, the use of a sketchpad genuinely opens up possibilities for new forms of artistic creation which would not existed without them (Clark,2003). .. is a form of extended cognition in which established elements and operations are closely integrated with additional ones in order to form a single novel unit of cognitive analysis.
As Clark (2003) points out, the role of tools in cognition shows that the concept of
cognition ought to be reconsidered in the light of the criteria of fluid integration and
transformative potential. A tool that we learn to use in a fluid manner becomes transparent.
‘Transparent’ here refers to the fact that, after training with a new tool, users subsequently
feel immersed in the task allowed by the tool, rather than being aware of manipulating the
tool itself. The more transparent a tool becomes, the more it augments fluidly its user’s
cognitive potential. For instance, when the cane becomes transparent, the tactile sensations
recede to the background for its experienced user.
These systems should also be understood as transforming sensorimotor and perceptual capacities, rather than being reduced to the exercise of one of the natural senses, either in the substituting or in the substituted modality.
interpretation, the initially artificial and tool-like nature of SSDs is emphasized but, as in the second interpretation of METs, due to their potential for fluid integration and transformation, they are considered as constituting a novel form of perception. By reducing experience with SSDs to one of the existing modalities, both theses deny their transformative potential, or at least its full extent. By emphasizing that experience remains wedded to the substituting modality, attackers of the dominance thesis have overlooked transparency.
We contend that perception can not only transcend its sensory origins, but it can move beyond the confines of the traditional senses.
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Sensory Substitution: Limits and Perspectives
Sensory substitution>> A sensor permits the conversion of a certain form of energy (light, sound, mechanical or other) into signals that can be interpreted by an (electronic) coupling system which is then responsible for the coordinated activation of a stimulator.
The term "sensory substitution", as such, denotes the ability of the central nervous system to integrate devices of this sort, and to constitute through learning a new "mode" of perception.
Ready to hand>>. In other words, sensory substitution can only be constituted and can only function through an ongoing exploratory activity with the sensors. Finally, the access to a mode of perception that is offered by sensory substitution devices after the requisite learning period can be described as implicit.
TVSS results
Equipped with the TVSS, blind (or blindfolded) subjects are almost immediately able to
detect simple targets and to orient themselves.
Heidegger>> Initially, the subject only feels a successions of stimulations on the skin. But after the learning process described above, the subject ends up by neglecting these tactile sensations, and is aware only of stable objects at a distance, "out there" in front of him. A number of experimental observations confirm this externalisation.
According to the accounts given by the subjects themselves, the irritations which can be caused by the tactile matrix are clearly distinguished from the perception itself.
NOT a sensory substitution!
It implies that the essence of the innovation consists merely in a change in the sensory input, in providing a new channel for the acquisition of information about the world of light.
Interaction>> He starts by learning how variations in his sensations are related to his actions. it provides original experimental tools for exploring fundamental mechanisms in perception.
In particular, by providing the means to observe and reproduce the genesis of intentionality, i.e. consciousness of something as external (the "appearance" of a phenomenon in a spatial perceptive field), these tools make it possible to conduct experimental studies in an area usually restricted to philosophical speculation.
Here, however, the empirical proof is direct: there is no perception without action. if the movements cease, the distal spatial perception disappears.
the perception of shapes takes time, and requires the external deployment of exploratory activity. Traces of the patterns of exploration can be easily stored for subsequent analysis. Analysis of these dynamic patterns shows that experienced subjects deploy identifiable strategies, which can and must be learned in order for rapid and reliable perception to occur successfully.
The essential role of action in the progressive emergence of structured percepts strongly suggests that
what is perceived, or recognized, does not derive from invariants in the sensory information, but
rather from invariants in the sensori-motor cycles which are inseparable from the activity of the
subject.
The richness of perception: depends on quite as much on the qualities of action (mobility, rapidity, zoom etc. ) as on the qualities of the sensation (sensitivity, spectral width, number of sensors etc.).
>> here i think mapping strategies play also a critical role! on richness of perception.
The device of Bach-y-Rita does not produce a sensory substitution, but rather an addition, the creation of a new space of coupling between a human being and the world! The sensory substitution devices upset the classical definitions of the diverse sensory modalities.
Now what is cruelly missing in this new perceptual modality is what Bach-y-Rita calls the
qualia, i.e. the values and the quality of lived experience associated with perceived entities.
Meaning or emotional significance are not things that are already there, in the world, just waiting to be picked up like a piece of information.
a crucial empirical proof: an isolated subject cannot attribute an existential meaning to
objects and events that he perceives simply on the basis of a new perception. Does it follow that
something essential is lacking in these devices? Unable to give a "content" to the perception (colour,
value), they demonstrate what distinguishes natural perception from a simple capacity to discriminate
and categorize. In other words, it is not the principle of sensory substitution as such which is responsible for the
impossibility of gaining access to qualia (GREGORY, 1990).
term "perceptual supplementation" is more appropriate than "sensory substitution". these
devices do not exactly remedy a deficit, but rather that they introduce perceptual modalities that are
quite original.
A sensory device doesnot give rise to a sort of "degraded vision", but rather to an entirely new mode of perception.
the immersion od the system in an appropriate environment may well lead to the emergence of modes of use and appropriation which were not foreseen by the designers.
"sensory substitution systems" are rather thought of as supplementation devices which bring about new modes of coupling with the environment. They do not make a difference disappear; rather, they create new differences - and
they have applications which are not exclusively reserved for handicapped persons (for example,
artistic applications, games, augmented reality, the development of portable and intuitive systems for
the detection of heat, radioactivity....).
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Low-Fi Skin Vision: A Case Study in Rapid Prototyping a
Sensory Substitution System
There are three finding from TVSS research that particularly interest us.
> First, they vividly demonstrate that people can see what they feel: subjects consistently describe
their perceptual experience in quasi visual terms, even though it is the result of somatosensory, rather than retinal, stimulation.
> second interesting finding is that as participants learn to use the tactile stimulation to recognise objects or guide their behaviour, the focus of their perception shifts from their skin to surrounding space. The tactile interface becomes transparent with expert use, or ‘ready-to-hand’.
> The third finding clearly demonstrated by sensory substitution research is that visual stimuli can be mapped to different somatosensory regions (for example, legs, back, abdomen, waist, tongue or arms) and usefully co-ordinate behaviour, as long as there is a feedback loop between the user’s actions and the TVSS system.
It does not matter whether the system’s sensor(s) are body-mounted or positioned away from the subject: what is
essential is that a user’s own movement affects the pattern of tactile stimulation they feel. >>> I am a bit suspicious about this finding!
Research formulation and claim: We believe that by creating a wide array of tactile interfaces and monitoring both their use and the user experiences, we can potentially gain knowledge about how to build useful sensory augmentation technologies as well as important insights into the extended mind perspective.
Requirments of TVSS: portable and can be built easily.
Situated robots vs GOFAI (good old fashioned AI)
a major problem with GOFAI is that the agents that are built to test theories of intelligence are essentially problem solvers that only work in abstract, symbolic domains: “The symbols may have referents in the
minds of the builders of the systems but there is nothing to ground those referents in any real world. Furthermore, the
agents are not situated in a world at all. Rather they are given a problem, and they solve it. Then, they are given
another problem and they solve it. They are not participating in a world as would agents in the usual sense”
>> I think here the main difference come from the constituents of agency of robots with respect to totally software basd agents. In the case of robots, they have physical bodies/ characteristics which shapes their potentials and defines their constraints according to the surrounding environment. i.e embodiment!
Brooks highlighted the key challenges in designing situated agents that can participate in the real world in ‘the
usual sense’: they have a limited perspective on the world; they have to respond quickly; and they have to deal with dynamic, noisy environments.
3 to 5 levels/intensities of vibration are distinguishable by subjects (mostly 3 levels)
their ways of investigation:
- the conditions under which system become transparent in use (this will require people to use the system for extended periods of time)
- change the mappings of devices and disrupt transparency . (We hypothesise that this change in the mapping will be adapted to more quickly when the user is able to affect the stimulation they receive by self-motion.
We plan to investigate whether self-motion generated by a head-mounted camera and that generated by tracking a
user’s hand are equally effective at enabling a user to adapt to mapping changes.)
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Feel the Force: using tactile technologies to investigate the extended mind
To investigate augmented perception by building a range of novel tactile interfaces + practical utility of these systems for real world task.
Question: how can we design tactile interfaces to mediate novel sensory information so that the user experiences the technology as an extension of themselves? >> that means using it as a tool! transparent mode of engagement!
idea of Extended mind: a view of the human cognitive system as a plastic hybrid of biological and non-biological components, including external representations and technologies. implications for our notion of what it means to be human, pointing to the potential to change thought and action (agency???) by integrating new technologies and info sources.
Augmented perception: sensory extension (IR& ultrasound)& sensory substitution.
The pioneering work of Bach-y-Rita and co-workers on sensory substitution. Interestingly, as participants learn to use the tactile stimulation their perception of it changes: sensing the percept in space rather than on their skin. The interface becomes transparent in use, or ‘ready-at-hand’ to use Heidegger’s phrase [6] - that is, the user experiences the technology as though it were an extension of themselves.
>> here this part is particularly important for HCI field also for the conceptual inquiry of agency. how do these two modes of engagement affect our agency! generally,using the tools require lower level of agency (with less consciousness on aparatus). does less consciousness on our extensions corresponds to less agency?? Is an expert usage of a tool (virtuosity ) the result of higher agency? or skill? what is the relation between the level of skilled usage and agency?? does being able to do a task in quicker or in a perfect manner mean higher agency? how about improvisation? how about going out of preplanned or pre-coded paths or tracks when performing a task or something else? In my opinion, the level of agency is not related to how much succesful a person was in performing something, or virtuosity, but related to awareness, intentionality and consciousness,
in some cases, higher levels of agency may not be a desirable feature/property or thing!!! when? exactly when this transition between the modes of engagement and levels of agency happen? in what conditions? airplane control?! autopilot!? controlling many parameters are frustrating, and hard to do rightly/properly, here, delegating the responsibility of performing to another agent is different from performing the task in a more efficient or quicker way (virtuosity), there is a common understanding of agency which implies that higher levels of awareness, reflection and consciousness point higher levels of agency.
so the relational axis can be constructed between control<->agency(human and machine)<->engagement, there also some other parameters on thi axis like mapping and virtuosity.
when the agency of tool increases like autopilot, the pilot does not need to control all the parameters anymore, he/she relies on his/her tool (which is the airplane software switched from manual mode to fully automatic mode), responsibility and physical and cognitive load of control is delegated and decreased!
Can the agency of machine/tool/computer be determined completely before its interaction with humans? is the term agency used here refers only the usage? how do agency and usage differ from each other for non-living things? the usage means the way anything is used. we know many examples of unplanned or personalized usages emerged from personalized interpretations or digestions of the things designed. How can we consider/evaluate these unplanned interactions between man and machine or his/her tool with respect to dynamic agency? how is this dynamic relation of agency negotiated? How do those properties of man and machine interact with each other in different ways than the usual or planned ones? So the agency of things (the material agency) is also dynamic and defined in and through practice.
These perceptual mappings can be surprisingly plastic. Early work by Stratton [19] and Kohler [10] established that humans can adapt to radical disruptions of the relationship between sensors and actuators, for example, inverting glasses turning the visual field upside down. Of particular relevance to our project, Ramachandran and Blakeslee describe how the perceptual system can be tricked into producing the experience of having a two foot nose or experiencing tactile sensation in a table [15].
Neuroscience experiments have established that tool use can cause structural changes in the brain: the receptive fields of some neurons expand and incorporate the tool into the ‘body schema’ [12]. Significantly, the neuronal changes only occur when the tactile information is used to guide action, a finding that provides support for O’Regan and No¨e’s [13] characterisation of perception as primarily involving the mapping of sensorimotor contingencies: systematic relationships between action and sensory input. These perceptual mappings can be surprisingly plastic.
Early work by Stratton [19] and Kohler [10] established that humans can adapt to radical disruptions
of the relationship between sensors and actuators, for example, inverting glasses turning the visual field upside
down. Of particular relevance to our project, Ramachandran and Blakeslee describe how the perceptual system can be
tricked into producing the experience of having a two foot nose or experiencing tactile sensation in a table
These perceptual mappings can be suprisingly plastic. ... Humans can adapt to radical disruptions of the relationship between sensors and actuators. for ex. inverting glasses turning the visual field upside down. Of particular relevance to our project, Ramachandran and Blakeslee describe how the perceptual system can be tricked into producing the experience of having a two foot nose or experiencing tactile sensation in a table [15].
