Human Computer Interaction
From Collectivate Course Wikis
Where The Action Is
Reading: Dourish, Paul. Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press. 2001.
Quote:
Getting In Touch
The ubiquitous computing approach to interaction-what Weiser dubbed 'physical virtuality' and would become known as augmented reality - does just the opposite(virtual reality) It moves the computer into the real world. An example is the reactive room was a meeting room supporting a variety of physical and virtual encounters. The critical move here was to see ubiquitous computing as technology of context; where tradtional interactive systems focus on what the user does, ubiquitous computing technologies allow the system to explore who the user is, when and where they are actiong and so on. The design of the reactive room attempts to exploit the fact that the people's activite happen in a context, which can be made available to the software in order to disambiguate action.
Dourish Where the Action is.
The rise of so called embedded computing reflects the fact that computation can be usefully harnessed for more than just traditional desktop computing. It can also help us as we get up more than just traditional desktop computing. It can also help us as we get up and move about the world, which we generally do more of than sitting at desk, (or would if computers didn't schakle us to them). However this new form of computation exacerbates the effects of trade off between the work that the user and the system do. (pg.)
Embodied Interaction is interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us. (pg.)
Interaction approaches conceptualize computation as the interplay between different components, rather than the fixed and pre-specified paths that a single, monolithic computational engine might follow. These models of computation have more in common with ecosystems than with vast mechanisms we used to imagine. (pg.)
Chapter 2 --Getting in Touch
Interaction with screen and keyboard, for instance, tends to demand our direct attention; we have to look at the screen to see what we're doing, which involves looking away from whatever other elements are in our environment, including other people.(27)
Tangible computing takes a wide range of forms. It might be used to address problems in highly focused and task specific work, or in more passive awareness of activities in the real world or the electronic. (50)
When computation moves out into the environment, as in the tangible computing approach, this is lost. Not only is there not a single point on interaction. The same action might be distributed across multiple devices, or, more accurately, achieved through the coordinated use of those artifacts.(51)
--Social Computing
Broadly speaking social computing refers to the application of sociological understanding to the design of interactive systems. Sociology though is a very broad term. As a discipline, it encompasses a diverse set of interests, topics, objectives, concerns, and methodological approaches.
The relationship in "social computing" between sociological and technical issues in not just that of a sociologist talking about technology, but of sociologists and technologists working together in the design process. (55)
Sociological approach becomes clear when we look at the context in which computation is put to work. Context can mean many things; it might be the tasks that the system is being used to preform, the reasons for which the tasks are being carried out, the settings within which the work is conducted, or other factors that surround the user and the system.
Human-Computer interaction can be thought of as a form of mediated communication between the end user and the system designer, who must structure the system so that it can be understood by the user, and so that the user can be led through a sequence of actions to achieve some end result.
Sociology is not a unified discipline three types applied:
First, they are concerned with the details of the organization of social conduct rather than broad social trends. Second, they are primarily oriented toward real activities and experiences rather than abstractions or models . Third, they all adopt an anthropological perspective on collecting, interpreting and using field material.(p56-57)
Social psychology is concerned with how an individual's thought and emotions are effected by interaction with others.(pg. 61)
On a more analytical level, the use of ethnographic methods for this sort of work is also rooted in a distinction between work process and work practice. Work process are the formalized or regularized procedures by which work is conducted; procedures for authorizing payments, for ordering supplies, for repairing machines, or whatever. Work processes are captured and codified in rule-books, manuals, recipes, and similar artifacts.(pg. 62-63)
it is important to recognize that the duality of practice and its processes is inevitable. No matter how clearly or carefully framed, a process description can never eliminate the need to interpret it for specific occasions.(pg. 63)
Practice is always dynamic, arising as a way to mediate between processes and the circumstances in which they are enacted. The reason to study practice is to understand how this dynamic mediation takes place.(pg. 63)
work practice studies emphasize that the handbook's description is inevitably only part of the story. Their view of the creative relationship between people and technology emphasizes the critical creative involvement of the people doing the work even in case of what seems like rote procedure, ripe for automation.(pg. 64)
The planning paradigm in AI is as old as the discipline itself (which, of course, is not so old). It models human activity in terms of the formulation and execution of plans. According to this paradigm, plans are are scripts for sequences of actions(71)
Ethnomethodology --Ethnomtehodology originated in the works of Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology is not simply another theory of social interaction, It rejects the very abstract notion of abstract theorizing on which most analytical accounts are based, and practiced. Ethnomethodolgy is a re-specification of the issues, methods, and very terms of reference of sociology. This arises from one of the fundamental problems of sociology, the problem of social order. This problem essentially, deals with the question of how stable and orderly social facts and relations can arise out of independent individuals.(73-74)
Technomethodology -- describes a deeper relation between technological design and ethnomethodoly. Not to draw simply on a set of observations of a specific working setting, but rather on ethnomethodolgy's fundamental insights about the organization of action as being a moment-to-moment, naturally occurring, improvisational response to practical problems. The second is that it attempts to relate these understandings not simply to to the design of a specific interactive system aimed at specific settings, but rather, at the basic, fundamental principles around which software systems are developed - ideas such as abstraction, function substitution, identity and representation. (78)
Accountability -- "[The] central recommendation [of ethnomethodological studies] is the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members' procedures for making those settings "account-able" [...] When I speak of accountable, my interests are directed to such members as the following. I mean observable-and-reportable, i.e. available to members as situated practices of looking-and-telling. I mean too, that such practices consist of endless, ongoing, contingent accomplishment: that they are carried under the auspices of, and are made to happen as events in, the same parties to those settings whose skill with, knowledge of, and entailment to the detailed work of that accomplishment - whose competence - they obstinately depend upon, recognize, use and take for granted; and that they take their own competence for granted furnishes parties with a setting's distinguishing and particular features, and of course it furnishes them as well resources, trouples, projects and the rest. (Garfinkel 1967:1-2). (79)
Abstraction - Software systems are built on abstractions. The essence of abstraction in software is that it hides implementation.
