Interactive Design and Game Development MFA thesis research

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.

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1 McCullough, Malcom, Digital Ground
2 Lowgren and Stolterman, Thoughtful Interaction Design
3 ibid
4 For my purposes, I define a manipulation as thus: An event where the value of an entity’s property is brought into alignment with an actor’s desired value.
5 Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play
6 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
7 Dourish, Paul, Where the Action Is

“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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Presentation Slides from my most recent run through are up.