Given the remarkable capacity of people to adapt to changes in existing sensorimotor mappings and to incorporate novel sensory modalities, under what conditions does a mediating technology not become transparent?
Does sensory extension support a ‘sensorimotor contingencies’ model of perceptual experience? if it does, what can we learn about the form of sesorimotor contingency mappings that remain opaque and donot become incorporated into the body. if it does not, which models better explain the perceptual experience of sensory extension?
the conditions under which such technologies become transparent in use.
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Perturbation Techniques for Multi-Performer or Multi-
Agent Interactive Musical Interfaces
This paper explores the use of perturbation in designing multiperformer
or multi-agent interactive musical interfaces.
how to cohesively organize the independent data inputs into useable
control information (?) for synthesis engines.
>> Here,the focus of paper apparently is on control! Control corresponds to mapping for this case. However, for our research study, focus is not on control or mapping (though they affect the relations significantly) but dynamics of relations and the process of reaching an equilibrium point between the interacting actors. We will use the mapping as a means not as an end. We want to look for how the actors negotiate their agency, how they react changes in their agency, how they explore the possibilities of new agential capabilities emerging out of interactions/coupling.
Perturbation: allowing mutual dependency between the performers, bounding their performance by the
group behavior. This approach allows for expressive microlevel data to be pulled by larger tendencies of the whole group.
>>
Agency in interactive computer music: it is largely organized around single performer systems, structures in which data input is centralized and synchronized.
Musical Multi-agent systems shift focus more broadly to the discreet agency of performers whether they be artificial
intelligences or human performers. The expanded notion of an “agent” is articulated here for musical purposes to define a system in which computers or combined human-computer intelligences share musical decision making responsibility.
>> here, the main element of agency is defined as decision making, which s rather a limited view of agency than the usual definition of agency, which is potentials for action.
Perturbation is proposed as a technique for mitigating control data (potentially conflicting) without limiting the inherent richness of multi performer data.
The model of human-computer interaction in MICE is viewed as a multi-agent approach to expressive sound, designed to share agency between performers and between human intentionality and computer intelligence.
Perturbation can be used as a technique for navigating multiperformer human-computer interfaces. Perturbation is the use of mitigated influence from one agent on the others. Individual performers or agents simultaneously influence and depend on the others. In such systems, the data input from the modes of action are operated on as a group, and this new value is used to attenuate the input data from the individual performers or agents such that some operation, T, acts as a mitigating force on each of the other performers.
Ta = I1(3/4)+ ((I1 + I2 + I3 + I4)/4) final formula for perturbation seems like a weighted sum function!
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26.July.09
Mediated Reality through
Glasses or Binoculars?
Exploring Use Models of Wearable Computing
Beyond Glasses and Binoculars
Phenomenology assumes there exists a correlation between what can be
experienced in the world and how it is experienced by the user, a correspondence
between what can be seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled and what is actually so
(Rathswohl, 1991).
Ihde extends the idea by implying that technology
mediates human—world relations. For instance, what is perceived through glasses is
different from what is perceived by the naked eye, which is to say that use of technology
alters the correlation between the world and how it is experienced.
when the bodily capacities are extended using technology, the
technology also transforms them. An experience through technology amplifies certain
desired aspects while suppressing others.
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22.July.09
Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology
of human–technology relations
types of intentionality involved in human-technology relations.
The article distinguishes and analyzes three types of “cyborg intentionality,” which all involve specific blends of the human and
the technological.
i. Technologically mediated intentionality occurs when human intentionality takes place “through” technological artifacts;
ii. hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological actually merges with the human; and
iii. composite intentionality is the addition of human intentionality and the intentionality of technological artifacts.
A cyborg is a border blurring entity, uniting both human and nonhuman elements. Humans and nonhumans
are often considered to be separated by a deep ontological abyss, the one active and intentional, the second passive and mute (Latour 1993; Heidegger 1977).
Authors like Bernhard Stiegler argue that we have always been cyborgs in a sense, since technology can be
seen as constitutive for humanity. For Stiegler, humanity is an invention of technology, rather than the other way round; human beings exist by realizing themselves technologically (cf. Stiegler 1998).
How to understand “cyborg intentionality”?
Is it simply a technologically influenced form of human intentionality?
Or can blends of human and nonhuman beings have an intentionality of their own? Does something
like “technological intentionality” exist? if so, how is it related to human intentionality?
augment Ihde’s analysis with two other forms of cyborg intentionality
“hybrid intentionality,” in which humans and technology merge rather than interact,
“composite intentionality,” in which there is an interplay between human intentionality and the intentionalities of technologies themselves.
Rather than separating humans and world, the concept of intentionality makes visible the inextricable connections between them.
Because of the intentional structure of human experience, human beings can never be understood in isolation from the reality in which they live. Humans are always directed toward reality. They cannot simply “think,” but they always think
something; they cannot simply “see,” but they always see something; they cannot simply “feel” but always feel something.
In our technological culture, many of the relations we have with the world around us are either mediated by or
directed at technological devices Ihde’s analysis lays bare a first manifestation of cyborg intentionality,
which can be called mediated intentionality.
Mediated intentionality
Ihde (1990) discerns several relationships human beings can have with technological artifacts.
i. technologies can be embodied by their users, establishing a relationship between humans and their world. ex: Glasses.
ii. Secondly, technologies can be the terminus of our experience. In this “alterity relation,” human beings interact with a device, as is the
case when taking money from an ATM.
iii. A third human–technology relation is the “hermeneutic relation.” tech.s provide representations of reality, which need interpretation in order to constitute a perception. ex:thermometer
iv. background relation. technologies are not experienced directly, but rather create a context for our perceptions, like the humming of the air conditioning,
. embodiment relation: (human-technology)->world
. hermeneutic relation: human->(technology-world)
. alterity relation: human->technology(-world)
. background relation: human(-technology-world)
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Agencies at the Interface
But more fundamental questions - of what it could mean, in all senses of the word, to be recognized by our environments- remain.
Software agents, "smart environments" and "wearables" together are figured within a discourse that makes servise imperative for a global economic infrastructure.
Technologies, acc. to Harraway, are forms of materilized figuration; that is, they bring together assemblages of stuff and meaning into more or less stable arrangements.These arrangements imply inturn particular ways of associating humans and machines.One form of intervention into current practices of technology development, then, is through critical consideration of how humans and machine currenlty figured in those practices and the might be figured and configured- differently.
And it is this contingent horizon of possibly relevant phenomena, I want to propose, that affects interaction's open-endedness. (mutuality of awareness does not necassarily involve a sameness or even symmetry among participants' orientations to an ongoing course of acion: it is an orientation to the contingent possibility that stg might become relevant that is crucial. )
what we need is to "direct our attention simutaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization" with respect to human machine boundaries. a discourse that recognizes the deeply mutual constitution of humans and artifacts, and the enacted nature of teh boundaries between them, without at teh same time losing distinguishing particularities within specific assemblages. REcognizing the interrealtions between man and machine doesnot meanthat there are no differences. The problem rather is how to understand the nature of difference differently.
Actor Network Theory is not a network connecting entities which are already there, but a network which configures ontologies. The agents, their dimesions, and what they are and do, all depend on the morphology of the relations in which they are involved. by Callon 1999
Key to Pickering's analysis is time, the view that what he names material agency is always temporally emergent in practice, rather than fixed in either subjects or objects. 1995
I would propose that in such projects the specific materialities of computing are under investigation, and reconfiguration, in forms that more radically challenge traditional imaginaries of human than do the most ambitous project in humanoid roobotics.
not to infer gesture but to facilitate the creation of new forms of gestures...
More than conversation at the interface, it is creative hybrids/assemblages like these(TGarden, Mother-child) that explore and elaborate the particular dynamic capacities that digital media afford, and the ways that through them humans and machines can perform interesting new effects. Not only do these experiments promise innovations in our thinking about machines, but also they open up the equally exciting prospect of alternate conceptualizations of what it means to be human. The person figured here is not an autonomous, rational entity/actor but an unfolding, shifting biography of culturally and materially specific experiences and relations, inflected in uniquely particular ways.
Chris chesher to be added!
Suchman. L., 2006, Human - Machine Reconfigurations
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A Manifesto for the Performative Development of Ubiquitous Media
short summary of agendas in HCI>>> Several new design agendas and approaches have surfaced recently. Dourish [11], drawing from ethnomethodology and phenomenology, proposes a new model of humancomputer humancomputer interaction based on the notion of embodied interaction that he defines as “the creation, manipulation, and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with
artefacts” (p. 126) While providing a set of principles around embodied interaction, Dourish recognizes that
questions of “how it should be developed, explored, and instantiated remain open research problems”.
Other approaches have critiqued the ‘disappearance’ of computers in the environment and the strive for embodied interaction,
suggesting that these design ideals may be unachievable or incomplete and proposing seamful design and design in
heterogeneity as alternative or complementary agendas
Designing for the user experience and its social dimension co-experience [13] are also related attempts to
define design agendas for HCI and related fields. Lately, designing pleasurable products and design for emotions are
growing areas of research into designing interactive systems[6,22]
our contribution joins pragmatically the following elements into a critical design agenda: 1) concepts from media studies, 2) tangible or
ubiquitous computing programs, 3) anthropological perspectives to performance and practices of theatre performance.
programmatic manifesto that contains the following themes:
- applying concepts from media studies as generative principles to realise potentials of ubiquitous media
- investigating novel practices and forms of participation in multimedia production and use
- applying concepts from anthropology of performance to situate interaction within events, expression and
experiencing
- approaches to devising collective action from the practice in the performing arts that translate into
interaction design to ‘make sense’ of the role of space, artefacts, constraints, senses etc.
>>> shifted focus from product to meaning making activities ..The focus of our design effort shifted from looking for the ‘meaning’ of physical actions (as actions on the digital media) to fostering media composing functions that created opportunities for more or expressive embodied actions. Addressing the ways in which participants creatively contribute as ‘authors’ by the appropriation of media texts
through tangible activities of transformation.
A Performance Perspective
>>> Performace Lit. The term performance can be taken to address everyday life, and can interest a variety of
situations beyond theatrical performances and rituals. Here we choose to follow specific views originating from
anthropology and performance art. In the late 70s and 80s, a movement in anthropology focused on understanding the
experience and performance of culture. Turner's book Antroplogy of performance...
A summary of these traits to formulate a performance perspective
Accomplishment and Intervention. The etymology of the term performance shows how it “does not have the
structuralist implication of manifesting form, but rather the processual sense of bringing to completion or
accomplishing [29]. A performance is always something accomplished: it is an achievement or an intervention in the
world ([25] Schieffelin 1997).
Event and processual character. According to Turner performances are not generally “amorphous or open-ended,
they have diachronic structure, a beginning, a sequence of overlapping but isolable phases, and an end.” ([30], p. 80)
Expression and Experience. Turner and others proposed the anthropology of experience as an alternative approach to
anthropology, where the experience of a culture is studied analysing its expression. Clifford Geertz comments in the
epilogue of the book Anthropology of Experience [15]: expressions are “representations, objectifications, discourses,
performances” like rituals and other performances, but also artefacts.
Space, artefacts, interactions. Expressions can be configured in space and artefacts in the way they “affordinvite-
oblige” interactions. Performance may be considered in the creation of artefacts or architectures, especially in the
ways these carry a performative potential that is unleashed through participant’s interactions (cf. Vito Acconci
explains his Performative Architecture with this words [1]: “The viewer activates (operates) an instrument (what the
viewer has at hand) that in turn activates (builds) an architecture (what the viewer is in) that in turn activates
(carries) a sign (what the viewer shows off): the viewer becomes the victim of a cultural sign which, however, stays
in existence only as long as the viewer works to keep the instrument going.” Performance can be, therefore, linked in
many ways to expression, e.g., through bodily movements, artefacts or architectures.
Perception, simultaneousness of doing and undergoing. The perspective of Dewey on experience explains the
“standing out” of an experience with the particular relationship between doing and undergoing of the
experiencer, and with the concept of perception.
Energy and consciousness. Dissimilarly to behaviour performance, includes more efforts in terms of energy, skill
and consciousness (thinking) of the acts. For example, Barba and Savarese [3] distinguishes between daily and
extra daily “techniques” (p. 9): “…the way we use our bodies in daily life is substantially different from the way
we use them in performance. We are not conscious of our daily techniques: we move, we sit, we carry things, we kiss,
we agree and disagree with gestures which we believe to be natural but which are in fact culturally determined… ”.
