DMI Blogs » Jason » April 2008

Feeds

529 items (508 unread) in 9 feeds

• Agata (35 unread)
• Cici (6 unread)
• Dan (123 unread)
• Elaine (101 unread)
• Colin (45 unread)
• Jason (48 unread)
• Joe (17 unread)
• Scott (96 unread)
• Simon (37 unread)

Jason (10 unread)

• 

  Posted: April 23rd, 2008, 8:51pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  My last post left me thinking about researching educational philosophy as a source for insight to experience design. I remembered that I had read some interesting stuff from Carl Rogers earlier this semester. Rogers was both a psychologist and an educational theorist. Much of what he wrote surrounded the mechanics of experience. I think the 19th of his “19 Propositions” is particularly insightful in considering experience design.

  19# As the individual perceives and accepts into his self structure more of his organic experiences, he finds that he is replacing his present value system - based extensively on introjections which have been distortedly symbolized - with a continuing organismic valuing process.

  The other 18 propositions can be found here. Coincidently, Wikipedia tells me that his approach to psychology was the model for Weizenbaum’s Eliza.

• 

  Posted: April 22nd, 2008, 7:03pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  

  Are we designing for observers, manipulators or co-creators? For example, I create a program in Flash which allows a user to manipulate the contents of that program. Who is the creator? Is it the team that wrote the Flash software? Is it the person who wrote software with Flash (me)? Is it the person who manipulated the software I wrote with flash into it’s final form? Is it the people that wrote the programing language that was used to write Flash in the first place?

  I bring it up because the question has forced me to think about what I am doing as a designer, specifically as a visual communicator. Am I designing for observers, manipulators or co-creators? Stated another way, how much power should I afford my audience to alter what I have created? I believe having an answer to this question is fundamental to good design. The design requirements for these 3 audiences are very different. An observer needs something worth contemplating. A manipulator needs something worth configuring. A co-creator needs room to contribute something of near equal value to the creator. Here are a few examples of how these requirements can be conflicting. A successful interface is often one that requires the least contemplation. If you leave too much work for a manipulator they may grudgingly feel like they are being asked to co-create. A manipulator may get bored if allowed only to observe.

  If I assume I am designing interactions, and no longer just designing visuals for observation, how does that affect the message I am communicating with my design? Interaction suggests a series of choices to be made by a user. Without choices, there is no room for interaction. Each additional choice given to the user means I am imposing my will less as a designer. I am no longer making a statement but instead asking questions. For example, if I provide a volume slider on an interface, I am saying “would you like to change the volume” instead of having a fixed volume which says “this is the ideal volume for you to listen at”. If I pass enough of these decisions to the user could they not be considered co-creator instead of just manipulator?

  Another way to look at it is to ask “am I imposing myself as an expert, or am I facilitating independent discovery, or both”? This sounds more like a question about pedagogy than it does about aesthetics. Perhaps reading up some more on educational philosophy could provide some valuable insight to answering this question.

• 

  Posted: April 19th, 2008, 9:18pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  
  Two interesting articles on ubiquitous interface. Both pretty short.

  Tai Chi
  Anywhere Interactive Interface

• 

  Posted: April 15th, 2008, 11:44pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  

  Some of those rules from Mau’s manifesto reminded me of my favorite poet, Tristan Tzara. Here is a line from a website with some of his poems as translated by Robert Motherwell, one of my favorite artists.

  “There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed.”

• 

  Posted: April 14th, 2008, 10:05pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  Don’t know if you guys are already hip to Bruce Mau. I stumbled upon his “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” and found it to be both funny and useful. My favorite rule is:

  22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

• 

  Posted: April 12th, 2008, 8:28pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  

  I had one of those nights where I was only half asleep and my brain was trying to think about theory instead of turning off and letting me sleep. I kept thinking about why we do things versus how we do things. What’s great about thinking when you are asleep is that it gives you a whole new outlook. For example, in thinking about visual communication I realized that so much of what we design is an instruction set, a how to manual. My sleepy brain then decided that anything that can be limited to instructions could and likely would be automated in the future. I then started thinking about why we do things, I think this goes back to the mapping project from last semester. In the mapping project I was thinking about how maps usually tell us how to get somewhere but tell us very little about why we should go there.

  The earliest maps did a much better job of addressing this question of “why leave where we are to go some where else” and “which places should be avoided all together”. One of the books I am reading, The Mapmakerss, describes how the Christian maps of the middle ages were based more on doctrine than fact and observation. While they could not be trusted for navigation they were full of use full information about the savage monsters and mythical beasts that inhabited distant lands. Of course the beasts did not really exist as described on the maps but they symbolized the genuine danger of the unknown. Although not very accurate from a cartographic point of view, these warnings as to where you should and should not go would serve as a useful distinction between known and unknown lands.

  Some times I think it would be nice to have a scary monster on the subway map marking the high crime areas. In some ways the scary monster would be more accurate and based more on fact and observation than the dot typically used to mark a subway stop. I think there is more to describing a space then just positioning it’s distance relative to other spaces. Information that helps me anticipate the type of experience I can expect at a given location would be useful in daily navigation. I guess this question of why go typically falls within the domain of travel guides.

• 

  Posted: April 8th, 2008, 5:36pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  

  I have been thinking a lot about visual representation and how different people often choose to represent the same experience in strikingly different ways. Choosing which details to retain and which to remove in order to communicate with more emotion or clarity. If the same object or experience can be represented in a multitude of ways, could it be possible to design an interface that allows us to slide gradually between these multiple representations and examine the subtle ways in which the message is changed?

