week 9. Hertzian Tales (chap4)

 Psychosocial Narratives

1. “Psychosocial narratives” refers to the unique narrative potential of electronic

products, the world of desire and fiction that embraces consumer goods, the socialization

that the use of electronic products encourages, and the idea that behavior

is a narrative experience arising from the interaction between our desire

to act through products and the social and behavioral limitations imposed on us

through the conceptual models they impose.

2. the idea that the designer,

in their role as a provider of new behavioral opportunities, becomes an “author”

working in a medium that can present experiences rather than represent

them; and how the electronic product becomes a “role model” bringing about

transformations of perception (and conception) in the user as a protagonist by

embodying unusual psychological needs and desires in “pathological” electronic

objects.

3. Although the explicit purpose of art is to evoke aesthetic experience,

Dewey does not limit aesthetic experience to art alone but considers it a potential element

of all experience. Perception is essential to aesthetic experience and leads to psychological

growth and learning. Recognition, or the interpretation of an object or

experience solely on the basis of already existing habits, only serves to condition a person

further to a life of convention.

4. If culture were simply a symbol system of convention,

as some cognitive anthropologists argue, then aesthetic experience would only consist of

recognition in Dewey’s sense, because the object of that experience ‘contains’ meaning

only as an arbitrary sign endowed with meaning by cultural convention and not because

of unique qualities of its own. (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, 176–177)

如果文化僅是符號， 則美學經驗就是認知 (recognition)

5. By using the

object, the protagonist enters a space between desire and determinism, a bizarre

world of the “infra-ordinary,” where strange stories show that truth is indeed

stranger than fiction, and that our conventional experience of everyday day life

through electronic products is aesthetically impoverished.

6. Consider the way the camera is used now.

Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who “reflects” the world according to his

personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object.

7. I am recommending, not that designers

try to predict misuses of products, but rather that they refer to as a

context of use this rich narrative space instead of the models of normality usually

referred to when new functional possibilities are being developed.

8. Often, as a by-product of trying to solve a practical problem, a poetic result is

achieved, as different ideas, embodied in objects but usually kept apart, come

together to reveal hidden similarities.

9. This subversion of function is related

to not being able to find the right word, creating neologisms that bend

language to accommodate something new.

10. The almost unbelievable stories reported in tabloid newspapers testify to the

unpredictable potential of humans to establish new situations despite the constraints

on everyday life imposed through electronic objects.

11. A computer is a device that allows us to put cognitive models into operational

form. But cognitive models are fictions, artificial constructs that correspond more or less

to what happens in the world.

12. Design could explore the fluid interface between “cognitive models [as] fictions,

artificial constructs” and new electronic technologies. Designers could create

new critical artifacts that help consumers, as protagonists rather than users, to

navigate through the “communications landscape” we share with “the spectres of

sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy” (Ballard 1990, 5).

13. Through projects like these, architects explore the

psychological and behavioral dimensions of consumer culture rather than the

technical, formal, or structural possibilities of consumer technologies.

14. Truth Phone illustrates how an electronic

product can transform the perception (and conception) of the user as a protagonist,

in this case by embodying unusual psychological needs and desires in

pathological objects.

15. it allows the user to participate in situations that encourage critical

reflection on the socializing effect of our encounters with everyday electronic

products.

Questions:

1. 小報消息(八卦新聞) (tabloid newspapers)，如何形成病理學上的敘事空間，請舉例。 (p. 73)

2. 病理學敘事空間，如何成為 electronic products 的設計靈感?

https://www.thenewslens.com/article/40300

week 8. critical design & critical theory

Critical design and critical theory: the challenge of designing for provocation

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2318001


1. p288
   Designers' judgement vs. analysis & reasoning activity


Over the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in design in human-computer interaction. Of particular
concern is constructive design research [27], also known as
research through design [16, 18, 33, 35], where design activity in the form of constructing artifacts becomes a central
research activity. In this work, design experience in the
form of designers’ judgments is equally important to the
analysis and reasoning activities that are common to all
kinds of research.

2.
   constructive design 可以從 “想像未來" 展開, 不一定要 fieldwork, theory...


Like other kinds of research, constructive 
design research may start from the result of fieldwork, theories of human behavior, or application of a particular design
approach, but often, it can start with just imagining future 
states, and in HCI, how technology can improve the current
state of human existence.