In daily techniques, we follow the principle of less-effort, that is obtaining the maximum result with the minimum
expenditure of energy, “extra daily techniques are based, on-the-contrary, on wasting of energy” ([2], p. 16).
>>> Good HCI vs Performance comparison.. Provocations of a performance perspective to interaction.
While traditional human-computer interaction identifies a repetitive task with general validity to be targeted by the
design, performance points to the organisation of eventsthat maintain a specificity given by the contingency of
meaning and material. While, in general, human-computer interaction relies on recognition, accountability and
‘affordances’ at the interface, performance focuses on perception and experience. Following Dewey, recognition
is something we already know, while perception occurs when we experience a thing that imposes surprising
qualities, creating new insights. While dominant tenets in HCI are usability, making an operation easy and efficient,
or exploiting affordances so that they can be carried out unthinkingly and making the tool disappear. A performance
perspective orients towards experiences where participants are more aware, think feelingly about the artefacts around
them and engage in the situation in reflection or perception in action. Dominant approaches, as personalisation, tend to
have a view from the computer artefact; here configuration is defined by the properties of the artefact. Performance
stresses the centrality of the actor that configures expressions and experience in environments; in this case,
configuration is defined by the actor and his situation. Finally, pervasive and context-aware scenarios propose
sensing systems that measure and simulate space or recognise and sense situations. In contrast, a performance
perspective proposes “sensing humans” with the idea that tangible interfaces should make use of spatiality and
materiality to enrich interaction using all senses.
Practice and wisdom from the performing arts
>>> their point&argument Instead of formalising and directing the design of interfaces with the concepts from
theatre theories, or reproducing the procedures or the formats of some theatre forms, different practical
approaches to directing the creative work of people can contribute to shape collective work and creativity.
Movement, space, temporality, action and play are all often relevant aspects when researching use situations through engaging
people in embodied activities.
Practical approaches to working with constraints
find strategies that are likely to make something happen rather than strategies for getting people to analyse what they
think they might do.” A particularly relevant aspect to design activities is how the role of constraints can be
developed within collective activities. Constraints are not primarily researched as design features, be they desirable
qualities or limitations to human’s engagement with interactive technology. We focus on the role of constraints
as a resource that can be used when directing collective creative action during design
.
.
.
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Designing the spectator Experience
Interaction is increasingly a public affair, taking place in our theatres, galleries, museums, exhibitions and on the
city streets. This raises a new design challenge for HCI – how should spectators experience a performer’s
interaction with a computer? Categroization to the extent to which a performer’s manipulations of an interface and their resulting effects
are hidden, partially revealed, fully revealed or even amplified for spectators.
We consider what it means to ‘perform’ with an interface in a public setting and explore the challenge of designing
the spectator experience, answering the key question: how should a spectator experience a user’s interaction with a
computer?
We deliberately take a broad view of performance that encompasses explicitly staged interaction by musicians,
actors and artists in front of an audience, as well as more implicit performance, where users almost unconsciously
perform their interactions for others to see in a public setting.
it is important to consider exactly what aspects of interaction are made available to bystanders and how
this is achieved. We therefore introduce a further distinction in order to help us express the various
possibilities; we deconstruct interaction into manipulations and effects.
MANIPULATIONS
Manipulations are the actions carried out by the primary user of the interface who we shall henceforth refer to as
the ‘performer.’ These actions of the performer include manipulations of physical controls (buttons, mice,
joysticks and so forth) as well as gestures, movements and speech that are sensed by the interface.
Previous work in HCI has discussed the role of performative gestures in playing electronic instruments, using the term
‘expressive latitude’ to refer to performance gestures that are not directly sensed by the instrument [7].
EFFECTS
Performers may also display a physical and/or emotional reaction to the interface, deliberately or involuntarily, and
the resulting gestures, movements and expressions around the interface can also be seen as being part of the effect.
Our definition of effects, therefore, does not correspond to system ‘output’ since effects are not confined to being
located purely in the technology but can also be found in the human elements.
Secretive interfaces tend towards hiding both manipulations and effects. This may be to protect
spectators from knowing about the experience until it is their turn, or to protect performers from interference.
Expressive interfaces tend towards revealing, even amplifying, both manipulations and effects.
Magical interfaces tend towards revealing effects while hiding the manipulations that led to them.
Suspenseful interfaces tend towards revealing manipulations while hiding effects.
Amplifying: Performers may deliberately amplify their manipulations and effects rather than merely reveal them.
TRANSFORMING: manipulations may be transformed into unrelated actions by a performer in order to mislead spectators, such as a
magician’s intentionally misleading bodily conduct that hides the methods employed to produce a trick [17].
Although we have defined performers as being the primary users of the interface, it is possible for spectators
to interact as well, either deliberately or accidentally. In a typical performance (such as theatre, music or standup
performer’s awareness of an audience is often vital to liveness. However, awareness of spectators may also have
a negative impact on a performer who may feel pressure, both in terms of the potential embarrassment of making
mistakes in front of strangers, but also the pressure to move on and let others have a turn.
The key here is a performer’s experience of interaction in public space is greatly enhanced by an implied awareness
and involvement of spectators.
Transitions and Handovers
Many experiences involve moments of transition between spectating and performing, especially in exhibitions when
visitors hand over control of exhibits to one another.
Thus, designers need to consider how their design may exploit transitions and how frequent and fluid such transitions will be..
One theatrical technique for managing the transition from spectator to performer involves highly
ritualised briefings in which an actor carefully introduces a spectator to the experience. Rituals such as these are also another important
aspect of building suspense.
The concept of ‘traversable interfaces’ is worthy of note here as it deliberately supports transitions between
spectating and performing by enclosing a performer and interface within a physically traversable secondary
projected display (such as a curtain, screen made of smoke or water spray [16] or even a tent-like screen into
which users can move [10]) while leaving spectators outside [15]. This fulfils several purposes. Firstly it
isolates the performer and the interactive technologies from interference by the spectators. Secondly, it allows
for a spectator view of events to be generated separately which may not show all of the performer’s effects,
maintaining an element of surprise. Thirdly, by designing the screen so that spectators can physically pass through
it, it supports dynamic transitions between spectating and performing.
Stuart Reeves , Steve Benford , Claire O'Malley , Mike Fraser, Designing the spectator experience, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005
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10.May.09
Guiding design with approaches to masked performance
a considerable part of design research that made use of performances employed props, mock-ups and incomplete artefacts.
But the design of the embodied artefacts and of interactive features has not been addressed with a language that links design qualities of the embodied artefacts to qualities or modes of performances. (stating the difference of the current study among the others...)
... could help better articulating design inquiries based on performances with and through artefacts.
However, no research works have devised performances by crossing genres, decomposing or constraining movements,
comparing different levels of acting, filtering perception, masking, or moulding time with changes of speed, rhythms or interruptions.
search for ways to relate to life and audiences usually proceeds by repeatedly introducing variations and by re-enacting the achieved forms. They explore stylised forms, other than naturalistic ones. Also, the choices about how to inspire, direct or to constrain performers are done explicitly and articulated in exercises. (some ways used in their practices)
- Performances with incomplete designs
Assumptions and search for ways;
searching for new design ideas has ranged from introducing a
new (even if not completely formed) object in common situations, to creating new situations with objects endowed with ad hoc and familiar features.
search for novelty has ranged from seeking totally new situations and action – as if future
requirements and needs were to be invented from scratch – to assuming that novel needs and attitudes are already implicitly present in actual life, and need to be acted out.
in all cases, the application of performances had to couple familiarity and novelty, abstraction and detail,
practical accomplishment and symbolic signification, and individuality and universality.
They do not articulate the performance exercises along dimensions that link expression and exploration through the aesthetic and technical qualities of the designed artefacts.
An important improvement in the design practices mentioned above can be achieved by reinterpreting the ways
in which approaches to training and devising performances can proceed by re-enacting and introducing relevant variations. For example, relevant dimensions can be those between neutrality and expressivity, pace and rhythm, incompleteness and
characterisation.
• Should performances be understood as being ‘reproductions’ or ‘representations’
of aspects of life? And, relevantly to this question, what alternative ways to devise
and study them can be learned from the performing arts?
. How to link exploration and expression?
One of the observed outcomes from these activities are alternative roles the markers could
play in influencing performances. These could range from the functional use of a
tool, to the covering of body parts, to the lead for movements explorations.
performance, the use of visual markers had shifted from an utilitarian use, as in the use of a tool, to a wearing that influences a performance, in a similar way in which some type of masks do.
This articulated the ways in which the installation reacted to the relationship between people in its space. Also, by the delay between a physical movement in the space and the triggering of a projection, it became possible to play with time and pauses, other than with static body positions.
>>>>> Some aspects that can inspire our embodied machine mediators..
- By covering parts of a performing body, one can achieve a state of inquiry through movement which permits
to be more economical, neutral, free or focused. - Expressive mask can permit to explore breadth and focus of embodied action by imposing structures and facilitating digressions.One can introduce structures and driving features that are alien to the original context and to the people involved.
- how masks can permit to explore the use or mediation with artefacts that retain different degrees of ‘incompleteness’.
Masks and Mediating artefacts on Stage
There are several ways in which a theatrical mask works as a ‘mediating’ artefact. A mask can have different roles in both driving and inspiring the masked performer and in guiding spectators’ interpretation of her performance. Masks can work as
tools for imagination and control.
>>>>> Work AS.. A mask can work as a constraint, a filter, a means and a vehicle. It can show a character in its broad outlines, it can structure or simplify the playing style, it can delegate to the non masked parts of a body to express essential attitudes, it can filter out the complexities of psychological aspects, and it can impose guiding attitudes in embodied actions.
Dualities:
A mask can be an active element both for who wears it and for who watches. The Masks introduce several dualities in the practical accomplishment and in the interpretation of performances: inward vs. outward, showing vs. hiding, constructing vs. deconstructing, immobility vs. movement and reality vs. illusion.
Masks as tools for inquiry
>>> as a research contribution >> in design these practices can be transposed and reinterpreted in order to constitute tools and activities for inquiry, instead than solely leading a single performance to be staged and used as direct evidence of design.
As figures, markers express nothing. But they have the effect, like neutral masks, to motivate a state of exploration through deconstructed
movement.
the exploration proceeds by trying out alternatives in which those artefacts can guide or constrain embodied action. In order to acquire functions that are similar to those of neutral masks, the artefacts can be mediating tools, physical constraints or framing
devices. The explorations aim to rely on them in order to induce performances which: (1) are characterised by a depersonalisation of the performer, and (2) express traits of action that are understood by all, or that are present to some extent in everyone’s action in the same circumstances.
The inquiry can move on by applying different degreesof expressivity, incompleteness or abstraction, in order to research on other design
qualities of the artefacts or the embodied actions. T
The exploration can proceed either by focusing on how the mask inhabits the situation with its form or by focusing on how the situation can be fitted towards ‘entering into the form’ of the mask(Lecoq).
Practical approaches that exploit the ways masks feature in relation to specific performing activities.
- ability to create variations
- inspiring, constraining, directing
- loosely structured
- process based
- avoid planning and control
- rules to serve to motivate the exploration of desig features.
A major goal is to devise a performance by making it emerge by imposing a minimum control, and by being ready to take advantage of unexpected outcomes. .. by carefully introducing constraints in performance activities
Reality does not suffice in representing design problems. This is one of the motives for using performances or, in general, for achieving illusion or imagination, to express and explore in design. In determining design spaces, stylisation provides an understanding
of design issues that is not possible through naturalistic play.design based on performances can learn from the performing arts. The primary reference should be life itself
... similar approaches to creative work can lead to explore the design space through the study of how incomplete forms feature in the worlds to foster imagination and abstraction.
Carlo Jacucci, Guiding design with approaches to masked performance, Interacting with Computers, v.18 n.5, p.1032-1054, September, 2006
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29.April.09
Seamful and Seamless Design in Ubiquitous Computing
The physical nature of ubicomp systems reveals itself in, for example, uncertainty in sensing and ambiguity of representations. These ‘seams’ may be inevitable, and users perceive and appropriate them for their own uses. Users can benefit from them, and new
opportunities for seamful design arise if we take fuller account of them.
He (Weiser) suggests that making things seamless amounts to making everything the same, and he
advocates seamful systems (with “beautiful seams”) as a goal.
Making everything the same is easy; letting everything be itself, with other things, is hard.
Making everything the same meant, to Weiser, reducing components, tools and systems to their
‘lowest common denominator’. Seamlessness could mean sacrificing the richness of each tool in order to
obtain bland compatibility.
