Interactive Design and Game Development MFA thesis research

In 1980 George Lakoff and Gregg Johnson published Metaphors We Live By. The book made the case that most of our thinking is largely metaphorical in nature; that we directly apply our understanding of the less abstract to the more abstract. Their description of metaphoric language as reflective of a thinking mind irrevocably situated in a physical context helped ignite an explosion of research in numerous fields including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, law, art, and politics. While there’s been much written since then, this work has been repeated referenced in other current texts that I highly value.

The edition I read contained an afterword written in 2003 that provided a great summation of the work, empirical support somewhat lacking in the original and some revisions and their thinking. If pressed for time I would recommend reading these 30 or so pages to the exclusion of the rest of the text.

Most importantly Metaphors We Live By validates my solution of using manipulation as a starting point for the design of interactivity and provides logical arguments against feedback that I  previously could only disagree with on intuitive grounds. In my review (which I have yet to talk about, but which I hope to do at some point in the next few weeks), a midst concerns about the scope of my research, I was questioned on the type of manipulation I was going to address “Manipulation is very broad; there’s all kinds of manipulation, semiotic, physical, interpersonal…” (paraphrased). In concern over the “unfocused” quality of my proposal itself and during an attempt to guide me to “just do a nice project” it was stated that if I was going to find some fundamental principles “… I would have found them by now”. On the first concern, I simply acknowledge the potential pitfalls and stated that I’d be focusing on the most basic form of manipulation, the equivalence between an intentional quantifiable value and that of a screen based entity (such as a box’s rotation to the position of a pointing device). On the second statement I simply bit my tongue. Having read Lakoff & Johnson I would now answer differently; There is not “many kinds of” manipulation. There is only one kind of manipulation which is conceptually mapped to many different experiential phenomena so as to highlight common qualities. These commonalities stem from our physical/spatial understanding of manipulation as a “base metaphor” concerning the movement of an object in space on behalf of an intent. My investigation of manipulation qua manipulation is still modest enough for the project, but more applicable to more complex systems than previously stated. Secondly, our understanding of what we experience and the metaphoric ontologies we use to understand abstract phenomena — such as complex interactivity —don’t get any more fundamental than those based on our body and the physical space it inhabits.

While Lakoff’s research is undoubtedly important, he’s been criticized as delivering his ideas more rhetorically than not and being remise in acknowledging others who have tread on similar, if not the same ground. Metaphors We Live By makes lengthy arguments against forms of objectivism and subjectivism that I’m not certain are necessarily reflective of philosophical thought at the time, and left me want of understanding the context within which the book was released into. The ideas of embodied thinking that seem to stem from their research into metaphor are highly reflective of thinking phenomenological thinking which was hardly underground at the time. At one point they do make reference to this area, but only as it exists, in their words, as “café phenomenology”. Their discussion limited to bullet points and bereft of topical consideration. One critical reviewer on Amazon.com points to Maurice Merleau-Ponty as providing much more nascent thinking on the issues that Lakoff and Johnson have waded into, going so far as to claim Lakoff and John’s most important ideas are ripped of from him. As Paul Dourish’s discussion of embodied thinking also references strongly Merleau-Ponty, it doesn’t seem impossible that there’s some truth there. Furthermore, I’ve found their most interesting ideas such as the reuniting of thinking and physical embodiment and how this manifests in a sort of layered understanding of the world echos those of Rudolf Arnheim whose book Visual Thinking I’ll be writing about in my next post.

Interactivity is most commonly described in terms of a conversation.1 While useful in separating the study of complex interactivity from that of traditional static forms, this description is of little use to those designers who wish to get a hand on the design of such interactivity. Some reasons for this can be found in where this metaphor breaks down. More important though is explicitly state that conversation-likness is not as a variable to be manipulated by designers, but a goal to be achieved through the design of the artifact’s more discreet and interconnected attributes. This conversational quality of some interactions is what Löwgren and Solterman would describe as an artifact’s “dynamic gestalt”.2 Whereas designers of traditional visual media have qualities like color, form, and space a designer of screen based interaction is left working with a “material without qualities”3 and has little to bridge the gap between the gestalts offered by traditional design variables and the goal of ‘conversational’ interactivity.

My thesis will argue that interactivity, of the quality described by the conversational metaphor, can be otherwise described as an emergent quality of a set of layered, transformed, intersecting, sequenced, or otherwise combined groups of manipulations.4 While manipulation (or interaction) can be described as taking place in various contexts (from physical to cultural)5 this is not indicative of different or unrelated kinds of manipulation but an example of the metaphoric use of one experiential concept — physical manipulation — to describe increasingly complex phenomena.6 From this experiential bases of manipulation, all manipulations can be said to have the following qualities: the accuracy of the result compared to the intention, the time required by the situational transformation, and the intervening states between the initial and the final result. These qualities aloner are not sufficent however. Designers of screen interaction are presented with an additional and particularly difficult situation; Before anything on the screen can be manipulated, it must first be described (and eventually programmed). Unlike physical manipulations, the causal relationships required for a screen based manipulation can be completely arbitrary and subject to manipulations themselves. In addition to exploring the qualities of specific manipulations and how they may be explicitly designed to produce a variety of dynamic gestalts, my thesis must address how the focus of a designed manipulation can transform over time, specifically through extension (switching between acting-on to acting-through)7 and/or reframing (the re-categorization of a situation). Together though, I believe these two sets of fundamental abstract variables can allow for the description and the deliberate crafting of an interactive aesthetic.

“Slides” from my most recent presentation can be found here. I embedded videos of some of my work in it so this version is in a quicktime movie format (make sure to right click and save as). The movie is set to pause on slides, so simply press play again to advance.


Is being written
not a thought transcribed (nor transcribing)
but a thinking be-ing?


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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