The topic of 'awareness' is one that has concerend the devlopers of technoloiges for group working, who want their systems to be able to support casual and assive awreness of group activity that coworkers achieve in a shaed physical space. Strong and Gaver turn this around, though, and give us technologies for supporting shared intimacy emotive rather than 'efficient'. What is particularly intresting about this group of devices is that they orignate not from a technical or scientific perspectve, but from a design perspective. The result of this shif in perspective is that they reflect a very differnt set of concerns. It is not that they simply that they reflect an aesthetic componet where the scientific devlopments are marked more b enginneering concerns. That is certainly one componet of it, of corse; the design examples certainly do reflect a different set of principles at work. However, there is more than this.
First, the design examples discused here reflect a concern with communicaion. What is important is not simply what they do, but what they convey. , and how they convey it; and the communicative function that they carry is very much on the surface. There is an 'at -a-glance readibiliy' to these artifacts that stnds in marked contrast to the 'invisiblity' of ubiquitous computing. Second, they reflec a holistic approach that takes full account of their physicality. The physical nature of these pieces is not simply a consequence of theri design; it is fundemental to it. While it was a tenet of ubiquitous computing, for example, that technology would move out into the world, the design pieces reflect a recogintion that the technology is the world, as so its physicality and its presence is deeply important part of its nature. Tird, they reflect the role of computation is intergrated much more directly with the artifacts themselves. Computainla and physical worlds are much more directly connected.
Response:
Syntactic Structures Chomsky, N. (1957)
Technology As Experience
Reading:
McCarthy, John. Wright, Peter. Technology as Experience. MIT Press. 2004.
Quote:
Toward a Deeper Understanding of Technology as Experience
"Perhaps it would be useful to view interactive technology in general as an experience, even if it is sometimes an experience of indifference or resistance. Given the lacunae treatment of experience in HCI to date, a central part of our exploration is a critical discussion of the approaches to experience that are current in HCI and a characterization of experience that enables us to interpret the influence of technology in our lives. The overview can be sen as a series of six propositions.
1) In order to do justice to the wide range of influences that technology has in our lives, we should try to interpret the relationship between people and technology in terms of the felt life and the felt emotional quality of action and interaction.
Because the word experience already express the feltness of life for us, when we write about experience of technology we have this felt quality very much in mind. We have become use to interpretations that emphasize the liveness of experience in HCI. For us felt experience points to the emotional quality and sensual quality of experience. These qualities should be central to our understanding of experience living with technology.
2) Social-practice accounts of interactive technologies at work, at home, in education, and in leisure understate the felt life in their accounts of experience.
Cognitive models of action are not the most appropriate models of human action for human computer interaction. Instead looking for an account of coherence of action in psychological process in the head, they have convinced us to look the particular social and physical circumstances of action and interaction for interpretations that are more relevant to understanding, designing, and evaluating interaction. Our aim is not to put ourselves in some fruitless competition with practice -based approaches. Rather, we would like to build on what those approaches have already contributed to HCI by giving a more prominent position to feltness in an account of people's experience with technology than they do.
3) It is difficult to develop an account of the felt experience with technology.
Developing an account of the felt experience with technology is difficult partly because the word 'experience' is simultaneously rich and elusive. It is also difficult because we can never step out of experience and look at it in a detached way. Experience is difficult to define because it is reflexive and as ever present as as swimming in water is to fish.
4) Pragmatism also sees knowledge as participative. According to this view, any knowledge we have is dependent on the technology, circumstances, situations, and actions, from which it was constructed. It is knowledge in a community of engaged people, in a situation, from a perspective, felt and sensed. For pragmatists therefore, knowing doing, feeling, and making sense are inseparable. Pragmatism is practical, consequential philosophy, a practice that is concerned with imaging and enriching as much as understanding. The test it sets itself is to improve things.(pg. 17)
5) The importance given to the emotional-volitional and creative aspects of experience in pragmatism prioritizes the aesthetic in understanding our lived experience of technology.
According to John Dewey, aesthetic experiences are refined forms of everyday, prosaic experience in which the relationship between people and the object of experience is particularly satisfying and creative.(pg. 18)
6) The revisionary theorizing of pragmatism is particularly valuable for understanding technology and design.
A revisionary theory is valued not so much for wether it provides a true or false representation of the world as for wether it helps us think through relationships between for example, people, technology, and design. It is less concerned with representing existing relationships than with imaging new relationships and experiences. (pg.19-20)
Going on From Practice
Questioning concering technology, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger, is an impotant and incurably complex activity. It touches on many areas of our lives: what work is and what it is likely to be; our orientation to fun and leisure; possible futures for education; boundaries between private and public, between home and work, and between knowledge and information; and even our own sense of what it is to be ourselves, people situated in an increasingly strange relationship with time, place, and other people.(pg.23)
-Rationalism to Practice:'Rationalism' refers to discursive practices that promote the notion of seperatin of mind, mental processes, and ideas from any material manifestations or embeddedness; the inherent purposefulness and intentionality of action where action is seen as the execution of a well formed plan; and reification of cognition or knowing above being and participating.
Design methods attempt to capture and represent design expertise, making the process objective and explicit. Rationalism is apparent in formal approaches to design. The turn to practice came about because rationalism had created an obstacle to thinking about technology by reifying technological artifacts as objects of study apart from making and use.(pg.24-26)
Winograd and Flores used their reading of hermeneutic and phenomenaological philosophy to devlop an alternative to the rationalist orientation to technology. Their alternative sees technology as a transformation of tradition: ...we let our awerness of the potentials for transformation guide our actions in creating and applyingtechnology. In ontological designing, we are doing more than asking what can be built. We are engaging in a philosphoical discourse about the self-about what we can do what we can be.