Seamfully integrated tools would maintain the unique characteristics of each tool, through transformations that retained their individual
characteristics. This would let the user brush some characters with the paint tool in some artful way, then
use the text editor to ‘search and replace’ some of the brushstroked characters, and then paint over the result
with colour washes. Interaction would be seamless even though the features of each tool were apparent.
As designers, we can be defensive or negative about such seams in devices and infrastructure, and try to design them out.
We can choose a more positive design approach by making seams a resource
for users. Note that we do not claim that seamlessness is always bad, or that seamfulness is always good.
Rather, they form a continuum or design space—with lots of room for new seamful work.
Rather than fighting against the uncertainty or ambiguity, we could make a deliberate choice to present and use it. There are several presentation policies:
• pessimistic: only show information that is known to be correct;
• optimistic: show everything as if it were correct;
• cautious: explicitly present uncertainty; and
• opportunistic: exploit uncertainty.
We are also considering opportunistic presentations that may be (in the words of our
colleague, Bill Gaver), discordant, deliberately leading users to pause or reflect.
Another strand of our work is in studying how people handle or take advantage of
uncertainty and seams in traditional settings, in otehr technologies and of course in our systems.
Our goal here is to inform our own system design but also to develop and explore more generally applicable
concepts such as ‘design for appropriation’.
On the first day of play, runners struggled to catch many players, but on the second day their appropriation of inaccuracy
significantly changed the balance of the game. Users’ appropriation of the particular seams and
characteristics of our systems, and of related systems and technologies, seems to be vital to technology
adoption. Users’ interactions not only let them achieve their moment–by–moment tasks and goals, but also
let them build up a shared understanding of how to resolve interactional problems and how to take
advantage of the particular features of our system in their particular context. Dynamic emergence of new
patterns of interaction seems common and often necessary, and so we are becoming progressively more
interested in designing to support this process, i.e. design for appropriation.
Extending the analysis of Harrison and Dourish, one approach to designing for appropriation is to aim
for systems whose underlying mechanisms are “literally visible, effectively invisible” in that everyday
interaction does not require attention to these mechanisms’ representations—but one can selectively
focus on and reveal them when the task is tounderstand or even change the tool. These mechanisms
and their representations must be robust, simple and flexibly manipulable. Using these ideas, Dourish used
computational reflection to offer manipulable ‘accounts’ of deep system structure and categorization,
and the processes that changed them.
Bellotti & Sellen (1993) put forward a framework for the design of mechanisms for feedback
on and control over the system’s models and representations of a user’s activity, and how those
representations were used by other people. The design of feedback and control mechanisms was based not just
on the media involved, but on their effects and uses in interaction. Another design principle was that such
mechanisms should be interconnected to allow graceful changes to the degree of engagement (Gaver 1992), that we support gradual shifts between peripheral awareness and engaged interaction.
Over time, designers may find patterns and correlations that describe which aspects of system
structure, sensing and categorization to reveal, and in what form—but where should we start looking for
them? We may be able to begin the process of finding which components these are through sociological
methods, such as field studies, and technological methods, such as instrumentation of system
components and user activity, to track which components are used, where, how and when.
In the long run, we must consider deep customization to be something that designers
contribute to by revealing system structures and seams, and affordances for their potential use, but it is
users who through their interactions with our system and with each other choose what to use and why. The
ultimate design goal here is a good tool lets users focus on their task—even when that task involves
changing the tool itself.
We do not see seamlessness as always bad and seamfulness as always good. Similarly, supporting
appropriation may be a bad design choice in some situations, e.g. where consistent interaction is
desirable for legal, medical or educational reasons, and a good choice in others e.g. where personalization,
adaptation and exploration are required. We should treat these design approaches as different tools, to be
understood and used in ways that suit the settings, technologies and users we design for.
Chalmers, M. MacColl, Seamful and Seamless Design In. Ubiquitous Computing. Equator Workshop, 2003
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23.April.09
INTERFACIALITY
- Affective Mappings of Dynamic Body-Code Interfaces
Digital media translate continua into discontinous code, which severs the intensive relations that inhere within the continious properties of materialities. .. it is in the gaps between the series of corporealities and informatic renderings of bodies that the interface can emerge as an interfolding of disparities or disjunction. Embodiment need no longer be situated as inadequate if we focus on interstitial space between matter and code. Instead it might be thought of as an open and dynamic set of capacities for moving across the very gaps that open up in relation to information aesthetics. .. an aesthetic of limitation rather than plenitude. >>>i.e. SEAMS
.. coding as differing arrangements of "lines of expressions". ways...
Affect occurs as a process of composition that is sustained through a relation between body and expression, representation, map and knowledge.
"if I had chance of looking at my own neural patterns with the help of the most advanced technologies, i would be still looking at them from a third-person perspective." Damasio
It is only technology that can internally access "the body" as an "outside". But is this rendering of the body as technical artifact necessarily reductive? It must be possible to conquer the alterity opened up by artificially produced views of the body. The outside view of our bodies that imaging technologies provide for us replicates the same action that consciuos human self performs on the sensing self: "having a feeling is not the same as knowing a feeling that reflection on feeling is yet another step up." Feeling or sensing here becomes the object of experience.
Damasio recuperates alterity through the activity of consciousness and its reflective modes of representation.
Alternatively, we might take visually enhanced, altered, digital bodies in a divergent direction. We might work across the split between sensation and the insides of bodies, on the ne hand, and their representation through technical images or the internal patterning that consciousness performs, on the other. The first step require would require acknowledging that rendering bodily states as informatic pattern naturally or through technological means is never a direct route "being in and of body". But we could say that affect slips in and "inhabits the passage" between sensing and rendering. Affect arises relationally and is produced out of the difference between being in the body and representing/mapping the body from the outside. Affect sustains the singularity of sensing and of representing as a differential experience of embodiment, one in which alterity has a place.
We can move further in the direction of processual understanding of the relation between body and digital code by focusing on composition rather than representation.
Guattari suggests that we forgo a search for signification in action. Instead, we can think of the making of this form of self through the sensing of sensation. ... expressed as "the feeling that one is in the mapping of one's self".
What informatic renderings/visualizations might open up for us here is not a reductive rendering of interiorities (brain, self, viscera) but a topological mapping of self as a pattern of microcompositions traversing the gaps between interiority and exteriority. Interface exists as an afteraffect of the dynamic encoding of bodies.
Here, the viewer/participant is placed dynamically in the process of "feeling that they are in the mapping" of an embodied self.
Relational Architecture: the experience is shifted away from the interface as a thing itself. It becomes a kind of quality that emerges in the experience of these relations in information spaces: the trajectory of informatic technologies is changed away from the visual matching of a given body with its given representation, as technologies of emergent experience. He is concerned with the qualitative changes that information aesthetics can bring to active and reactive relations between humans and the spaces they inhabit.
In the past, the aim was to erase computational and human differences.(seamless design). assuming thatdigital technologies occurs primarily at the cognitive and communicative levels. this caused the lost of qualtitative difference of the space between, the inter-face, altogether.
The interface will always suffer a loss of face if it is situated here, as a translator between human and machine, body and information, analog and digital. These are modalities, rather than things, and do not combine smoothly to create forms of belonging with each other. Yet it is in those gaps between corporeality and information that the interface as a dissonant folding, and interfolding, emerges.
Instead of situating bodies as inadequate, we might look at ways in which embodiment can be conceived of as open and dynamic, operating and traversing these gaps; not a property that "I" have but something that is produced, in relation to other bodies and machines.
Increasingly, it is these emergent and qualtitative dimensions of human embodiment that will feature in our engagement with digital, especially if we areconcerned with globally sustainable relations to technologies.
Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: embodiment in information aesthetics (Dartmouth College Press, 2006),
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02.04.09
THE VARIETIES OF USER EXPERIENCE
BRIDGING EMBODIED METHODOLOGIES FROM SOMATICS AND PERFORMANCE TO
HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION
Research Formulation and Summary of Thecla Schiphorst
Annotated Extracts from her thesis
Schiphorst, T., The Varieties of User Experience, PhD thesis, SFU, 2008
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29.March.09
Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focuses on how designers can develop systems that convey a single, specific, clear interpretation of what they are for and how they should be used and experienced. New domains such as domestic and
public environments, new influences from the arts and humanities, and new techniques in HCI itself are converging to suggest that multiple, potentially competing interpretations can fruitfully co-exist. Lay out the contours of the new space opened by a focus on multiple interpretations, which may more fully address the complexity, dynamics and interplay of user, system, and designer interpretation.
While different areas disagree on whose interpretation (e.g., the users’ or the designers’) should be privileged, there is general agreement that there should be a single, correct way to interpret a computer system (e.g. how it works or the emotion it should exhibit or engender), and that the goal of the system’s designer should be to convey that interpretation accurately to its users. Interpretation is then understood to be causing a problem when users and designers disagree about the meaning to assign to a system’s operations, functions, or the role it plays in users’ lives. The solution to this problem is therefore to adjudicate the disagreement, identify which interpretation is correct, and to design and contextualize systems so that this correct interpretation is agreed upon by all parties.
Proposition: we will show that HCI can and should systematically recognize, design for, and evaluate with a more nuanced view of interpretation in which multiple, perhaps competing interpretations can co-exist. We will argue that it is not necessarily a problem when users and designers have divergent interpretations of a system. And even when it is a problem, the solution does not necessarily need to be to establish and promote a single correct interpretation.
3 reasons why we should reconsider whether a single preferred interpretation is necessary or desirable.
1. The first is recent shifts in context of use: the expansion of computing beyond the relatively circumscribed and controlled context of the workplace into most facets of everyday life suggests that the domain of HCI has become broader, more personal, more idiosyncratic, and therefore less accessible to, and appropriate for, designer control.
2. Recent interest in HCI in drawing on the arts and humanities whose perspectives assume a rich field of interpretation going beyond HCI’s traditional preoccupations with utility and usability.
3. The third is results from the sociology of technology (R) which demonstrate that even when a single interpretation of a technology is eventually established, this happens in a messy, complex, and protracted process involving negotiation among a variety of social groups.
If one hopes for the user to understand a system, to use it properly, and to enjoy using it, then it is up to the designer to make the System Image explicit, intelligible, consistent.” (as a criticism )
Many areas in HCI work from the assumption that a system should be designed to support a single interpretation. Ambiguity is generally seen as something to be coped with or resolved, not supported.
Similarly, the evaluation of a system should measure whether the preferred interpretation the designer had in mind is actually taken up by users.
Levels of Interpretation
At the lowest levels of interpretation, users need to interpret a system’s interface and actions to use it at all: from “Is this a button?” to “What does this button do?” to “How do I do this task?”.
At middle levels of interpretation, users need to unpack how that system might relate to their everyday lives – from an understanding of “What is this system intended to be used for?” to “What activities is it appropriate for?” to “What role can it play in my life?”
At the highest levels of interpretation, users interpret the values embodied in and the social and cultural meaning of systems – “What does it mean about me, my social group, my society, my culture?”
Lower levels of interpretation tend to involve issues traditionally associated with ‘usability’, and at these levels it would appear reasonable to assume a single preferred interpretation that accurately accounts for how the system works. Higher levels in the interpretation chain, in contrast, involve personal decisions about values and meaning for a specific user that appear less amenable to, and appropriate for, designer control.
Levels of interpretation are not independent and sequential. Interpretation at all levels is strongly dependent on context and the resources that users’ social and cultural situations provide for interpretation. In addition, there is an interaction between user interpretation of a system and system interpretation of a user. Users interpret not only the system’s interface, but also the ways in which the system is representing themselves and other users. The story about interpretation that emerges is complex, suggesting that the assumption that user interpretation can and should be controlled by designers may need to be rethought.
Ludic design draws on critiques of utility to argue that designers unconsciously design systems for work-related values such as efficiency — even when those systems are intended for home or leisure activities. Alternative values, such as curiosity, play, exploration, and reflection are also important from this point of view, and new design strategies and methods are needed to design for them
No single one of these perspectives may necessarily be “correct;” instead, all may be useful in highlighting aspects of how systems will be understood, be used, and find roles in individual’s and community’s lives.
People appropriate and reinterpret systems to produce their own uses and meanings, and these are frequently incompatible with design expectations and inconsistent within and across groups.
