Semantics

I've been taking Level 2 undergraduates from Graphic Design and Games Design for Research Techniques and this week I was getting them to discuss their propositions for a research project. One Graphic Design student had decided upon "What makes a good design?" as her initial investigation. I had during the group tutorial made each student really think about their questions so that they were looking at a specific area of inquiry rather than being too broad. I got this student to consider that 'good' had to be defined clearer as it was too subjective and also what she meant by design. Design like art is a word that everyone knows what it means but can never truly agree a definition. In order to further illustrate my point to the students I used my own experience of researching interactivity.

During my research I have come across many different papers all attempting to address the definition of interactivity. To illustrate this I will discuss a few of them here.

The Interactive Typology
As cited in a paper by Rob Cover (Cover, 2006) Sally McMillan draws upon other work by Bordewijk and van Kaam (1986), into a four level classification of (a) Allocution, (b) Consultation, (c) Registration and (d) Conversational interactivity. Essentially (a) passive audience involvement, ie: watching TV (b) database dissemination of content upon user request, (c) more dynamic dissemination through collection of patterns of engagement by the user, ie: browser cookies (d) Face-to-Face (F2F) real-time communication.

In another paper McMillan and co-author Downes (Downes & McMillan, 2000) are thorough enough to provide further definitions that I will lay out here.

Exertive Interactivity
Where the user exerts more effort to accomplish a task when it comes to the use of digital media compared to older media that is more passive. This is a form suggested by Heeter (1989).

Interchangeable Roles
The positions of role-taking and providing feedback are interchangeable allowing mutual discourse between communicating entities (Rice, 1984) & (Rogers, 1995)

.MOD
The amount of real-time modification a user can perform upon the content whilst interacting with it. (Steur, 1992)

Two-way Exchange
Whether real-time or asynchronous both Rice and Williams (1984) and Rheingold (1993) both suggest that media can only be interactive if it has the potential for two-way exchange between entities whether these are human or processor.

Downes and McMillan do admit these terms are contradictory and have drawn attention to the need for a more consensual definition, but I am not the person to do this. Obviously. But the need to understand your medium is important to any designer and interactive design is no different. I will come back to these defining terms in another post once I have time to ruminate on this post. This is the first time I have actually brought this research together and what you are reading is my research in progress.

References:
Cover, Rob (2006)'Audience inter/active: Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history', in New Media & Society Vol6(4):487–506, pp.142, SAGE Publications
Downes, Edward J. & Mcmillan, Sally J. (2000) 'Defining interactivity: A qualitative identification of key dimensions', in New Media & Society Vol2(2):157–179, pp.159, SAGE Publications
Heeter, C. (1989) ‘Implications of New Interactive Technologies for Conceptualizing
Communication’, in J.L. Salvaggio and J. Bryant (eds) Media Use in the Information
Age: Emerging Patterns of Adoption and Computer Use, pp.221–5. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
McMillan, S. (2002) ‘A Four-Part Model of Cyber-Interactivity: Some Cyber-Places are
More Interactive than Others’, New Media & Society4(2): 271–91.
Rice, R.E. (1984) ‘New Media Technology: Growth and Integration’, in R.E. Rice
(ed.) The New Media: Communication, Research, and Technology, pp.33–54. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Rice, R.E. and F. Williams (1984) ‘Theories Old and New: The Study of New Media’,
in R.E. Rice (ed.) The New Media: Communication, Research, and Technology, pp.55–80.
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Rogers, E.M. (1995) Diffusion of Innovations (4th edn). p314. New York: Free Press.
Rheingold, H. (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New
York: Addison-Wesley.
Steur, J. (1992) ‘Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence’, Journal of Communication 42: 73–93.

Self-evident interfaces and perceivable possibilities

In attempting to understand Durrell Bishop's research into self-evident design with more clarity I thank Fusewire and Alec for their comments to my previous post. Cultural mediation and perception appear to be two aspects that need considering with Bishop's thesis. With further reading around the subject I have read highlights of an interview with Bill Gaber, professor of design at Goldsmiths College in London. In this interview he cited the work of perception theorist J.J. Gibson, in particular Gibson's 1979 book on The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

As I have an interest in human evolution and the development of human creativity (in the words of Douglas Adams "the secret is to keep banging the rocks together guys!") Gaber's thesis was understandably of interest. If, as Gaber hypothesizes, our evolution has allowed our species to benefit from perceiving what actions would be useful to our survival over those that wont, we are able to perceive, validate and combine complicated actions together such as our ancestors' stone tool-making. This outcome of perceiving the possibilities when flint is struck with another stone, mammoth meat can then be butchered for the tribe back home is disseminated through perceptual experimentation and then cultural-mediation. Each stone age tribe makes stone tools with their own twist on the technology, evolving it through an ongoing iterative process of constant development. This perceptual process is the same as we use to evolve interactive design.

Gaber in his research and work when at Xerox EuroPARC has tried to demonstrate that people can deal with graphical elements within interface designs as if they are self-evident physical objects by "thinking about the interface being a physical environment rather than being a kind of command-line-driven conversational metaphor". This is more than just creating an icon of something from the physical world and placing it into the visual design of an interface. A rewind button on a tape deck does not function in the same way as a backwards button on a physical or digital CD player. A scrub wheel does not function in exactly the same way on an iPod as it does on an analogue device. The physical function may be similar but the perceived outcome may not match the outcome. Gibson's theory refers to these perceivable possibilities for action as "affordances" and Gaber has applied Gibson's affordance theory to interactive design by attempting to peel back "the notion of affordances to its real essentials".

Has anyone read Gibson's work? I would be interested to hear if his theory has been advanced further or has been dismissed in favour of a more robust thesis. Any further reading on this matter would be greatly appreciated by myself.

Monopoly and designing interactive digital artefacts

What would happen if the design principles of Monopoly where applied to an interactive digital artefact?

In the words of Durrell Bishop the real-world is full of self-evident objects where their shape displays their mechanical properties. What if digital tools could actually be clearer in their display as to what they performed? I am not talking about icons here. I have lost too many man hours trying to decipher the icons on Microsoft Outlook Web Access when I need to send an email due to some egoist insisting on using icons they thought were >cool< that no-one else does… but I digress.

Bishop uses Monopoly to explain his premise on self-evident design. The game itself has a complex system that is as complex as using a video recorder (slightly old school but hang in there) and he argues that it's functions are self-evident. The board graphics demonstrate clearly the possibilities and route around the board; the pieces show the players' proximity and the dice demonstrates the position of both the current and previous spatial position of the latest player. Houses show both ownership and risk. At each stage there is a physical signal as to where the game currently is.

If a player has to go the toilet or make a cuppa during play, when they return it doesn't take a full debrief to resume the game. Bishop's main point is that at one glance you know where you are. Using the comparison to a video recorder he suggests that videos would have been more user-friendly if at a glance the user would know what is on the tape, where the programme they want lies on the tape, how much is left on the tape and who else needs to watch the programmes remaining on the tape before it can be recorded over.

So my point of interest in Bishop's research is whether digital interface design can transcend the icon-centric bull and harness more self-evident design principles to make the usability of interactive digital artefacts more intuitive for the user. Does anyone have anything to add to this idea?