A Pragmatist Approach to Technology as Expereince
'Experience' is the word that is most likely to express something of the felt life. It is a very reich word, discursively open and complex, and redolent of life as lived, not just theorized. Pragmatism's practical focus and he richness of its experience give it a modernity and a freshness that serve well our inquiries into technology as expereince
Conyne: '[it] embraces the primacy of human action, the practicalities of human involvemevt, the materiality of the world, the interavtion of the senses, and the formative power of technology."(pg 52)
Two pragmatists:
John Dewey-- Dewey's "pragmatic philosphy emphasized precariousness, disturbance and instability, seeping social change and technological transformation, genuine novelty and real begginings and endings. For pragmatists such as Dewey, experience is more personal than behavio; it involves an active self who not only engages in but also creatively shapes action. "Expereience he (Dewey) wrote, "includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see believe, imagine - in short, processes of experiencing...It is "double barreled" in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains both in unanalyzed totality." According to dewy, therfore experience is constitiyued by the relationship between self and object-by concerend, feeling people acting and the materials they use. The concerend person is always already engaged and comes to every situation with persoanl intrests and ideoloiges. (pg.53-55)
Mikhail Bakhtin -- Bakhtin's work focused on devloping a clear sense of individuality. A pragmatist reading of his work is warented by his comitment to knowing as a practical process, a plurality of perspectives, and historicty in thinking. For example, in Towards a Philosphy of the Actshis concern was with how a sense of self emerges in everyday activities. His approach to activity is to focus on how individuals intone acts of living and knowing. By 'intone' he means how individuals make acts their own, how they make them unique, personal experiences through the particularities of interpreting, feeling, and value judgements and distinctions that are ethically worthwhile. Thus, although expereience always occurs in cultural, historical, and material contexts, meaningful engament depends on the event or action being felt, known, and valued in unique ways. This is also the kind of meaningful engagment that transforms people and systems.(pg.56)
Both Dewey and Bakhtin aesthetic experience is the key to understanding how rich all expereince can be. They argue that it is in aesthetic experience that our need for a sense of meaningfulness and wholeness of our action is fulfilled. One of the most important points that Dewey and Bakhtin make about aesthetic experience is that it should be seen as continous with ordinary experience. Theis aim is to demonstrate just how rich experince can be and to inquire into the nature of aesthetic experience so that we can see its charcter and conditions well enough to use them in other areas of our lives. If aestheic expereince is not to referexclusively to art objects, what is it that marks out aestheic experience and gives it value? For Dewey aestehetic experience is pradaigmatic of the potential richness of all experience not because of any signle quality it possess not because of any signel qulaity it posses but because of its "moe consumate and zestful intergration of all the elements of ordinary expereince," which gives " the experincer a still larger feeling of wholeness and order in the world" According to Dewey the enemies of the aestehetic are "the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure.
In aestehtic experience, the lively intergration of means and ends, meaning and movement involivng all our sensory and intellectual faculites is emotionaly satisiying and fufilling.
Brenda Laurel's aestheitc account of interacting with computers argues that engaement is "a desirable-even essentail-human response to computer-mediated activites" Laurel draws parallels between the experience of the theatre and the experience of compters suggesting that "both have the capacity to represent actions and situations...in ways that invite us to extend our minds, feelings and sensations" but that in order to do so they must first engage us.(60)
Following Dewey and Bakhtin, we also see the pragmatist position as a ploitical act, the proper gaurd aginst the kind of reification of uman computer relations that emerge from many functional, sociocultural, and systemic accounts:
-a sustained commitment to the particularity and agency of emotionaly and volitionally intoned action.
-people doing suffering, striving, loving, and enjoying, acting and eing acted upon-alanguage that brings us into the realms of life felt.
-the particualr response fromed in relation to with other others from which a sense of self emerges
-people making acts their own personal experiences through the particularites of interpreting, feeling and making value judgements.(pg 77-78)
Dewey identified closely related process such as cumulation, conservation, tension and anticiaption to rfer to the internal dynamics of experience.:
Cumulation refers tot the buildup that attends the temporal unfolding of an expereince.
Conservation refers to the tendecy to hold onto some of what has gone before, be it nergy or meaning.
Tension refers to both the opposition of the energies within the experience between people involved int he experience.
Anticiaption can be seen as the space occuring in two temporal phases.
Cumulation, conservation, tension, and anticiaption describe the internal dynaics of any intergrated experience. While experience cannot be aestehic without being intergrated into a rythmic dance of resistance and relase, not all intergrated expereinces are aestehic. What makes them aesthetic is the dynamic, alyways moving toward fufilment:
That which distingusehes an experience as aesthetic is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversions, into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close."
Experince and Creativity of Action: For pragmatists, creative action is always embeded in human situated freedom; the freedom to make something out of what is given, to constur and respond to the situations that one inevitablity meets. With creativity at its center, it might be useful to think of prgmatist ideas of action and expereince as like the prosaic creativity of children playing. In play, children are not intrested in achieving unequivocal ends and they overcome problems by imagining new ways of acting or by inventing new descriptions of the situation in which they find themselves. In the pragmatist model of action , the relationship between means and ends is radically reformulated such that action is both means and ends. Children play with paints not just to create pictures, but also to enjoy the expereince of making colors, marks and to have the tactile pleasure of feeling the texture of of paint on their fingers. Play is a very mindful model of action. Children and adults can imagine a variety of posibilie courses of action even while playing, and demonstrate a quite readiness to experience and to round off experience. Both approach situations not in the service of pre-set goals but creating goals and the means to achieve those goals in the height of thier engagement with the world.(pg.68-69)
Threads of Expereince --sensual, emotional, compositional and spatio-temporal.
Sensual-When the functions of the sense are fully realized to give this sense of the situation, the interaction between person and enviorment becomes participation and communication. Owing to the immedate and vital capacity of the senses to mediate communication between person and situation, any derogation of the senses narrows and dulls life experience. In industrial societies, action, emotion, insight, and thinking are seperated from one another. In this context Dewey writes:
We undergo sensations as mechanical stimuli or as irritated stimulations, without having a sense of the reality that is in them and behind them: in much of our experience our differnet senses do not unite to tell a common and enlarged story. We see without feeling; we hear, but only second hand report, secondhand because it is not reinforced by vision. We touch, but the contact remains tangential becasue it does not fuse with qualities of senses that go below the surface. We use the senses that go below the surface. We use the sesne to arouse passin but not to fulfill the intrest of insight, not becasue we eild to condiotns of living that force sense to remain an excitation on the surface.