The ability for different stakeholders to hold different interpretations of the same system can provide a kind of conceptual lubricant, allowing different perspectives
and motivations to be applied to the same technologies without conflict. For instance, SMS messaging may be seen as a tool for coordination by businessmen, a social glue by teenagers, and a method for passing wireless control signals by hackers.
if people are enabled to play a substantial role in determining the meaning of systems, this implies that they will be actively engaged in the process of understanding both the system and its situation of use.
the challenge for HCI becomes, not to decide upon and support a specific, correct interpretation of a system, but to incorporate and balance multiple, perhaps conflicting interpretations and processes of interpretation in design and evaluation. One way to support re-interpretations is through the use of skins or end-user programming, in which the look or functionality of a system, and indirectly its eventual meaning, are left explicitly for users to tailor.
If we take supporting multiple interpretations as a central goal, design shifts from deciding on and communicating an interpretation to supporting and intervening in the processes of designer, system, user, and community meaning-making.
There are several ways to do so:
1. Designs can clearly specify usability, while leaving interpretation of use open.
2. Designs can support a space of interpretation around a given topic.
3. Designs can stimulate new interpretations by purposefully blocking expected ones.
4. Designs can gradually unfold new opportunities for interpretation over the course of interaction.
5. Designs can make space for user re-interpretation by downplaying the system’s authority.
6. Designs can thwart any consistent interpretation.
Office Plant #1 clearly has an interpretation of the user’s email, but this interpretation is not a straightforward status monitor of the presence or emotional quality of that email. It is presented indirectly and in an alien form that requires interpretation. By presenting their interpretations in defamiliarized ways, provide opportunities for reflection on and reinterpretation of the context which users and systems share, but see in different ways.
It is important, therefore, to highlight that designing systems to support a rich range of interpretations does not abdicate the designer from responsibility for the eventual success of the system. Instead, designers might develop new kinds of evaluation criteria that focus on their design goals: not “did the preferred interpretation take hold with users?” but “How many different interpretations does a particular ‘blank canvas’ generate, and why?” or “Do users feel both stimulated and empowered to develop their own interpretation of an alien presence system?”
Evaluation is also a form of interpretation, however, and can itself be single or multiple. Thus an emphasis on multiple interpretations might suggest gathering together a rich mélange of interpretative accounts that might be inconsistent or contradictory, instead of or in addition to focusing on meta-level criteria for success. In this case, evaluation shifts from determining whether an authoritative interpretation was successfully communicated to identifying, coordinating, stimulating, and analyzing processes of (evaluative) interpretation in practice. While the results may conflict, the responsibility remains with the designer to weigh the results and to justify his or her eventual conclusions.
Several strategies present themselves that leverage multiple interpretations for evaluation.
- Incorporating user interpretation into evaluation: Ethnographers, of course, have long argued in favor of using people’s accounts of their own meaning to understand systems, and ethnography is useful in capturing rich and multi-layered accounts of people’s experiences with new designs. Although this is most commonly used in HCI for design, it is equally valuable in evaluation.
Another approach to incorporate user interpretation into evaluation is Boehner and Gay’s notion of dynamic feedback When using dynamic feedback, whatever information is collected about or from users is also given back to users to interpret. (R) users’ interpretations of systems can shift substantially over time. Longitudinal studies may therefore also be invaluable in understanding such changes in interpretation.
- Multiple, potentially inconsistent assessments: it might also be useful to involve commentators from outside traditional academia such as journalists and art critics, as well as those from fields traditionally thought to be unrelated to HCI such as psychoanalysis or forensic anthropology, as long as they can\ offer new perspectives on systems and the ways people interact with them.
Design shifts from deciding on and communicating an interpretation to supporting and intervening in the processes of designer, system, user, and community meaning-making.
Evaluation shifts from determining whether an authoritative interpretation was successfully communicated to identifying, coordinating, stimulating, and analyzing processes of interpretation in practice.
As we hope our design and evaluation strategies demonstrate, recognizing multiple, perhaps conflicting interpretations as legitimate does not have to lead to an anything-goes mentality. Designers must still develop approaches that address multiple interpretations in definable and testable ways. These approaches do not replace single-interpretation approaches; rather, they suggest new opportunities for both design and evaluation.
The question of how many interpretations or what kinds of interpretation a specific system should support will, of course, depend on the application under consideration. It will also depend on which level of user interpretation is being addressed.
The goal is not to design systems that are completely open to interpretation. It is instead to allow the rhythms of constraint and openness in interpretation to become part of the design language available to us in HCI.
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Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty
Designing for pleasure demands a different approach from designing for utility.
The latter can be done from outside a given situation, standing back to assess difficulties and seek solutions. The former, in contrast, is better done from within.
“Cultural Probes,”
A design-led approach to understanding users that stressed empathy and engagement. Probes are collections of evocative tasks meant to elicit inspirational responses from people—not comprehensive information about them, but fragmentary clues about their lives and thoughts. We suggested the approach was valuable in inspiring design ideas for technologies that could enrich people’s lives in new and pleasurable ways.
The Probes embodied an approach to design that recognizes and embraces the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s an approach that values uncertainty, play, exploration, and subjective interpretation as ways of dealing with those limits.
Our Probe results are impossible to analyze or even interpret clearly because they reflect too many layers of influence and constraint. Far from revealing an “objective” view on the situation, the Probes dramatize the difficulties of communicating with strangers.
What is the point of deliberately confusing our volunteers and ourselves? Most fundamentally, it is to prevent ourselves from believing that we can look into their heads.
Over time, the stories that emerge from the Probes are rich and multilayered, integrating routines with aspirations, appearances with deeper truths. They give us a feel for people, mingling observable facts with emotional reactions.
Summary:
• Asking unambiguous questions tends to give you what you already know, at least to the extent of reifying the ontology behind the questions. Posing open or absurd tasks, in contrast, ensures that the results will be surprising.
• Summarizing returns tends to produce an “average” picture that may not reflect any individual well, and that filters out the unusual items that can be most inspiring.
• Analyses are often used as mediating representations for raw data; they blunt the contact that designers can have with users through Probe returns.
• Seeking for justifiable accounts of Probe returns constrains the imaginative engagement and story-telling which can be most useful for design.
Probes to encourage subjective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty as positive values for design.
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Critical Technical Practice as a Methodology for Values in Design
Critical Technical Practice (CTP) is an approach to identifying and altering philosophical assumptions underlying technical practice.
For years the lighthouse of ‘productivity’ has guided technologists in the rough seas of design, its beam illuminating ‘efficiency’, ‘efficacy’, and ‘effectiveness’ as the promised lands of success. much attention is now given to design that supports more authentic, rich human experiences taking into account the complex meaning making activities we engage in every day.
One approach toward enhancing design for experience is to identify aspects missing from existing computer models, such as emotion and creativity, add these missing variables to the equation, and otherwise continue with design practice-as-usual. This approach does identify new values to design for, but is less concerned with explicating, or challenging, the values that go into the design practice itself.
An alternate approach for supporting more authentic interaction with and around technology does not attempt to fit complex experiences into computer models but, rather, looks at ways in which technology can stimulate reflection on, enhance awareness of, and create opportunities for meaning making activities. The goal in this approach, which we espouse, is to use systems for enhancing people’s own awareness of context, affect and other complex experiences that are being augmented.
Interpretation is not black-boxed inside a system but rather is a process of co-construction between users, systems, and designers.
Participation may not always be equal among all three groups but awareness of who is participating is imperative.
A final distinction between our approach and that of the codification-of-experience model is in metrics that push beyond utility and efficiency measures. Successful systems are not determined by whether or not a user ‘got it right’ or ‘performed more efficiently’. Instead we look at metrics such as levels of engagement, enjoyment of use, integration with everyday experiences, the variability of use or capacity for re-appropriation.
The values to be espoused in system design are not necessarily easy to articulate before design has begun, but instead may emerge through a process of engagement with users, materials, and fellow researchers.
Our approach is to introduce users to new, critically-informed ways of looking at the world around them. We explore the limits of HCI practice – what is it we may design for, what methods we may use – to question and provide potential alternatives to core assumptions of the field.
Briefly, CTP (CRITICAL TECHNICAL PRACTICE) consists of the following moves: identifying the core metaphors of the field, noticing what, when working within those metaphors, remains marginalized, inverting the dominant metaphors to bring that margin to the center, and embodying the alternative as a new technology. It is important to note that during this process, the values embodied by the field can be questioned and shifted.
Because of HCI's interdisciplinary constitution, ranging from computer science to ethnography and design research and even extending into the arts, there is more openness to possibilities for HCI that lies outside of the purely technical.
We have attempted to explicitly identify theory-constitutive metaphors and what they marginalize, show our inversion of the assumptions as we think of new metaphors, and finally, design and build systems that demonstrate the alternative assumptions.
Museum Imprints:
In line with the reflective philosophy of a critical technical practice, we are measuring the success of the Imprint program not in terms of does it create a ‘more’ enjoyable experience or does it create ‘more’ awareness of visitor roles, but instead, we seek to understand
- How visitors appropriate an application designed for marginalized aspects of the museum experience?
- How do visitors integrate this simple act of making, leaving, and viewing marks into their visit?
- Do they see these marks as legitimate forms of expression and participation?
Intimate Objects:
Our re-examination of key metaphors inherent in communication resulted in a technological improvement as well as a deeper understanding of the issues being explored.
It is possible to invert the values of productivity and efficiency and yet produce technological systems that continue to be meaningful to users, espousing values of experience, felt life and emotion.
CTP allows us to rethink our dominant metaphors, to expose the values that go into design and to surpass impasses that are encountered during standard system building approaches. Moreover, as we depart from 'efficiency' and 'productivity' models, CTP allows us to rethink our choices and renegotiate our values.
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21.Feb.09
Open Interactions: The Balance of Specification
The size of the elements within an artwork, the ‘interactive granularity’, is stated as key to the creation of open
interactions.
It is suggested that the potential for interactivity to propagate further creativity relies heavily on the balance of specification for both
interactor and system. Furthermore it is stated that truly conversational interactions are inherently open-ended and can
result in both positive and negative outcomes by whatever standard.
Looking further back, writer and theorist Jack Burnham notes, ‘[w]e have already seen in happenings, kinetic
art, and luminous art some premature attempts to expand the art experience into a two-way communication loop’
Duchamp said “the look makes the picture” and when we say that every artwork is interactive, the word is not that
interesting anymore. Also it sounds too much like a topdown 1-bit trigger button —you push and something
happens— which is too predatorial and simple.
Open interactions are therefore not narrative based, but instead focus on free-form creativity and play at the base level. Promoting
highly participatory creative experiences, rather than arranging heavily authored content into narrative-like structures.
a moral compass for interactivity; a scale designed ‘to measure distance in the use of
the machine starting from its reactive/automatic level and stratifying from there’ [46]. The moral compass evolves on the
following scale:
Reactive → Automatic → Interactive → Instrument → Platform
Reactive: 1-to-1 action reaction
Automatic: Automatic systems function without interaction, but rely on a set
of author determined rules or algorithms to run independently.
Interactive: Antirom chose to react against such interfaces, instead creating works where ‘the interface was the content and the purpose of the
interaction was the experience of the interaction’
Instrument: it is used here in the sense of an interactive system which allows the interactor to
engage creatively. The focus is not upon the creation of a subsequent artifact, but rather the interactive experience that develops.
Platforms: Processing and SoftVNS
Coarser granularity with larger individual elements occupy one end of the scale, labelled by Lippman as merely selective rather
than truly interactive [6], with the user selecting from a finite number of presets. On the other end of the scale finer granularity
provides smaller individual elements with which the interactor can begin to construct and create in diverse ways.
ex: Low-level languages offer great control, but at the same time require attention to huge amounts of
detail when programming. High-level languages automate much of this detail and consist of larger blocks of code for specific
tasks.
For interactivity, the level of granularity has significant implications for the level of engagement felt by the interactor; less
specification allows greater creative possibilities but can potentially create a more complex learning process.
Line Rider Game
The beauty remains in the fact that through an overtly simple set of rules, creative and complex user interaction
can evolve. This is achieved in part by encouraging a state of play. The absence of a goal means there is no correct or incorrect way
to interact; as a result the user is less concerned with the outcomes and more involved in the experience of the interaction itself and
the possibilities it offers.
Emergence:
The pragmatic relevance of emergence is intimately related to Descartes Dictum: how can a designer build a device which outperforms the designers specifications? Ifour devices follow our specifications too closely, they will fail to improve on those specifications. If, on the other hand, they are not in any way constrained by our purposes, they may cease to be of any use to us at all. Thus, the problem of emergence is the problem of specifications vs. creativity, of closure and replicability vs. open-endedness and surprise.