  How many times have I heard someone say “I can see it in my head but I can’t get it down on paper”? Would an elastic representation that required manipulation of variables in place of manipulation of paint, graphite or pixels give these people the tools for expression they desire? Or would it be doomed to the same fate as the early Photoshop filters which rapidly became meaningless because of the ease of use and abuse they afforded? I am not sure.

  Over the weekend Elaine and I went out to a great restaurant in China Town with a gentlemen we met at the Massaging Media Conference. During the car ride to the restaurant he mentioned that he heard Jaron Lanier give a speech on cuttle fish several years back at the new england aquarium. I stumbled upon a written version of same lecture a few weeks ago in a book about science and optimism and found it to be fascinating and somehow related to my own ideas about elastic representation.

  I did not buy the book, but found an extended version of the essay online. Here is an excerpt from a section that I found to be particularly interesting:

  Our software tools are not yet flexible enough to enable us, in virtual reality, to think ourselves into different forms. Why would we want to? Consider the existing benefits of our ability to create sounds with our mouths. We can make new noises and mimic existing ones, spontaneously and instantaneously. But when it comes to visual communication, we are hamstrung. We can mime, and indeed when I give lectures on cephalopods I like to pretend to be the crab and the cuttlefish to illustrate the tale. (More than one student has pointed out that with my hair as it is, I am looking more and more like a cephalopod.) We can learn to draw and paint, or use computer-graphics design software. But we cannot generate images at the speed with which we can imagine them.

  You can find the rest of the article here, and Jaron’s web site here.

• 

  Posted: April 7th, 2008, 8:57pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  I found another interesting article on UXmatters that I wanted to share. I really enjoy the tag line for UXmatters, “Insights and Inspirations for the User Experience Community”, lots of great info.

• 

  Posted: April 4th, 2008, 9:06am PDT by jasonrbailey

  
  I picked up a copy of Ready Made magazine the other day and they had an advertisement for this brilliant fruit plate. You choose a location from Google maps and this company will take the topographical data from that location and create a plate milled out of plywood using a CNC machine.

  I especially enjoyed the interface for ordering one of these, it allows you to move around in Google maps and then preview your plate in 3D at the press of a button . A really creative idea for a product with an equally creative interface.

• 

  Posted: April 2nd, 2008, 9:48pm PDT by jasonrbailey

  It’s funny how once you start looking for something you see it everywhere. When I started thinking about the potential for real-time 3D online collaborative spaces, I was aware of Second Life, Croquet, and of course, games like World of War Craft. Since then I have discovered a wide variety of collaborative environments including:

• Disney’s Club Penguin for children
• Sun’s project wonderland
• IBM’s Blue Grass
• Qwaq (built on the Croquet platform)
• Something called Vivaty that Scott sent me a link to
• Playstation 3’s Home, which aesthetically seems the most advanced

I am sure there are many more that I have not included. To be honest, I don’t feel compelled to use any of them. Why do all the 3D collaborative spaces that keep cropping up try to reproduce the elements from reality that really just slow us down? In real life, the meaningful activities I engage in with other people aren’t enhanced by traveling around buildings and terrains. For example, I travel to school because I have to, in order to engage with my classmates and my professor, not because driving to the campus and taking the elevator up to a classroom (that is pretty much empty) somehow enhances my experience. It is the engagement with the people that makes it meaningful. The building exists so we don’t get rained on or snowed on, and the commute is a drawback, not a benefit. There are many advantages to meeting with people in real life that should be evaluated in developing a collaborative digital experience, but I don’t think my commute is one of them.

I am starting to give in to the fact that I will not single-handedly develop the next revolutionary collaboration tool, but I am still firm in believing that what we need from such a tool is to know that someone else is there and that that someone can work with us or share with us, communicate with us using tools that are appropriate to a digital environment.

How are 3D graphics appropriate to a digital environment? After all, our computer screens are 2D. Right? When it comes to conceptual representation, I believe 3D graphics are a far superior visualization mechanism to 2D. Think of it this way: once you have a well built 3D model, you can produce an infinite amount of 2D representations with an infinite amount of rendering styles. Additionally, you can animate this model in space to describe motion and interactions with other objects. If we were to have a collaborative environment, which is essentially a blank screen onto which we can conjure up complex models from an existing library as visual aids, we could better share concepts and would really be taking advantage of what 3D technology can offer. There are other examples of people using 3D graphics in a similar fashion. For example, CAD designers don’t take a virtual hike through a virtual forest before they start designing a part.

In an attempt at expanding my thesis direction, I have been asking myself why I am interested 3D graphics. I think visual representation is at the core of most of my interests as a designer. I am fascinated by the choices we make in visually representing experience. The excitement of choosing what stays and what goes in the sorting process of visual representation never gets old for me. As an artist, I developed a symbolic language built from personal experience, and used this to describe my view of the world. As a designer, I try to use prescribed symbols from a shared language to communicate specific messages to known audiences in the clearest terms possible. Both are processes of visual reduction, selectively removing elements from what is seen and experienced in the real world to better draw the viewers’ attention to specific elements.

What gets lost in the process of translating real life experience into symbols and simulation? Whether for the purpose of clarity, emotional emphasis, or technical necessity, the subjective decision of which elements to leave out of a visualization can assist in describing what a thing or experience truly is in its objective form. The idea that a single object or concept can be represented on a sliding scale of details and styles, each carrying a different message, fascinates me. I am using this theme as a frame through which to view my future projects and research, and so far it has been helpful in developing new ideas.