A by product of these comparmentalizations is the derogration of the senses and, as sense organs are the means of pariciapion, a dulled life expereince.
Emotional-The prgamatist use of emotion is different from our habitual way of thinking about emotions as thing that exist independent of expereince.
Dewey: Joy, sorrow, hope fear, anger, curiosity, are treated as if each in itself were a sort of entity that eneters full-mad upon the scene, an entity that may last a loing time or a short time, but whose duration, whose growth and career, is irrelevant to its nature. In fact emotions are qualiies, when they are signifigant, of a complex expereince that moves and changes.....All emotions are qulifications of a dram and they change as the drama devlops.
...emotions are forms of evlauative judgments that ascribe to certain things and person's own control great importace for the person's own flourshing. Emotions are thus, in effect acknowledements f neediness and lack of self sufficiency.(Nussbaum 2001, p,22)
Dewey, Bakhtin and Nussbaum evoke people struggling for emtional unity and having a sense of their freedom for creativit. It is not the subjective state that varies from experince to experience, but the totalilty of people acting and making sense of their action in a setting.
Compositional-the compositional thread is concerend with relationships between the parts and the whole of expereince. If we are to think of expereince as aesthetic, we have to put some effort into it by thinking about what we do and by providing a meaningful background aginst which the meaning of events can emerge.
The Spatio-Temporal Thread
All experience has a spatial-temporal compnet. Expereiences of space and time are constructed through interaction. In our construction of the spatio-temporal aspect of an expereince, we may distinguish between public and private space; we may recognize comfort zones and boundaries between self and other, or between present and future. Such constructions affect experiental outcomes such as willingness to engage in exchange of information, services or goods.
Some gran the we can interpet time in many different ways, but the phenomenon of time itself is absolute. History aybe be a cnstruction, there is no returining to what actually happened in the past, and memory plays tricks on us, but our inability to capture precisely a past moment dose not dissuade us from affirming our existence in a present with a past behind us and a future ahead."(pg91)
An intense emotional engagement can make our sense of time change. A fustrating expereince leave us percieving space as confined and closeting. Space and time pervade our language of expereince. We talk of needing space to settel an emotional conflict, and of giving people time. Expereiences of space and time are constructed throgh interacion. Time may speed up or slow down, pace maybe increased or decreased, spaces may open up or close down. Space and time maybe be connected or disconnected. In our construction of the spatio-temporal ascpect of expereience, we may have to distingusih between public and private space; we may recognize comfort zones and boundraies between self and other, or between present and future. Such constructions affect experientail outcomes such as willingness to linger or to revisit places or our willingness to engage in exchange of information, services or goods.(Coyne pp.174-175) also asset the centrality of a temporal quality to experience:
In the nineteenth-century novel, people change as a consequence of their experience and we cannot predict from the outside wthere the heroine and hero will ge together in the end. What happens in between is is crucially important in this regaurd. In contrast with the Greek Romance, where charcters are propelled through space-time by fate and chance events, charcters in the nineteenth -centuty novel try to take initiative and control over there fate.(pg.92)
Making Sense of Experience
Experience does not come to us ready made. Te quality of an experience wheter it is well rounded or fragmented, for example-depends significantly on our readiness to experience and to round off experience in a present. The personal meaning of an experience depends significantly on the sense we make of it given our particualr history ad disposition. For some f us, when expereience seems incapable of expression in words, we paint or make or do something. In short people seem to have a strong need to express and make sense of their experience, do it in many different ways, and never finish it off. (pg.105-106)
Mead's and Bakhtin's Concepts of Self-Other Relations
Mead--In such situations, not only is consciouness functionally required, so is self consciousness. Social interaction and individual self-reflection are functionally coupled in interpersoanl action,, and a sense of self is creaed in such situations. Therfore, the creation of soical order for example in the construction and maintenacne of communities of practice, does not require like-mindedness or normativity. Neither does i require a process of becoming like the other, the master or the member. It requires interpersonal action situations and human communication that links autonomus, self organizing people.(pg 111)
Bakhtin--the liberated person is not dominated by one truth or one view of the world; rather a liberated person has access to multiple truths. If we think each indidual as a unique and singular center of value, Bakhtin argues that when they come together in activites in which they are reponsive to each other -sensitve to each others thoughts, feelings, and values in action-an enriched experience is created. The particulary of one value center envelops the other, enriching the other with an outside perspective.(pg 112)
The relationship between experience with technology and the sense we make of it is clearly not straightforward. In exploring self and other we mke making sense of experience, we encountered some of the subtelty and complexity of the pragmatist approaches to self-other relations. Self as something like multiple, complex voices always becoming. We have seen that self, sense , and experience interpenetrate each other, and the coherence required for a story that is convivial in telling sometimes shapes experience.
the threads of and sense making processes must be understood in context of the sensibilities to felt life that we have also devloped these sensibiltes are:
-the situated creativity of action that makes visible the personal involvement of people creating both goals and means in the height of engaged activity,
-the openess of experience that encourages us to see the messiness and the process that underlines order,
-the weight of answerability that enables us to see experience as simultaneously aesthetic and ethical,
-the holism and unity that requires us to avoid reducing the relational and multi-layered quality of life.
-the sensory engagement with a situation that orients us toward its nimmedaiate, pre-lingustic sense sense and its reflective interpretation,
-the emotional-volitional charter of experience that makes vissible the feltness of self-other relations.
-the continous engagement in experience that helps us understand how the past and future interpenetrate the present.
Response:
Forces of Production
Reading:
Noble, David. Forces of Prodution: A Social History of Industrial Automation. Oxforad Univerity Press 1984.