Wright speaks of the simple underlying cellular automata rules behind the ground-breaking simulation and city building game Sim City. Despite the simplicity of the rules pertaining to crime, traffic, pollution etc..., Wright noted complex emergent phenomena such
as urban gentrification evolving from interaction within the rules. Rather than being hard-coded into the game system, these
emergent behaviours evolved through user interaction; in a sense capturing the ‘something for nothing’ [14] feeling of emergence.
Automatic - Automated systems which run without interaction or intervention from outside sources. For example, generative art
systems such as Manovich’s Soft Cinema.
Reactive - Systems which allow a minimum level of interaction, often defined by low definition input devices and coarse
interactive granularity. For example, branching narrative structures, DVDs.
Interactive - Systems which incorporate a fundamental level of interactivity involving a continuous feedback loop of action
and reaction. For example, goal based games, virtual reality systems.
Instruments - Systems with a rich level of interactive granularity and a focus on interactions which promote creativity. For
example, Rokeby’s Very Nervous System, Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton, and the author’s Light Tracer.
Platforms - Comprehensive systems focused on being utilised for further production and creation. For example, Processing,
Rokeby’s SoftVNS.
Adaptive Computational - Systems with the capability to alter and adapt their computational parts based on their performance in
past interactions. For example, Interactive systems with a learning element.
Structurally Adaptive - Systems with the capability to adapt their structure parts based on their performance in past interactions,
For example, Pask’s electrochemical ear experiment.
Motivationally Autonomous - Systems capable of establishing their own performance-measuring criteria.
To assist with locating works within the interactive specification loop the following questions can be used to determine the
openness of the interactive work and the balance of specification. The intention is to question the outcomes of interaction rather than
the interactor or system by itself.
- Is it possible to predict all ways in which interaction will take place?
- Is it possible to predict all outcomes which will result from interaction?
- Can the output of the system be evaluated as both a positive and negative outcome (by whatever standard)?
Although there are no correct or incorrect answers to these questions, their use lies in revealing how interactive systems
manage the balance of specification by either encouraging or restricting either party.
Haque draw a distinction between intelligible and intelligent interactivity: ‘Intelligibility requires predictability
and a finite language. Intelligence, on the other hand, requires creativity and the unexpected’
Coming across the unexpected when interacting with computers is almost inevitably perceived negatively as an unintended and
unwanted ‘bug’. Relatively little is know of creative processes that cede appropriate control to the system to allow for potentially
positive unexpected directions.
Eno and Wright suggest dealing with generative and emergent processes represents ‘a new way of being an artist’,
where the process is one of ‘surprise and discovery’. Wright notes that when using such processes, having an end goal in mind is
made difficult by the inherently non-linear and counter-intuitive nature of the process.
A move towards more intelligent-productive interactions may be desirable, but the question of what exactly that constitutes still
remains to be delimited. The suggestion of systems capable of ‘amplifying our own creativity’ represents a positive direction for further research both within and beyond the field of art. However does such a definitive goal contradict the idea of a partnership and reduce the
system to a mere tool?
Truly conversational interactive systems are inherently open-ended and should thus produce positive as well as negative outcomes (by whatever standard).
Willis, K., Open Interactions: The Balance of Specification, PerthDAC 2007
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21.Feb.09
The Flow Principle in Interactivity
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively on the intrinsic pleasures of creative action and argues that activities can be rewarding in and of themselves, regardless of any goals or outcomes.
Csikszentmihalyi describes this theory of the autotelic experience as the flow principle and it relates directly to the engagement with interactive experiences. Case studies are cited in which the flow principle can be applied to interactivity and shows that engagement may begin and end with playful experiences that are satisfying in their own right.
In a complete interaction the participant’s changed behaviour creates another change in the device’s reaction, which results in another change in the interactor’s behaviour, thus producing a feedback loop of interaction. This form of action, reaction and interaction is also a fundamental aspect of play and game playing..
... ultimately the interactive elements changes the traditional relationship of author and audience.
actually one can only move around inside the constraints of the gameplay. We cannot make Lara stop and negotiate with her enemies instead of shooting them, which might show a growth in character so crucial to traditional narratives.
Laurel compares engagement in interactive experiences to the theatrical notion of “willing suspension of disbelief” introduced by the early nineteenth-century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Willing suspension of disbelief in traditional narrative is the audience’s willingness to “play along” and pretend that the fictional world presented to them really exists in order to become engrossed in the story.
It is possible to induce a willing suspension of disbelief, but one in which the interactor is engaged with the activity at hand, rather than the interface to the activity.
PLAY AND FLOW
Csikszentmihalyi describes flow or the optimal experience thus:
“The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding. […] The term ‘autotelic’ derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward”..
Csikszentmihalyi outlines the eight conditions for the flow experience based on hundreds of interviews over many years.
1. The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.
2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.
3-4. Concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.
5. One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
6. Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.
7. Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
8. The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.
The Flow Experience and Interactivity
Successful interactivity and play, however, needs rules and they should be usually simple and easily understood. The key to creating engaging interactivity is setting up the correct rules for a playful flow experience.
such as a guitar, it is easy to see how important rules are because they relate to the entire mode of playing. A guitar has six strings, tuned in a certain way, with a number of frets along the neck. Those are the rules of a guitar. The rules can be broken by de-tuning or post-processing the guitar sounds, but this is more of a bending of the rules. Breaking them completely renders the guitar less of an instrument than a box with a noise making capability.
balance of goals versus skills as the “boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act”
(Control related) trade off-> On the one hand making something so complex (like a piano) with which it is possible to create a multitude of different combinations is powerful and gives great scope for personal expression, but the learning curve is likely to become tedious with dedicated practice required. One the other hand, making something so simple (like the ‘play’ button on a CD-player) carries little interactive interest after the first one or two interactions.
game vs toy ???
to understand what principles cause the state of play and flow may be a good place to start. Affordances and conventions are essential parts of any language.
simple interactions and observance of the interactors at play may allow us to develop the tools and techniques that story-tellers have had at their disposal for years. One with clear principles of design in relation to experienced outcome.
Polaine, A. (2005) The Flow of Interactivity, Interactive Entertainment Conference 2005, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
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10.Feb.09
Progressive interaction design for the meta-medium:
An investigation into interactive meaning-making
HCI, viewed as design, is considered to consist of three main branches: task-efficient design, participatory design and interaction design.
1. Task-efficient design
One perspective on HCI as design is to emphasize efficient use and design. Design can be considered to be a means to access information and create material in the most efficient manner possible.
Four of the five "Goals of User-Interface Design" deal with efficiency: (1) time to learn, (2) speed of user performance, (3) rate of user errors, and (4) retention over time related to time to relearn. Only the fifth goal concerns something other than efficiency: (5) subjective satisfaction.
The definitive goal within in this branch is to "get rid of" the user interface altogether. The task should be in focus and the interface should in effect not be noticed: "... make the task dominate, make the tools invisible .... We need to aid the task, not the interface to the task. The computer of the future should be invisible. (Norman)
By conceptualising interactivity as task solving. The human is represented in the capacity of being an efficient handler of tasks, with computer assistance.
2. Participatory Design
The context of use is considered to be an important element in PD, and the whole system development cycle is brought more directly into consideration. In particular, the mutual dependency between use and design are important, and the user involvement in system development processes is crucial.
3. Interaction design
A main goal of interaction design is to unite aesthetical aspects with functional demands to create a user experience. The proponents of this view seek methods and approaches to support the creative processes of design and at the same time make sure the system development accords with the principles of robust software engineering and usability (Löwgren, 2002, Winograd, 1996).
Use of digital environments in interaction design, often characterised as user experience, should include a pleasurable quality that has a value in itself.
The move from designing for usability to designing for user experience is a significant one. The activity of use is not something to be measured in laboratories according to metrics. Rather it is a personal interpretive experience of making meaning, which takes into account the context of use, previous knowledge, and use situation in general: "Interaction design deals primarily with values, preferences and meanings – with, if you like, aesthetics and semantics – it can neither have universal predictive theory nor always-reliable methods to generate solution" (Crampton Smith and Tabor, 1996:56 original emphasis).
Multimedia
The unique and defining quality of multimedia is the way time-based datatypes of video and audio can be combined with the time-independent datatypes such as pictures, graphics and text – under user control.
Interaction as a phenomenon between human and technology
Design for human action should in her (Laurel) view be the overall guideline: "Focus on designing the action. The design of objects, environments, and characters is all subsidiary to this central goal". She further defines interactivity as "the ability for users to participate in actions in a representational context".
She (Murray) identifies three qualities of interactive experiences: immersion, agency and transformation. The first of these is often employed in discussions of virtual reality, as the feeling of being immersed.
Immersion, according to Murray, is "the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, ... that takes all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.
Agency describes the actual control the user has to both generate material and enjoy the experience: "when things are going right on the computer, you can be both the dancer and the caller of the dance". In other words, you can both control how things develop and take part in creating them yourself. She defines agency as: "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices".
Transformation, the ability to alter existing material, such as pictures, narratives or any digital material.
Jensen defines interactivity according to the potential the user has to influence the content and form of the mediated communication (Jensen, 1998). This can be achieved by studying the system and the options it presents to the user. Interaction then becomes a question about the functions that exists in the system and how they are presented. To put it at an extreme, the potential to influence the expression is there if there are functions available to do so, and the issue of how accessible they are to the user is not relevant.
If we study interactivity as user experience, interaction is in the realm of individual experience and the amount of delight, enjoyment and other emotional processes that may be stimulated (Murray, 1997). This is clearly contrary to Jensen (1998). In between these two are perspectives on interaction that embrace the interplay between people and machines. Laurel's earlier perspective, with the three dimensions of frequency, significance and range of choices, is close to the technical side.
In between these two are perspectives on interaction that embrace the interplay between people and machines. Laurel's earlier perspective, with the three dimensions of frequency, significance and range of choices, is close to the technical side.
Directions in HCI
Kay seems to strike a balance between the computer as a tool and as a medium, giving slight priority to the media qualities in his metamedium concept. At the same time he warns against trying to find the "essence" of what computer technology is and will be.
Think of the computer, not as a tool, but as a medium" (Laurel, 1993:126). Laurel states that this approach will lead designers to create virtual tools based on their idiosyncratic understanding of a tool, which is not necessarily shared by the users. In particular, when the "tool" has no referent in the real world, we will be left with the system developer's ad hoc estimates of the software to be constructed. This will lead to a design that mimics the technical structure of the digital environment, but with little meaning for most users.
What if we were to define the action of information retrieval, not as looking for something, but examining and experiencing it? This seemingly innocuous shift in point of view puts emphasis in an entirely different domain: the action involved in perceiving, interpreting and experiencing information.. Laurel
The decision to design computer environments, as media is rather an attempt to obtain symmetry in the communication, and to enable humans and computers to operate in the same "sensory universe". She sees symmetrical possibilities as a way to "vastly improve our experience of engagement and agency" when using a computer (Laurel, 1993:165).
Agency in the Metamedium
Design of the metamedium should enable the user to become active and engaged. This is a role that is influenced by the extent to which the user can have control and take initiative in use of a digital environment.
Murray emphasizes the pleasurable experience of being in control of the action: "Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices" (Laurel, 1993:126). She draws analogies to activities like the sport of orienteering and navigating in a maze. The pleasure of finding the spot where the post is, or "controlling" the maze by finding the way, is at the core of agency as a gratifying experience.
Laurel has enactment as a key concept, where a user should be able to act in a representational context – the digital environment. Although "computer as theatre" is the main perspective where the user may act through a given script with certain degrees of freedom, Laurel also opens up for ways to incorporate the user's creations and productions. She looks for possibilities to transform tasks into action: "Isolated tasks must be contextualized into meaningful realms of activity – as parts of an action that is large enough to be pleasurable" (Laurel, 1993:173).
On the other hand, Murray definitively states that the user cannot be an author of the actions they encounter in a digital environment. They are not productive in a content-oriented way. The user influences events, and experiences agency, but within the procedural limits set for them by the environment (Murray, 1997).
The Experience of Interaction
Another building block is Polanyi's concepts of focal and subsidiary awareness (Polanyi, 1966). In focal awareness we are immersed in the situation. Objects we handle are integrated in our activity to the extent that they "disappear" from our consciousness as an object to reflect on, and become incorporated into our activity and existence. They turn into extensions of our body.
Polanyi argues that we "feel" the results of actions taken with an object localised to the place where the effects of the activity appear: "When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that the handle has struck our palm but that the head has struck the nail" (Polanyi, 1958:55).
