The Art and Science of Everything

Aesthetic Interaction
- Aesthetics is not about prescribing meaning but invoking imagination. Seeking poetic principles for this. Serendipity and improvisation in interaction.
- design for mind/body, design for instrumentality, design for socio-cultural context
- concept of user relation

Instrumentality
- art in discourse almost something beyond use

Emotion, Experience, and Co-experience

This panel proposes a theoretical framework for experience design. One panelist’s web-site also has summaries of other theoretical HCI contributions (their words, not mine).

Their framework posits that three dimensions of experience are:
1) the constant stream of experience that happens when we are conscious
2) narratives describing experience (and change the context and user as a result)
3) co-experience, when experiences are created with others.

They also break down user interactions into three types:
1) sub-conscious (or pre-attentive?)
2) cognitive, requiring attention and changing user and context as a result
3) narrative, in which a sequence of interactions is had with a product.

Is the point of this just to introduce a vocabulary?

I’m at DIS2004 in Boston this week! The conference hasn’t even started, but thanks to my next-door neighbor, UI teammate, and buddy Chad Thornton, I met many interesting people over dinner and drinks this evening and the learning has already begun.

We ended up talking about persona-based design and I asked my CS247A rant-y question that I have yet to get a good answer to: What are the ethical implications of persona based design when it is based on personas built off of the *current* demographic of a user group? What subtle values get embedded in software designed, say, for personas representing the male sysadmin population but no women?

What I learned is that Robert Reimmann thought about it and thought it was an interesting open question. One of the problems is that for formal persona building, you base personas on the existing user group. But Robert suggested that you can use other data — from surveys, existing research, etc — to build provisional personas to expand thinking about design decisions and task scenarios that the interface should manage. He admitted that the answer seemed a slipperly slope though. He definitely acknowledged that it’s a really interesting question, but he also put it in perspective, pointing out that we already have so long to go to create software that is effective at all. “Who is it effective for?” seems a secondary question.

Also, Abigail Travis and I started talking about the cultural situatedness, as well as aesthetics as being integral to the task of creating a functional UI. She told me about a talk she saw by someone from Microsoft describing the process of internationalizing the Tablet PC. They found that while in western cultures, we value whitespace greatly, in China, an empty desktop — whitespace — was seen as wasted space and the user experience was considered less valuable. According to MS via Abigail, this is also evident in comparing western newspaper layouts to Chinese newspaper layouts. Some googling revealed no MS papers on this, but I did find an interesting poster on cultural concerns in UI decision making form 1998: Integrating Culture Into User-Interface Design

I found this especially interesting because Google is all about that minimalist design and our home page is all whitespace. I wonder what our presence in China is, compared to other search options.

I’ll report what more I find!