Quotes:
Response:
Seeking a Founation for Context-Aware Computing
Reading:
Dourish, Paul Seeking a Foundation for Context-Aware Computing University of California, Irvine 2000. pdf
Quotes:
Abstract:
Context-aware computing is generally associated with elements of the Ubiquitous Computing program, and the opportunity to distribute computation and interaction through the environment rather than concentrating it at the desktop computer. However, issues of context have also been important in other areas of HCI research. I argue that the scope of context-based computing should be extended to include not only Ubiquitous Computing, but also recent trends in tangible interfaces as well as work on sociological
investigations of the organization of interactive behavior. By taking a view of contextaware computing that integrates these different perspectives, we can begin to understand
the foundational relationships that tie them all together, and that provide a framework for understanding the basic principles behind these various forms of embodied interaction. In particular, I point to phenomenology as a basis for the development of a new framework for design and evaluation of context-aware technologies.
A second is the recognition of the mutual influence of the physical environment and the human activities that unfold within it, so that aspects of the setting can be used both to disambiguate and to provide specialized computational support for likely action. --The influence of design which draws attention to the symbolic as well as the instrumental use of technologies and the roles that each conception of technology need to play in their design and deployment.
opportunities to tie computational and physical activities together in such a way that the computer “withdraws” into the activity, so that users engage directly with the tasks at hand and the distinction between “interface” and “action” is reduced. It is particularly in this third way– the idea that the world is the interface
Context In Social Analysis:
The question of context is central to social analyses of interaction, in two ways. The first is the fairly straight-forward observation that social analyses look beyond simply the interaction between an individual user and a computer system. They look at the context in which that interaction emerges – the social, cultural and organizational factors that affect interaction, and on which the user will draw in making decisions about actions to take and in interpreting the system’s response. So, sociological perspectives have pointed out that instances of interaction between people and systems are themselves features of broader social settings, and those settings are critical to any analysis of interaction. This is what Grudin (1990) characterized as “the computer reaching out” as the context of interaction gradually expands to include an larger and larger frame of reference. --Ethnnomethodology is an approach to social analysis which explains the orderliness of social conduct not in terms of abstract theories, but rather as the practical achievement of members continually working to render the world sensible and interpretable in the course of their everyday actions. Critically, this means that, for ethnomethodology, social conduct is an improvised affair, carried on in real-time in the course of everyday activity. Social conduct is orderly not because it is governed by some overarching theoretical construction, but because people make it orderly. Ethnomethodologists argue that people find, within the conduct of everyday affairs, the resources by which those affairs can be found to be meaningful and rational; and so in turn, they recommend that the investigation of social order should not take the form of a search for theoretical principles, but rather should involve the careful examination of specific instances of organized action, so as to be able to uncover the means by which people produced the rationality that they exhibit.
In context in interaction argues that context in which actions take place is what allows people to find it meaningful. Context - the organizational and cultural context as much as the physical context – plays a critical role in shaping action, and also in providing people with the means to interpret and understand action.
Suchman rejects abstract
depictions of action and argues instead that we must see the orderliness of action as derived “bottom-up” from the local, situated activities of actors. This model places the
real-time, real-space activities of social actors – embodied actions – before abstractions or theoretical accounts of them. Practice precedes theory
The importance of context-based computing extends beyond simply those systems that are designed around an awareness of spatial location, of user identity, of the proximity of people and devices, and so on, but that it is also a critical feature of sociologicallymotivated explorations of interaction.
Embodiment:
Embodiment is about establishing meaning. The first thing that we can observe on the basis of the phenomenological position is that embodiment is about meaning. We
might be inclined to imagine that embodied approaches to interactive systems are successful because they are more familiar to us, or that they capitalize on natural social or
physical skills. Indeed, these might be true on a superficial level. However, phenomenology turns our attention to how we encounter the world as meaningful through our active and engaged participation in it, and so we can see that the underlying purpose of this sort of “more natural” approach to interface design is that it allows us to engage with technology in a different way – in ways that allow us to uncover, explore and develop the meaning of the use of the technology as it is incorporated into practice.
We need also take account of social, cultural, organizational and interactional context, which are equally telling for the ways in which action will emerge.
By embodiment, in this context, I (Dourish) mean not simply physical presence, although that is certainly one relevant facet. More generally, however, by embodiment I mean a presence and participation in the world, real-time and real-space, here and now. Embodiment denotes a participative status, the presence and occurrentness of a phenomenon in the world. So, physical objects are certainly embodied, but so are conversations and actions. They are things that unfold in the world, and whose fundamental nature depends on their properties as features of the world rather than as abstractions. So, for example, conversations are embodied phenomena because their structure and orderliness derives from the way in which they are enacted by participants in real-time and under the immediate constraints of the environment in which they unfold.
-embodiment is not a new idea, but rather has been at the center of one branch ofphilosophy for the last hundred years or so. That is phenomenology, which, loosely, is the
philosophy of the phenomena of experience. The reason that it is particularly interesting to observe that the concept of embodiment has this sort of history is that it opens up the possibility that, by understanding and drawing on that history, we might be able to develop a foundational understanding of embodied interaction.
Phenomenology:
Husserl, who saw himself developing a Cartesianism for the modern age, had adopted this position, and his form of phenomenology explored the inner mental phenomena by which sensory impressions could be interpreted and meaning assigned to them. Heidegger rejected this idea. He argued that rather than assigning meaning to the world as we perceive it, we act in a world that is already filled with meaning. The world has meaning in how it is physically organized in relationship to our physical abilities, and in how it reflects a history of social practice. For Heidegger, the primary question is not “how do we assign meaning to our perceptions of the world?” but rather, “how does the meaning of the world reveal itself to us through our actions within it?”
--Heidegger, action precedestheory; the way we act in the world is logically prior to the way we understand it.
--Heidegger’s phenomenology is somewhat familiar in HCI through the work of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, and their explorations of technology in use.
Meaning arises in the course of action. The second observation that we are led to by studying the phenomenological work is that the meaning of a technology is not inherent
in the technology, but arises from how that technology is used. Meaning is something that comes about through an encounter with the technology (or with other people), and so arises from the interaction between the parties. The significance of this for design is that, in designing interactive systems, we typically take the meaning of the elements of the system – its components, processes and representations – to be given or static within the frame of the application.