Conversely, the subsidiary awareness is a detached and analytical "not me" experience with the physical object, where attention is directed towards the object as object. A "me" and a "not me" experience do not occur simultaneously.
Hodgkin develops a general theory for learning through the use of objects. He arrives at three roles for these objects with regard to human activity: they can be toys to play with, tools for skilful practice, and symbols to use for exploration. Thus the same physical entities can work as what he terms "transitional objects", oscillating between being toys, symbols and tools – in play, practice and exploration.
The practice of using the object as a tool is an integrated experience where the object feels like an "extension of oneself". It is embodied in focal awareness. Exploration occurs when the object is applied in an unfamiliar type of use, which entails analytical awareness towards the object as such. The object is no longer experienced as integrated in the activity or with the person using it. Here the user explores the capacity and functional range of the object, possibly pressing it to its limits where the object might be shown to be unusable or dysfunctional, or to physically break down.
Use of an object may be a varied blend shifting between the three types of activity continuously, in what Hodgkin characterises as a cycle of creativity. Here Hodgkin contradicts Polanyi's absolute distinction between the focal and subsidiary awareness – the "me" and "not me" experiences.
Play is a vital activity and the toy is given a central role in Hodgkin's model. In the middle position, play contains elements of the other two activities. "[Play] merges in one direction into controlled instrumental practice; in the other it runs into frontier activity – to exploring, or sustaining attention to, what is problematic, ambiguous and, perhaps, dangerous." (Hodgkin, 1985:52, see also figure 13). Hodgkin considers play to be "[an activity] without pressure [but] for a purpose", and important as a background for more goal-directed creative and constructive processes.
The purpose of play is general and directed toward some indefinite future need. It is a way to attain necessary experience with the object and the world in a broader context than activity that has specific plan. The playful activity between practice and exploration provides a necessary base for skilful practice and the analytical activities to come later. It is like an open space of activity where we seek to "maximize the amount and diversity of feedback coming from the contexts of our acts". In Hodgkin's framework, play is an activity where it is possible to be "pre-theoretical", acting on intuition and instinct.
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What is interaction? Are there different types?
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In the feedback-loop model of interaction, a person is closely coupled with a dynamic system.
Nature of human and system is not specified
o What is nature of human
o What is the nature of dynamic system
o Do different types of systems enable different types of interaction?
- For Haque, in interaction, the precise way that input affects output can itself change.
TYPEs of SYSTEMs
- Static: those that cannot act and thus have little or no meaningful effect on their environment (eg. a chair)
- Dynamic: those that can act and thus change their relationship
a. Linear (open-loop) : those that only react (f(input)=output), coin operated machines..
b. Closed-loop: those that interact
i. Recirculation: (natural cycle of water), no goal!
ii. Self-regulatory: system has a goal and this goal defines a relationship between the system and its environment, which the system seeks to attain and maintain.
1. First order: (can not change its own rules)
2. Second order: (multiple systems, measures and control each other)
a. Self-adjusting
b. Learning
Learning within organization require 3 levels of feedback
i. basic processes, which are regulated by the first order loops
ii. processes for improving the regulation of basic processes
iii. processes for identifying and sharing processes for improving the regulation f basic processes
System combinations and interactions
0-0: Reacting → to another system
0-1: Regulating → a simple process
0-2: Learning → how actions affect the environment
1-1: Balancing → competing systems
1-2: Managing and Entertaining → automatic systems
2-2: Conversing → with each other
Dubberly, H.,Pangaro, P.,Haque, U., What is interaction? Are there different types?, Interactions Jan-feb 200
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The passage from material to interface
From interaction to alteraction: emphasis not only on the action but also on the encounter with the other, who, in the context of cyberspace, risks becoming evanescent because this “other” is not necessarily there, present on the screen.
In new media arts there are six principle categories of conductor interfaces:
1. Sensors: all types of sensors
2. Recorders: from photo camera to digital memory
3. Actuators: moving devices, robots
4. Transmitters: from the telegraph to the internet to the telepresence
5. Diffusers: from magic lantern to LCD screens
6. The integrators: from automaton to the cyborg, artificial creatures, reproduction of living
Each of these interfaces allows the articulation of a particular form of interactivity.
Five major functions of experimental interfaces; extendible, revealing, rehabilitating, filtering, or the agent of synthetic integration
1. As an Extension: lengthen and increase a sense by allowing it to capture and record elements from reality. Microscope, telescope, wearables.. interfaces destined to serve an extension of a faculty, memory, judgement or imagination must pass through senses..it is where we see things that we think.
2. As an revealing instrument: some interface allow one to reveal conditions or reports, which we cannot conceive or objectify otherwise. Things that allow the exploitation of unsuspected relations, undoubtedly always present, but of which we were unaware and in which current technologies permit one to participate like interactive materials used in architecture.
3. As a rehabilitation instrument: rehabilitation of forgotten, neglected, or lost sensoriality. Allowing first the rediscovering of dimensions and bodily functions that have become obsolete. Prosthetics..
4. As a filter: filter for profusion of instruments and information. Interactivity provides markers indicating the dark areas, the pockets of resistance, and offers a tryout field.
5. As a synesthetic integrator.
Poissant, L., "The passage from material to interface" , Media art histories, MIT Press , 2007
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Delusions of Dialogue: Control and Choice in Interactive Art
A computer can be thought of as an empty structure into which a concept is inserted. The concept-which must be represented in a mathematical way-is the program, which is made up of a series of algorithms that define the response of the system.
I find it useful to put interactive work on a dynamic spectrum with controllable systems on one end and responsive systems on the other. In controllable systems the actions of the viewer correlate 1-to-1to the reactions of the system. Interactive CD-ROMs are controllable systems and so, generally speaking, are games. In responsive systems the actions of the viewer are interpreted by the program to create the response of the system. Artificial life artworks fit at the extreme end of this side of the spectrum.
The point is that often the first time an interface is experienced it is perceived as being responsive, but if the interface is experienced again it becomes controllable. The second time it is not a question but a command.
It is very hard to avoid the theme of control in computer art because computers are fundamentally designed to be controlling devices.
we want them to be passive slaves. One can see this in the software, hardware and interfaces that are currently being used. This model is fine until it collides with art.
An interface of choice and control makes sense for a word processor, an information retrieval system or a game, but not as a metaphor for inter-activity or dialogue.
"as program, what can I measure?" instead→ "What can I reflect and what can I express based on some interpretation of the viewer's responses?"
- interactive works: from controllable to responsive
- interfaces: from command to measurement
ex: foot switch to start and end the video show… (no dialogue, discrete on/off)
The fundamental difference between discrete interfaces and continuous ones: namely that in discrete interfaces the interaction is between the viewer and the interface, and in continuous interfaces the interaction is between the viewer and the work or the program.
Interfaces that involve discrete choices leave little room for intuition. Discrete choices generally cause the viewers to look for a logical reason to make the correct choice based on what they think the consequences might be.
when we begin to understand more about communication, it will be possible to express not merely a thought of the past, but a thinking process in the present.
Campbell, Jim, "Delusions of Dialogue: Control and Choice in Interactive Art" (Leonardo, vol. 33, no. 2, 2000) : 133-136
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Responsive Architectures
- Aristotle’s poetry- “our topic is poetry in itself and its kinds, and what potential each has, how plots should be constructed if the composition is turn out well; also from how many part it is construed and of what sort they are”
- They are useful as tools for understanding, for perspectives they opened, but they are not necessarily pushing at the boundaries of creative performative composition
- The intention is to open up an experience through the construction of a poetics, with the potential impact upon the imagination, sensibility, and expression of those who read it.
- It unearths a set of experiential categories
- And living concepts that may engender a sensory and intellectual awakening to the shared experience of responsive media
- Morse→ interactivity is limited in scope: it is not just an instrument or a perhaps irritating interval between clicking and getting somewhere else but an event that brings corporeal and cognitive awareness to this increasingly ubiquitous feature of contemporary world!
- Aspects of responsivity missing from the standard model of interactivity include the passive spectrum of human reactions and constructions of embodiment that differ from the model of hard subject. Morse→ to interact is a kind of doing that entails purposiveness, conclusiveness, and agency-qualities that, namely, point to subject. Purposive decision-making covers a certain range of actions of the autonomous agent, but is a construction of agency generous enough to include other states and actions? The acts of listening, prevaricating, meandering, stumbling, thinking, reassessing, and hesitating; the states of confusion, uncertainty, frivolity, intimacy, and perhaps the less celebrated human reactions are hard to reconcile with the purpose with purposive interactive model..
- Agency might be spread across a range of human modalities, distributed across bodies and across modalities.
- The problematic becomes whether interaction occurs across a human-to-human connection through the computer or whether the computer can step in to relation as one of the engaging partners.
- What matters is not whether the computer is a tool or a person but whether the engagement is life-enhancing or destructive.
- The tension here becomes one of the scripted responsivity versus a contained generative system, evolving on its own, emergent but closed.
- The challenge arises when it is desirable for various components of an installation (such as images, sound, human movement) to have loosely choreographed and interrelated responses, similar to an ecosystem where the impact that one component has on others is never totally random, nor is it entirely bound to one result. The shared actions create affective and kinaesthetic states.
- An ethology is way of describing the choreography in responsive systems, or ecosystems.
- Deleuze→ individuals enter into composition with one another to form another individual, ad infinitum.
Kozel, S., Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, MIT Press, 2008
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08-12-08
The Synthesis of the Practice of Everyday Life and Design of Everyday Things
The Practice of Everyday Life
De Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley
Design of Everyday Things
Norman, D. A. (1988), The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books
Fundamental Categories
Crowther, P. (2002). The transhistorical image: Philosophizing art and its history. Cambridge University Press
2008-10-20
Mediation
The dream of unmediated experience has a long intellectual history. "perceptual idealism" characterized the view of Bishop Berkeley, who belived that the world was there only by virtue of its being perceived: a mimetic fantasy, reality was identical to the image on the retina of the eye.??
The facts, which our sense present to us, are socially performed in two ways:
-
through the historical character of the object perceived and
-
through the historical character of the perceiving organ
How we experience one another and the world around us is necessarily mediated by the recongized or unrecognized cultural baggage with which we learn how "to be" in the world.
Bull, J. (2006), Sensorium: embodied experience, technology and contemporary art, MIT Press
2008-10-20
"Formula for Computer Art" by Jim Campbell
INPUTS:
- wind
- rain
- temperature
- movement
- shape
- light levels
- spoken words
- time
- earthquake
- position
- color
- electronic activity
- radio activity
- net activity
- stock market
- breath
- death
- heartbeat
- noise
- galvanic skin response
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
Input Interpreter
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
Algoritmhs + Memory
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
Output Controller
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
OUTPUTS:
- wind generator
- light generator
- dynamic graphy
- dynamic lighing and sounds
- moving text
- moving image
- moving robot
- heat generator
- rain generator
- wind generator
- noise gen.
- scent gen.
2008-10-10
Transforming Mirrors
The act of realizing a work is a process of progressively narrowing the range of possibilities by a series of creative choices until one of the possible has been manifested in the finished work.
The structure of interactive artworks can be very similar to those used by Cage in his chance compositions. The primary difference is that the chance element is replaced by a complex, indeterminate yet sentient element, the spectator.
Interactive artists are looking for ways to give away some of the control over the final actualizations of their works. The extreme of this position, in some sense corresponding to Cage's notion of 'indeterminacy', is found in the creation of learning and evolving systems.
The artist structures this space with a sort of architecture, and provides a method of navigation. Each position within the conceptual space provides a point-of view, defined and limited by the surrounding architectural structure. Exploring this structure presents the spectator with a series of views of the space and its contents. The sequence in which the spectator experiences these vistas forms a unique reading of that space.
It is ironic that wide-open interaction within a system that does not impose significant constraints is usually unsatisfying to the interactor. It is difficult to sense interaction in situations where one is simultaneously affecting all of the parameters. It has been my experience that the interactor's sense of personal impact on an interactive system grows, up to a point, as their freedom to affect the system is increasingly limited. The constraints provide a frame of reference, a context, within which interaction can be perceived.
Interaction is about encounter rather than control. The interactive artist must counter the video-game-induced expectations that the interactor often brings to interaction. Obliqueness and irony within the transformations and the coexistence of many different variables of control within the interactive media provide for a richer, though perhaps less ego-gratifying experience. However, there is a threshold of distortion and complexity beyond which an interactor loses sight of him or herself in the mirror. The less distortion there is, the easier it is for the interactor to identify with the responses the interactive system is making. The interactive artist must strike a balance between the interactor's sense of control, which enforces identification, and the richness of the responsive system's behaviour, which keep the system from becoming closed.
