All in the mind?

As I'm not a psychologist I am well out of my comfort zone with this next attempt to understand interactivity but is interactivity dependent upon perception? I am an avid listener of Melvyn Bragg's Radio 4 programme In Our Time. One programme deals with perception and Bragg introduces the programme by saying "Perception is a tangled web of processes and so much of what we see, hear and touch is determined by our own expectations that it raises the question of whether we ever truly perceive what others do." Certainly within interactive design perception is crucial but is there an inherent problem when we attempt to make an interface intuitive that we cannot solve?

If we attempt to put into place enough visual cues and spend time perfecting the interactive loop (see image, adapted from a diagram by Bill Verplank of Stanford University) in order to make the interface usable for as many people as possible, are we still being kneecapped by a philosophical bullet. That is do we assume the user (insert your preferred nomenclature here) perceives the interface in the way we expect? Not exactly an earth-shatteringly original concern but when we consider that interactivity is more than just hand and eye, but also factors such as asynchronous and real-time communication, interchangeability of roles, modification of content within real-time etc. and tangibility affect the way that the perceived interactivity works.



It is therefore a little disconcerting for me to think that even taking into account semiology, typography and the psychology behind colour theory I may still need to consider deeper philosophical issues such as suggested by Spiro Kiousis in his 2002 paper "Interactivity: a concept explication". Kiousis proposes that interactivity, on an operational basis "is established by three factors: technological structure of the media used (e.g. speed, range, timing flexibility, and sensory complexity), characteristics of communication settings (e.g. third-order dependency and social presence), and individuals’ perceptions (e.g. proximity, perceived speed, sensory activation, and telepresence)." We already are aware that each individual has different ability in reading on screen and hand-eye coordination with input devices, but is there deeper issues we need to be aware of.

I am re-reading Kiousis' paper and will post again my own observations.

References

Kiousis, Spiro (2002) Interactivity: a concept explication New Media & Society, SAGE Publications, Vol4(3):355–383, Pp 379

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.