Most importantly, the designer does not have absolute control, only influence. In turn, this suggests that, if the meaning of the use of the technology is, first, in flux and, second, something that is worked out again and again in each setting, then the technology needs to be able to support this sort of repurposing, and needs to be able to support the communication of meaning through it, within a community of practice.
The phenomenological background to the ideas of embodied interaction, as they work themselves out in both the domains of ubiquitous computing and social studies of
HCI, cast light on a set of underlying concerns that are different than those we might see if we looked at them individually. In addition, it begins to show more concretely how these two novel approaches to interaction have more than simply a shared interest in “context” at their heart. Finally, it offers the opportunity to build a more comprehensive framework that can help to articulate what makes context-based computing important and effective, and how to both design and evaluate technologies that take advantage of it.
The Coming Age of Calm Technology
Reading:
Weiser, Mark. Brown, John Seely. The Coming Age of Calm Technology[1]. Xerox PARC October 5, 1996. web
Quotes:
"The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us.
In the past fifty years of computation there have been two great trends in this relationship: the mainframe relationship, and the PC relationship. Today the Internet is carrying us through an era of widespread distributed computing towards the relationship of ubiquitous computing, characterized by deeply imbedding computation in the world. Ubiquitous computing will require a new approach to fitting technology to our lives, an approach we call "calm technology".
Major Trends in Computing
1_The Main Frame Era:Many people share a computer.
2_Persoanl Computer Era: one computer one man/woman.
3_Internet - Widespread Distributed Computing. - many people and their information become connected.
4_The Ubiquitous Computing era - Many people sharing Many machines.
The social impact of imbedded computers may be analogous to two other technologies that have become ubiquitous. The first is writing, which is found everywhere from clothes labels to billboards. The second is electricity, which surges invisibly through the walls of every home, office, and car. Writing and electricity become so commonplace, so unremarkable, that we forget their huge impact on everyday life. So it will be with UC. The UC will bring information technology beyond the big problems like corporate finance and school homework, to the little annoyances like Where are the car-keys, Can I get a parking place, and Is that shirt I saw last week at Macy's still on the rack?
The radically new context of the PC - uncontrolled room, uncontrolled third party software, uncontrolled power, third party hardware components, retail sales, low-cost requirements, frequent upgrades - meant that mainframe technologies required considerable adaptation. The era of ubiquitous computing is already starting to see old assumptions questioned top to bottom in computer systems design.
The most potentially interesting, challenging, and profound change implied by the ubiquitous computing era is a focus on calm. If computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way, and that means designing them so that the people being shared by the computers remain serene and in control. Calmness is a new challenge that UC brings to computing. When computers are used behind closed doors by experts, calmness is relevant to only a few. Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technological design of the next fifty years.
The Periphery:
Designs that encalm and inform meet two human needs not usually met together. Information technology is more often the enemy of calm. Calm technology engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two. We use "periphery" to name what we are attuned to without attending to explicitly. It should be clear that what we mean by the periphery is anything but on the fringe or unimportant. What is in the periphery at one moment may in the next moment come to be at the center of our attention and so be crucial.
A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back. This is fundamentally encalming, for two reasons.
First, by placing things in the periphery we are able to attune to many more things than we could if everything had to be at the center. Things in the periphery are attuned to by the large portion of our brains devoted to peripheral (sensory) processing. Thus the periphery is informing without overburdening.
Second, by recentering something formerly in the periphery we take control of it. Peripherally we may become aware that something is not quite right, as when awkward sentences leave a reader tired and discomforted without knowing why. By moving sentence construction from periphery to center we are empowered to act, either by finding better literature or accepting the source of the unease and continuing. Without centering the periphery might be a source of frantic following of fashion; with centering the periphery is a fundamental enabler of calm through increased awareness and power.
It seems contradictory to say, in the face of frequent complaints about information overload, that more information could be encalming. It seems almost nonsensical to say that the way to become attuned to more information is to attend to it less. It is these apparently bizarre features that may account for why so few designs properly take into account center and periphery to achieve an increased sense of locatedness. But such designs are crucial as we move into the era of ubiquitous computing. As we learn to design calm technology, we will enrich not only our space of artifacts, but also our opportunities for being with other people. When our world is filled with interconnected, imbedded computers, calm technology will play a central role in a more humanly empowered twenty-first century.
Embeded
Reading: Hansen, Mark. Embeded. 2006.
Sensor networks and a data scientist
• Broadly, sensor networks consist of measurement devices placed in the physical world.
• In many current deployments these devices are connected to a central local network (wired or wireless); in the future it is believed they will operate in a peer-topeer fashion.
• Papers in this area emphasize a fundamental tradeoff (forced by power constraints) between computation/ observation and communication.
• Old problems like function (surface) estimation and clustering take on new life in this constrained environment.
Adaptive sampling
• For NIMS and related projects, the question of sampling becomes interesting.
• There is a natural tension between the characteristics of the sensors and the movement of the node.
• There is also a tension between the liveliness of the
phenomenon being observed and the autonomy of the robot.
• There is an obvious link to the literature on continuoustime experimental design, to adaptive function estimation. and even to biological models for searching and gradient following.
Networks of embedded citizen-sensors
• Local expertise to help address global scientific questions
• Human identification and evaluation of phenomena
• Centralized data repositories allow citizen-sensors to share information and identify their contributions.
• The connection to the physical world adds a dimension beyond the use of the web as communication channel; physical phenomena become anchors for activity and collaboration
• “In-network” processing and actuation are all driven by humans; these tasks are limited only by the participant’s skills at identifying and evaluating phenomena and perhaps by their attention span
• Detailed observation of people and their activities has long been a tool in the social sciences
• Such data collection has not always been top-down; rather, bottom-up movements have emerged out of a desire to “tell one’s own story”
• Surveillance v. Sousveillance?
Mass Observation
• Mass Observation was founded in the 1930’s with the goal of constructing an image of “life” in Britain that was more accurate than what was offered by the popular press of the time
• The decision of Edward VIII to abdicate as King rather than give up his marriage to the American divorcee’, Wallis Simpson, created a national crisis which motivated Mass Observation’s founders to create a more accurate view of Britons
•The real observers in this case were the millions of people who were, for once, irretrievably involved in the public events. Only mass observations can create mass science. The group for whom I write is engaged in establishing observation points on as widely extended a front as can at present be organised. We invite the cooperation of voluntary observers, and will provide detailed information to anyone who wants to take part.