In navigable work, establishing the responsive character of the work is not difficult, but in works where the character of the interaction is more complex, providing proof is not always so easy. The proof that will most easily satisfy the audience is 'predictability' (i.e. if one makes the same action twice, the work will respond identically each time).
These behaviours are not necessarily willfully programmed; they often emerge as the synergistic result of experiments with the interactions between simple algorithmic behaviours. Just as billions of simple water molecules work together to produce the complex behaviours of water (from snow-flakes to fluid dynamics), combinations of simple programmed operations can produce complex characteristics, which are called emergent properties, or self-organizing phenomena.
Rather than creating finished works, the interactive artist creates relationships. >> experiences..
Mirrors give us back an image with which to identify. We look at the marks we have made on our world to give us a sense of our significance. We distinguish ourselves from others by the uniqueness of our point-of-view. We compare ourselves to others like us in order to understand our similarities and differences. By providing us with mirrors, artificial media, points-of-view, and automata, interactive artworks offer us the tools for constructing identities, our sense of ourselves in relation to the artwork, and by implication, in relation to the world.
Speed (in digital media, video games) is intoxicating because it makes us, in some sense, unconscious, incapable of reflection; speed relieves us of the burden of responsibility because there is no time to measure the consequences of an action. The skills required are programmed into our brains through repetition, so that our responses become instinctive, requiring no conscious thought. We return to the paradise before consciousness and moral dilemma.
Rokeby, D., (1995), Transfoming Mirrors, Critical Issues in Interactive Media, Sunny Press
2008-10-07
Distinguishing Concepts
"Interactive art and architecture premised on thenotion of an artefact doing solely in linear-casual response to actions by aperson (or environment) is generally structured on preprogrammed cycles of call-and-response between human and machine. Such work involves a mutually reactive relationships only slighltly more sophisticated than that between a person and an automated cash machine."
By obscuring the distinction between interactive and reactive we lose a fertile conceptual framework. Originally interaction was distinguished from circular 'mutual reaction': it was about affecting not just actual output(in response to input), but also about affecting the way output is calculated.
There is a marked difference between our relationship to a cash machine and our relationship to a human bank teller,
with whom we are able to enter into a conversation (concerning some news item, or a particular financial issue
that requires further discussion, or a personal matter once we get to know a teller from repeated visits to the bank). This is because both the input criteria (what we can say to the teller) and the output criteria (what the teller can tell us) are dynamic, and constructed collaboratively.
Haque, U., (2007), Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art & Architecture, in 4d Social - Interactive Design Environments, Wiley & Sons
2008-10-07
Understanding the interactivity
The summary for this research study is attached as a file called understanding interactivity.
Svanaes, D. (2000). Understanding interactivity - steps to a phenomenology of human-computer interaction. Ph.D. in computer science, NTNU, Trondheim.
2008-10-07
Understanding the media
McLuhan also claimed in Understanding Media that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. Mc Luhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by Mc Luhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.[4] This concentration on the medium itself, and how it conveys information — rather than on the specific content of the information — is the focal point of "the medium is the message".
wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
2008-10-05
Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology
one critique ..
“the entire installation from devising to performing, was one long dialogue among gallery, myself and the Room, under the eyes of a range of visitors. It rapidly became clear that this room was not a fixed entity. It changed depending on the humidity in the air and the surface of the floor…. I climbed up it, around it, over it. I observed it from afar and flattened myself against it, trying the occupy the same place it did. I witnessed how natural or artificial light reflected off it and bounced through it. Then there were sounds to consider. The structure creaked and groaned. … the sounds of the wood on wood in one ear and echoes of people in the gallery in the other made a sandwich out of my own rasping breath and pounding heart. My bones and the wood , its creaks and my breaths, moving at a monumentally slow pace: was this a performance, a work of art, or an exploration of human and structural vulnerability?”
I think the problem with these expressions of her experience coming from the over-subjective and over decorated depiction of her experience. She is using an existentialist vocabulary and because of the nature of this vocabulary we cannot differentiate the particularity of this specific performance. For example when I replace the gallery with a green park, room with a tree and visitors with the people around, the depictions she used are still valid.
“the entire installation from devising to performing, was one long dialogue among park, myself and the tree, under the eyes of a range of people around. It rapidly became clear that this tree was not a fixed entity. It changed depending on the humidity in the air and the surface of the park…. I climbed up it, around it, over it. I observed it from afar and flattened myself against it, trying the occupy the same place it did. I witnessed how natural or artificial light reflected off it and bounced through it. Then there were sounds to consider. The structure creaked and groaned. … the sounds of the wood on wood in one ear and echoes of people in the park in the other made a sandwich out of my own rasping breath and pounding heart. My bones and the wood , its creaks and my breaths, moving at a monumentally slow pace: was this a performance, a work of art, or an exploration of human and structural vulnerability?”
What I mean is that she has some ideas and conclusion but not derived from this work of art. She wear his ideas to that artwork but on the other hand her rhetorical abilities and existentialist approach makes it possible to wear that concepts on any experience she might have. Although we are enjoying her beautiful, intimate and subjective depictions, we find ourselves in a difficulty of seeing the unique connections between the performance work and the concepts..
The extended body: telematics and pedagogy
The image is slow. I have lost her, no she is still there
I am waiting for a response that fits into my usual movement paradigms, my usual rhythms, but this is not what I am receiving
- Unexpected patterns breakthrough the fabric of my emerging choreography, visual angles reconfigure and I find myself reading across and between the Windows.
- The difference in my own visual feed from what I am consciously offering captures my attention for a moment
- Rhythm generated by the update speed over which I have no control
She is not able to predict the next stage of actions and movements, system do not behave in a predictable reactive way due to technical insufficiency but this unexpectedness results in a digital avant-garde experience.
new avant-garde
Switch from new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world.
to new ways of accessing and manipulating information.
We can consider avant-garde here as its character of being experimental.
She experiences a very different kind of movement practice, unpredictable, attentive, and open-ended. She has to think about her routines, regular movements that are broken by this drift.
This drift make possible to
• Create new choreographies
• Augment experience
• Discover new ways of communication or interacting with others and environment and in a broader way with context!
• Self understanding
WHY do we need new choreographies, augmented experiences and new ways of communication and interaction ways?
Drift practices? How can we realize drift as a means of discovery in interactive media? Ways to drift
Susan Kozel has experienced the drift by means of technical insufficiencies she encountered- bandwidth. Unintentional drift.. Our aim is in a way to provide conscious drift.. frequency of drift?? participant/observer to augment his/her experience and to support creative production.
>>Is drift a momentary thing or more of a process?
She mentioned about new set of perceptual modes that are not confined with the vision during her experience of telematic dance performance. I support the idea of integrating/utilizing all perceptual modes to compose our expressivity.
Kozel, S. (2008), Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, MIT Press
- Aim is to present a set of design cases that demonstrate its application within HCI???
- Somatics: experience from within the lived body
- Its contribution to HCI with regards to body in everyday life..
- “Somatics is exemplified through first-person methodologies, and offers experiential models that can begin to re-balance our understanding of the relationship between subjective and objective knowing, making, and doing.”
- - Lived and Felt-experience, felt-life
-
- Shift from visible to invisible – Perceptual interfaces..
- Utilization of all of our senses and richer and more fully articulated human being!!? >>>>It might not be the case always
- >>>at what times and which senses to utilize? For an optimal experience??
- Some problems [50]
- Like loss of control, lack of interaction cues..
- Need to return to some graphical interfaces
- Argument -> If our goal is to increase legibility, coherence and social relevance in relationship to the ‘whole human’ then we need to develop richer interaction and sense-making models that align techniques of active embodied practices with technological rigor and imagination.
- Body in mind and image schemas from [32]
- Prototyping experience [7]
- Building blocks of experience [16]
- “First person methodologies access and construct knowledge through the body.”
- “From the Somatics perspective, knowledge is constructed through experience, requires that experience be directed or focused through awareness.”
- Workshops on somatic attributes such as breath, heartbeat, stillness, and slow motion movement.
- Resolution of experience ..
- Interconnectedness of feeling states- physiological patterns-thought patterns and emotion..
- ‘feeling’ body-states are an inter-connected set of feeling, thought, emotion and physiological functioning: each of these being present and affecting the other.”
- Another argument for an art installation= soft(n)
- How specific movement taxonomies can be applied as a form of qualitative input recognition.
- Outcome of the study is not clear..
- What was the goal?
- What are the results of test cases/installations ?
- What are the criteria for evalution of their own results
- What did they expect at the beginning? Were the outcomes satisfactory?
- Contribution?
- This work can be considered as an explorative attempt to experiment performance based methods to support design of sensory perceptual interfaces. However, they did not provide useful heuristics they discovered during their experiments for the further use.
- They just show in some manner the possibility of use of somatic methodologies whose potential usefulness more or less known or predictable.
Surrealists put together samples of reality in illogical combinations;
cubists chop up reality in small pieces; abstract artists reduce
reality to what they think is its geometric "essence"; new vision
photographers show reality from unusual points of view—but, despite
these differences, they are all concerned with the same project of
reflecting the world. Modernism's key concern is therefore the
invention of new forms, i.e. different ways to "humanize" the
"objective" and ultimately alien picture of the world served to us by
media technologies. For the new avant-garde is radically different:
1. The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new forms, new
ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media
avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating
information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, search engines,
data mining, image processing, visualization, simulation.
2. The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or
representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using
previously accumulated media in new ways. In this respect new media is
post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material.
Thus new media does represent a new stage of the avant-garde. The
techniques invented by the 1920s left-wing artists became embedded in
the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short,
the avant-garde vision became materialized in a computer. All the
strategies developed to awaken audiences from the dream-existence of
bourgeois society (constructivist design, new typography, avant-garde
cinematography and film editing, photo-montage, etc.) now define the
basic routine of a post-industrial society: interaction with a computer.
So what is the new avant-garde? It is the new computer-based techniques
of media access, generation, manipulation and analysis. Forms remain
the same, but how these forms can be used changes radically.
Manovich, L., (2001), Language of New Media, MIT Press London 2008-09-28
"And so we enter the era of what I’m calling Experience Design. A quick
scan of our sociocultural landscape suggests that, in terms of artistic
practices, mass entertainment, sports, and emerging technologies of
pleasure, productive forces are increasingly targeting experience
itself — that evanescent flux of sensation and perception that is, in
some sense, all we have and all we are." "Let’s begin with the rise of the so-called "experience economy." On one
level, this describes an apparent shift within the consumption patters
of the younger, more technologically savvy elite, a shift away from the
hoarding of material goods and status symbols to the hoarding of novel,
exciting, and challenging experiences. " Over the last ten or fifteen years we have also seen the rise of a new
kind of film, one which features amazing special effects, but which
otherwise sucks. Whether or not we judge such films to be good, or even
worthwhile, depends on how much we accept the new regime of special
effects as a semi-autonomous component of cinema whose art is largely
devoted to stimulating immediate sensations and visceral — rather than
symbolic or narrative — emotion. A similar logic comes to the fore in
many computer games and mass applications of virtual reality
technologies in amusement parks and arcades, all of which strive for
the quality of "immersion" — which is often just another word for
simulated experience. Meanwhile, the language of "experience" has
become thoroughly integrated into multimedia design, even in the
relatively low-bandwidth tricks and offerings that commercial websites
use to capture sticky eyeballs.
" it seems crucial to recognize and emphasize the continuity, rather than
the divergence, between contemporary practices that target the human
sensorium. Across the fields of art, architecture, media, music,
pharmacology, even spirituality, we are moving towards the intentional
and multi-dimensional stimulation and production of a complex range of
increasingly immediate human responses, including the direct induction
of classic "altered states of consciousness." Media artists are uniquely placed to explore this emerging world of
spirituality without falling into the dogmatic or New Age traps that
swallow up so many true believers. Altered states of consciousness are
real, and as our media technologies get better at drawing us in and out
of them, artists and other non-coercive proponents of the human spirit
(or whatever you want to call it) need to become familiar with these
states, not simply as a source of inspiration, but as modes of
expression, communication, and confrontation itself. By recognizing
that the material that we are now focused on is not technology but
human experience itself, then we take a step closer to that strange
plateau where our inner lives unfold into an almost collective surface
of shared sensation and reframed perception — a surface on which we may
feel exposed and vulnerable, but beginning to awake. from - www.techgnosis.com/experience.html 2008-09-19