3. critical design 的定義, by Dunne:
  吸引 viewers 進入 the world of ideas 而非 objects.


producing conceptual electronic products that encourage
complex and meaningful reflection on inhabitation of a
ubiquitous, dematerializing, and intelligent environment: a
form of social research to integrate critical aesthetic experience with everyday life…. I hope in my approach I have
retained the popular appeal of industrial design while using
it to seduce the viewer into the world of ideas rather than
objects. Industrial design locates its object in a mental
space concerned with identity, desire, and fantasy and
shaped by media.... Again, I hope this remains intact but is
subverted to challenge the aesthetic values of both consumers and designers. (p. 147)

4. p. 289



In short, critical design
proposes an approach to provocation（挑釁), rather than design as
rearranging surface features according to the latest fashion
while obfuscating (使困惑) the norms and conventions inscribed in
the designs and their use.


5.


A new
book on constructive design research details three different
approaches: Lab, Field, and Showroom [27].

...

In the  Field examples, design researchers
employ lightweight versions of social science methods to
understand the current state, and then use methods from
design practice to create new things that express a preferred
state.





 Showroom, Koskinen et al.’s term for critical
design, is different. The description in the book talks about
the theoretical influences, but does provide a sketch of how
methods might be put together to complete a project.

6. In other words,
one might desire a description of critical design as an approach to account for both (a) productsthat generate dilemmas or confusions among users in such a way that users
are encouraged to expand their interpretative horizons or
rethink cultural norms; and (b) the sorts of design processes
that could lead to those kinds of products. 

7.  p. 290

  4 種 整合 critical theory 和 design 的 困難:

(1) Critical theory offers little insight about how to make 
things.

  CT: a verbal tradition,  new theories, critiques, and insights
  D: an embodied making tradition,  design materials

(2) Critical theory tends to be anti-method.

(3) Critical theory emphasizes the meanings and effects of cultural artifacts over their creation.
(4) Critical theory generally tends not to focus on the author of  a work as an individual creative agent

critical theory 不關心 intention (of author)

But if design can be defined as intentional change [30],
critical theory’s disinterest in intention becomes a limitation
of its applicability to design.


8.
  我們已經習慣  不受限於 creators' intention


We, too, were trained to seek
to understand the effects of cultural artifacts without limiting our inquiry to what their creators intended. Likewise,
we can understand why Gaver, like Derrida before him,
rejects “method” as a description of his approach. 


9.
What we seek, then, is a middle ground between critical
design as an elitist mystery, like art itself, and critical design as a step-wise cookbook description of design practice.
We recognize that the subjective expertise of the designer is
a crucial factor that no method, approach, set of practices,
etc., can capture or simulate.

THE CRITICAL DESIGN PROCESS
10.
  先找出 挑釁的點

Among
the most basic decisions in a critical design project is identifying which aspects of the present world we wish to provoke, a process that can be enriched through an engagement
with relevant critical theory literatures.


11.  2 cases of critical design

Significant Screwdriver (SS)


As  a starting point, it seemed to us that design could be used to  transgress rather then reinforce social norms.

Whispering Wall (WW)

Another place where we might transgress rather then reinforce social norms was in the space of a health club or gym.


12.


Breakdowns in operationalizing critical theory in design
often occur because whereas theory is often descriptive,
providing frameworks or models that serve as organizing
constructs [17], design itself is actionable, creating prototypes that suggest preferred future states. As in any design
activity, in making the leap from descriptive to generative,
the designer must make judgments about how to proceed.

13.

This breakdown exposes that
in critical design, the linkage between (verbally-based) theory and the embodied design practices of decision-making
and observations of use in deployment is problematic.
Overcoming this is not something that can be derived from
critical theory resources alone (i.e., in this case, feminist
theory only got us so far), due to the fact that design as critical resource  and  textual discourses about design  are different kinds of epistemological resources. 

14. p.294

   輕微的  陌異化 是關鍵


As
Dunne and Raby write, “A slight strangeness is the key—
too weird and they are instantly dismissed, not strange
enough and they’re absorbed into everyday reality…” [15,
p.63].

輕微的  陌異化  可以考量跨越 conceptual, functional, material, aesthetic 等等層面.

Our experience suggests that achieving this “slight
strangeness” is anything but straightforward, as it plays out
across conceptual, functional, material, and aesthetic dimensions of design in complex ways. Often, designers rapidly generate and iterate on solutions as a way to reason
about a problem space; when the problem space itself is
transgression and provocation, some of our more familiar
strategies will undoubtedly come up short.


15.
  how design students do vs. engineering ones:


As designers, we have considerable experience evaluating
sketches, directions, and prototypes in the context of design
briefs and situations—even ill-defined ones—both in the
studio and in the field.