Blogging
• There are obvious comparisons between Mass Observation and current trends in blogging and vlogging
• While Mass Observation became a centralized “authority” on public opinion and behavior, blogging is much less organized
• However, the essential motivation, if not the basic techniques (enlisting diarists, cataloging via photography) are similar.
• While this seems to be quite far from my original topic of sensor networks, consider the fact that blogs of this kind do enable “local” reporting
• From the sights of global conflict and natural disasters, we have read reports by bloggers and other first-hand amateur journalists
• Again, from the reports of citizen-sensors we build up a sense of a larger physical phenomenon It is undoubtedly beyond my topic to dwell on the relationship between blogging and the mainstream media
• However, in a recent talk on participatory media, Kenyatta Cheese commented that he does not differentiate between producers and consumers, but rather considers everyone to be a user with varying degrees of participation Blogs and their ilk blossomed because of easy authoring and publishing software; interface and protocol
• On the flipside, we still have the Web, with its capacity for linking and sharing, as well as powerful search engines for discovery
Slogging
• What would happen if sensing technology became as easy to use as a blog or a vlog?
• What would it mean for users to have “varying degrees of participation” in slogging?
• What would happen if a Web grows atop a collection of such sensor networks?
• Would we see communities spring up around data, around sensor logs?
A neighborhood monitors its own air or water quality New images of urban life are already being considered in instrumented cities
The citizen-scientist?
• If blogs spawned citizen-editors and journalists, what might we expect from easy access to data collection technologies, to publishing and collaboration?
• How can we as “data scientists” contribute both through education as well as research, enabling more
participatory users to make sense of extremely varied data types recorded under possibly unreliable circumstances The goal of this research is to gather, interpret, analyze, and ultimately quantify acoustic information from the environment. tThis quantification will then be correlated to landscape analysis, remote sensing data, and land use/land cover data to develop an index of disturbance regimes for land use changes and land development.
The variety and variability among living organisms and the ecosystems in which they occur. Biodiversity includes the number of different items and their relative frequencies; these items are organized at many levels, ranging from complete ecosystems to the biochemical structures that are the molecular basis of heredity. Thus, biodiversity encompasses expressions of the relative abundances of different ecosystems, species, and genes. The research hypothesis is that change detection measurement through acoustic sounds is correlated with changes in land use/ land cover and affects ecological integrity. Human activities canalter the habitat and degrade ecosystems. So quantifying relationships between specific human activities and biodiversity through acoustics will enable accurate prediction of ecological changes. This quantification will then be correlated to landscape analysis, remote sensing data, and land use/land cover data to develop an index of disturbance regimes for land use changes and
land development. Simultaneously, by making this information available to the public in real time through the clickable ecosystem concept, the research team hopes to bring a general understanding of ecological systems, and help in policy decisions, and public education, thereby helping to develop a society that is better informed and more capable of making intelligent ecological
decisions.
Some simple networks
• This team considers the energy in different frequency bands as an indicator of land use and, ultimately, bio-diversity
• While the signal processing is somewhat sophisticated (relative to an average citizen-sensor), the proposed interpretation is straightforward, direct
• There are already several examples of sensor networks that lead to at least this level of informal interpretation
• Even outside of the arts, there are plenty of examples of people telling their story through data
• One wonders who the audience might be, but keep in mind the unintended and often surprising consequencesof data collection...
Support for sloggers
• At the moment, it appears that most deployments of sensor networks are designed with the idea that we share data
• This makes it plausible that an infrastructure around data sharing might emerge, the Web of sensor networks I alluded to
• Current interfaces to sensor-network data are very, well, close to the SQL; the interface inspired by the database CENS
• But is a database really the right model? Certainly data scientists can help on a number of levels
Images from a nestbox is used to characterize the lifecycle of its inhabitants We really want to know when a nest is formed, when eggs appear, when chicks leave the nest
• Once filters are designed to identify higher-level events, how should we “publish” them?
• Maybe we can again take guidance from the blogging and vlogging community
• Would some variant of RSS be appropriate?
• Perhaps we can consider specialized aggregators that serve the function of the backyard bird watchers or the amateur seismologists and identify events
• Even short of the (possibly odd) notion of a slog, I could imagine our James Reserve collaborators wanting a kind of system that would tell them “what’s new?”
• Registering to a data feed might not mean literally receiving chunks of video of nestboxes, but instead a report when something happens, what’s changed, what’s new
• Who should do this processing? Perhaps some protocol between nntp and rss? Would data be cached at points around the Web?
• And speaking of google, what would a search engine look like in this context?
• Find for me all of the finches singing in North America right now (I hope finches actually sing!)
• If such events require my own kind of filter, who does the processing? How do I even learn the characteristics of such a filter in the first place? Do we need a flikr.com here or can it be done automatically?
And finally a philosophical question
• It might warm your heart to know that a well-respected new media theorist, Lev Manovich (UCSD) believes that a work of media art “can be defined as one or more interfaces to a multimedia database.”
• In his book “The Language of New Media”, Manovich considers the impact that new technologies (first photography and film and then telecommunication) has on art-making and on culture in general
And finally a philosophical question
Manovich studies the Big and Small Optics of Paul Virilio “Small Optics” refers to usual perspective of the human visual system
“Big Optics” deals with real-time information transmission, “the active optics of time passing at the speed of light”
Manovich writes:
Virilio asks us to notice “the progressive derealization of the terrestrial horizon, ... resulting in an impending primacy of real time perspective over real space.” He mourns the destruction of distance, geographic grandeur, the vastness of natural space, the vastness that guaranteed time delay between events and our reactions, giving us time for critical reflection necessary to arrive at a correct decision. The regime of Big Optics inevitably leads to realtime politics, a politics that requires instant reactions to events transmitted with the speed of light, and that, ultimately, can only be
efficiently handled by computers responding to each other.
