Interactive Design and Game Development MFA thesis research

For class wednesday (Theory of Interaction Design), we were tasked with dissecting an existing definition of interaction design. As I had just finished “Where the Action Is”, I used the assignment as an opportunity to start writing about it (and digesting Dourish’s ideas).

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Presentation Slides from my most recent run through are up.

This past weekend I finished Where the Action Is by Paul Dourish. It’s the book I didn’t know I needed to read years ago. Back then I spent a bit of time in meetings drawing grids of small circles and thinking “What IS a button?”. In Action Dourish tours through sociology, psychology, phillosophy, and HCI (among other areas) to support at a set of interaction principles that echo my own intuitive thoughts, but fully resolved. For example, his use of phenomenology to describe how we can move from action on an object to action through an object puts the table under my undergrad ideas of  ”token chains” and “token switching” that I built from Costikyan’s token idea. Dourish offers arguments that could nullify nagging questions I’ve about interfaces and representation; for example, if the interface is roughly defined as the system with which we interact to effect change in a removed system, and we can move between interacting with a something and interacting through it simply by change our mental frame, then isn’t the interfaceness of something supremely subjective? If it is, does that mean we should design to facilitate the exposure of  a system rather than hiding it? Dourish not only argues that there is no distinction between representation and implementation, but explains why the distinction exists in the first place (age old phillisophical splitting of mind and body). It’s all still sinking in (I’m just now writing this after finishing the book over two days go) so I may not be doing a good job of articulating.

His idea of “embodied interaction” and its implications cover two thirds of my thesis. I’m now trying to figure out how to best incorporate and/or build on his work; I’m trying to understand what changes this will have on my research plans (am I going to have to dive into ontology and phenomenology???). There’s too many thoughts to deal with at once and I’ll likely come back to this book repeatedly, so I’ll simply end this post here.

Greg Costikyan, in attempting to define the basic elements of a game, describes the ‘token’ as an element in a game system the player has direct control over.

Agency in interactive systems is hardly restricted to one place however. (Press any key to toggle fullscreen).

NOTE: There is a bug in Google Chrome on Mac that prevents hiding the cursor! I HIGHLY recommend viewing it in another browser.

In The Human Interface, Jef Raskin hammers on one particular message; Modes result in mode errors, and must be eliminated wherever possible. Along with this he argues that any gesture must retain the same meaning (or effect) in as many places as possible, but preferably, in all places. This anti-modality view is built on the rather inarguable premise that any digital artifact must first be built with the cognitive limitations of people in mind. From this, as we have only one “locus of attention”, requiring a user to change their locus from the content to the context is both inefficient and prone to cause errors, particularly when the context is deep in the periphery of our attention.

Computer interfaces are still far from “humane” in many cases, so a focus on cognitive ergonomics or cognetics even today is hardly problematic. However, some things strike me as particularly… peculiar.

A multiplicity of layered, changing or even conflicting meanings in human gestures is the rule of our daily lives. It’s at the heart of a ‘passive agressive’ act for example. Us humans have a fantastic ability to move between models of structuring the world. We are also fantastic at misunderstanding the contexts within which actions are meant to be taken within. Computers are no different. It seems their biggest problem is an exaggerated inability to understand the context within which our actions are meant to take place.

The simple solution, of course, is to remove the potential for different contexts. A communicative flat land. This is Raskin’s ideal. No applications, no files, no modes. One context, no ambiguity.

While the elimination of preventable errors is nobel. I’m not convinced that a paradigm for designing interfaces that results in the removal of metaphors is either desirable or even the most efficient . Let alone forcing users into a land of a single context smacks of a bend-the-user-to-the-computer practice that Raskin is himself trying to eliminate in his book.

Perhaps some manipulations are universal, or close to it; Cut and Paste, Copy, Undo and Redo. These actions, or at least the pervasiveness of their use, is due to the reconfigurable qualities of computation as much as the structure of human thought. Outside of them there’s plenty of actions that might have very beneficial contextual interpretations. I don’t want auto indentation when typing a letter, but I do want it when writing code. A parenthesis is an individual character, but if I type it while a line of text is selected, I’d rather it bracket the content than replace it with “(”. We might want windows to be in the same place when waking a computer from sleep, but I doubt everyone wants their browser, on launching, to display the last web page they were on when sitting in a coffee shop.

The discrepancy between a computer’s understanding of context and our own is evident even in the removal of modes. This is highly evident in the social faux-pas on Facebook when new users unintentionally publish, publicly, information meant to be private. Raskin might argue that this stems from the modality created by applications, perhaps applications such as an email client. No matter how ideally ignorant a user should be of the computer’s mode, ignorance on the system’s part of the context of the user will always cause problems.

The issue seems not in designing for a universal context (though this can also help in avoiding bad design choices), but in understanding how people float between contexts and how this can be facilitated by a computer, not ignored.

The idea of computers responding to emotions is briefly mentioned. Raskin quickly sets it aside as a nice thought, as the ability for computers to successfully do this, or for designers to account for it at the time of writing is nill. Fair enough. However, he never addresses the emotions that users have — regardless of whether the computer reads them or not. Raskin talks of designing humane interfaces, polite and respectable interfaces, but his guidelines account for people as if they were machinery.