16.


Provocation can be socially uncomfortable, and subjects
may not expect to be provoked when consenting to participate in a study. Researchers need to be prepared for and be
ready to handle such discomfort.



17.

Indeed, it was through conversations in which he was initiated as a peer researcher, rather than research subject, that
this participant gradually began to buy into it.

18. p. 295


Both of these patterns suggest that in a critical design study,
not only does the research destabilize the topics of inquiry,
but it also destabilizes the relationship between researchers
and research participants.



19.

In short, design researchers deploying
critical designs need to be prepared for everything to be
challenged, negotiated, and subject to fundamental change. 

20.

Critical design as a discursive methodology


Critical Design 中, 連 framing 也是 unknown:

In traditional user research, the research objective is to establish user needs and requirements. What is unknown are
relevant behaviors, attitudes, and functional needs of a target population. In critical design research, the framing itself 
is part of the unknown.



...

We were not out to discover folk theories of gender in
gyms and homes; the critical designs were meant to transgress them and provoke discussionabout that. 

21.
  重點不是收集使用者所說的話, 而是 協同思索與推思索與推論

we
didn’t just collect what they said but engaged with them
intellectually—the result was a practice of collaborative 
speculative reasoning grounded on a critical design that was
itself informed by a combination of cultural theories and
folk theories.

22.
   3 lessons from critical designs:

(1) Provocativeness
(2) Deep relationship

When using critical design in the future, we will design the
prototypes and interactions with participants with the goal
of developing a deeper relationship. We allow for repeated
and rich encounters in order to explore how participants’
insights and behaviors change as they use the design to
probe the research team’s intentions. 

(3) Fluidity of research plan

..., it seems that critical design
might best use theory to sensitize designers and to inspire
the intention of the provocations, but that we cannot and
should not force that theory to delimit the trajectory of the
work once it has been placed into the world. We raise this
as a concern for others who may wish to use critical design
as a way of operationalizing a theoretical framework.

Case Studies:
 "Make It Critical" card deck

week 7. humanistic HCI

Humanistic HCI in ACM Interaction

1. HCI reaches out.
"Key examples include the rise of aesthetics as an approach to user experience design [2]; the introduction of “reflective HCI” [3] to reposition the field with a more self-critical stance; as well as the use of feminist [4], queer [5], and postcolonial [6] approaches to emancipatory computing."

2. The humanities reach in.
" As alternatives, Winograd and Flores introduced Heideggerian phenomenology, biological accounts of cognition and language, and speech act theory to HCI. Offering an epistemological critique of the field as a whole and introducing an alternative epistemological stance are philosophical activities. It is easy to see that Winograd and Flores’s seminal work was in fact humanistic HCI, even if no one at that time was using the term."

3. What is Humanistic HCI?
". It is not the same as digital humanities, which is humanistic research supported by digital technologies, and which is by and large practiced by humanistic scholars (see, e.g., [9])."

"Humanistic HCI operates in the opposite direction: It is HCI research and practice that is supported by humanistic practices, theories, and methods."

4. History and tradition
"Many HCI systems are presented with little to no reference to their own historical genealogies, and the field itself has no significant histories beyond a generally shared sense that HCI has had three paradigms or waves [13,14]."

" Our expectation is that interaction design and/or HCI (whatever their relation is or will become, exactly) will develop much more of a historical sensibility in the coming decade."

5. Conceptual analysis
" During its rise in the 19th century, science began to displace philosophy as the knowledge discipline best able to account for the world. What was philosophy’s role in a scientific era? One answer was that philosophy ceased to provide doctrines and instead became an activity directed at the clarification of thoughts. As the early Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations” [15]. Philosophy was thus moving away from producing original systems and toward the disciplined analysis of the concepts we think with."

Summary:
" overall humanistic dispositions: the attempt to take on a situation or work that is in some sense confusing; to do so holistically (rather than analyzed and operationalized into well-defined parts); to bring clarity to it; and to do so in a way that orients itself toward emancipatory change (diversely defined)."

Humanistic HCI  Practices and Methods
1. Excursus: The expert subject.
2. Interaction criticism.
3. Critical discourse analysis.
   " HCI examples of such critiques include studies of cultural probes [25], affective computing [26], and sustainable making [27]."
4. Critical social science
5. Design futuring.
 "These strategies are commonly deployed in speculative design, critical design, design fictions, and science and utopian fiction"
6. Emancipatory HCI.