And finally a philosophical question?
• We have already seen the move from human-centered actuation to machine-based filtering and response
• Manovich goes further to consider not only how the erosion of distance impacts real-time response, but also the duals of vision and touch; how distance acts as a barrier to touch
• While Manovich is technically considering haptic devices that can be manipulated over the network (writing in the late 1990s), the notion of touch can be interpreted more broadly as some kind of physical response
• We have seen a kind of “touch” in the way citizens have responded to the local reporting (the images and videos shared via blogs and vlogs) recent tsunami
Again, Manovich writes:<br.
In contrast to older action-enabling representational
technologies, real-time image instruments literally allow us to touch objects over distance, thus making possible their easy destruction as well.
• While “destruction” is very strong, we should consider what it means to link up the physical and the virtual in this way
• When data collection and interpretation is not left to organizations like the EPA or other official bodies, there is bound to be a social shift
• It’s worth considering what kind of action we’ll be called upon to take
How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design
How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design
Scott R. Klemmer, Björn Hartmann
ABSTRACT
Our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world. This paper draws on theories of embodiment — from psychology, sociology, and philosophy — synthesizing five themes we believe are particularly salient for interaction design: thinking through doing, performance, visibility, risk, and thick practice. We introduce aspects of human embodied engagement in the world with the goal of inspiring new interaction design approaches and evaluations that better integrate the physical and computational worlds.
The body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical… experience [is] always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body. — Michael Polanyi [56, p. 15]
"One of the most sweeping — and unintended — transformations that the desktop computing paradigm has brought about is the extent to which the physical performance of work has homogenized. "pg. 1 This paper presents five themes that we believe are particularly salient for designing and evaluating interactive systems. The first, thinking through doing, describes how thought (mind) and action (body) are deeply integrated and how they co-produce learning and reasoning. The second, performance, describes the rich actions our bodies are capable of, and how physical action can be both faster and more nuanced than symbolic cognition. The first two themes primarily address individual corporeality; the next two are primarily concerned with the social affordances. Visibility describes the role of artifacts in collaboration and cooperation. Risk explores how the uncertainty and risk of physical co-presence shapes interpersonal and human-computer interactions. The final theme, thickness of practice, suggests that because the pursuit of digital verisimilitude is more difficult than it might seem, embodied interaction is a more prudent path.
Particularly for infants in the sensorimotor stage of development, physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development. 2
A less obvious point is that systems that constrain gestural abilities (e.g., having your hands stuck on a keyboard) are likely to hinder the user’s thinking and communication.
Epistemic Action Body engagement with physical and virtual environments constitutes another important aspect of cognitive work. We are familiar with people leaving keys or notes for them-selves in strategic locations to serve as later reminders. Iterative design practices provide another perspective on the importance of concrete, artifact-centered action in the world to aid thought. Reflective practice, the framing and evaluation of a design challenge by working it through, rather than just thinking it through, points out that physical action and cognition are interconnected [58].
When compared to other human operated machinery (such as the automobile), today’s computer systems make extremely poor use of the potential of the human's sensory and motor systems. The controls on the average user's shower are probably better human-engineered than those of the computer on which far more time is spent. —Bill Buxton [8] Physical tacit knowledge is an important part of professional skill. Physical Action is Characterized by Risk One’s unmediated experience of acting in the physical world is characterized by uncertainty and an awareness of corporeal vulnerability. Dreyfus [17] argues that this leads to a constant preparedness for danger and surprises, and that this readiness shapes one’s experience and interactions in the world.
Trust and Commitment
Because distance collaboration mitigates risk, there is less of an opportunity for building trust. “Even strong ties maintained at a distance through electronic communication are likely to be… diminished in strength compared with strong ties supported by physical proximity” [37].
Attention
One may better design for embodied interaction by designing the experience of risk in interactive systems to alter the emotional experience of user(s).
It may seem a platitude, but it is worth repeating that, “if technology is to provide an advantage, the correspondence to the real world must break down at some point” [23]. Interaction design is simultaneously drawn in two directions. First, the promise of new technology is that it provides previously unavailable functionality. Second, in designing almost any new technology, one is drawing on existing human understanding of the world.
The project of technology is the creation of increasingly malleable materials, and computation is perhaps the most malleable created so far.
More precisely, from a design perspective, solutions that carefully integrate the physical and digital worlds — leaving the physical world alone to the extent possible — are likely to be more successful by admitting the improvisations of practice that the physical world offers. RELATED WORK As Dourish notes, “Tangible computing is of interest precisely because it is not purely physical. It is a physical realization of a symbolic reality” [15, p. 207].
• Learning through doin: physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development (Piaget, Montessori)
• Gesture is important in terms of cognition and fully linguistic communication for adults (to conceptually plan speech production and tocommunicate thoughts that are not easily verbalized)
• Epistermic actions: manipulating artifacts to better understand the task’s
context
Thinking through prototyping
• Tangibility of representations: The representation of a task can radically affect our reasoning abilities and performance.
The tacit knowledge that many physical situations afford play an important role in expert behavior.
hands, as they are simultaneously a means for complex expression and sensation: they allow for complicated movement
kinesthetic memory is important to know how to interact with objects (ride a bicycle, how to swim)
Reflective reasoning is too slow to stay in the loop
Learning is situated in space
Visibility Facilitates Coordination
• Physical Action is characterized by Risk: bodies can suffer harm if one chooses the wrong course of action
• Personal responsibility: Making the consequences of decisions more directly visible to people alters the outcome of the decision-making process.
Implications for Design Paul Dourish
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/publications/2006/implications-chi2006.pdf
Controlling Interruptions: Awareness Displays and Social Motivation for Coordination
http://interruptions.net/literature/Dabbish-CSCW04-p182-dabbish.pdf
Making space for stories: ambiguity in the design of personal communication systems
==Ten myths of multimodal interaction==
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=319398
Plans and Situated Actons
User needs for location-aware mobile services
http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/user_need_for_location_mobile_svcs.pdf
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=986053