2023年9月24日 星期日

week 4. Hertzian Tales (chap 1)

Introduction:

建築與傢具設計已經成功的在文化沈思的領域運作了一段時間,然而,產品設計與市場的強力連結使得電子產品很少有文化功能上的沈思。

"Whereas architecture and furniture design have successfully operated in the realm of cultural speculation for some time, product design's strong ties to the marketplace have left little room for speculation on the cultural function of electronic products." p. xv

為了達成這個(目的),研究需要擴展設計美學的概念,以包含更詩意和形上的關係,關連到科技設計物的人造環境。

"In order to achieve this, research is needed into an expanded notion of design aesthetics that includes more poetic and metaphysical relationships with the artificial environment of technological artifact." p. xvi


 Memphis Group






Do hit chair by Droog Design


即使是設計團隊發起的文化與美學的實驗,例如  Memphis,或者更近期的 Droog Design,也很少碰電子產品。

"Even the cultural and aesthetic experiments of design groups like Memphis, or more recently Droog Design, rarely touch on electronics." p. xvi



Mies Chair and Ottoman by Andrea Barnzi et al.


Andrea Barnzi 和其他 1960 年代與 1970 年代的實驗設計師,處理詩意居住模式中的設計物的角色,在建築學觀點的帶領下,發展出挑釁的研究取徑和立場,聚焦於新素材與表面的表達和語言學上的可能性。

"Andrea Branzi and other experimental designers of the 1960s and 1970s addressed the role played by design in poetic modes of inhabitation and, guided by an architectural perspective, developed provocative research approaches and positions focusing on the expressive and linguistic possibilities of new materials and surfaces." p. xvii

根據早期的義大利設計思考,Ezio Manzini 描述了設計師的角色,是提供新鮮的觀點。他認為設計願景的日子已經結束了,對烏托邦的厭倦已經開始了。然而,他建議設計師使用自己的技巧來視覺化另類的未來,呈現在公眾面前.....

"More recently, Ezio Manzini outlined a role for the designer that offers a fresh perspective that builds on earlier Italian design thinking. He suggests that the days of the design visionary are over, and a weariness with utopian vision has set in. Instead, he advises the designer to use his or her skills to visualize alternative future scenarios in ways that can be presented to the public,..." p. xvii

這些"實體物質故事"並不是烏托邦願景或藍圖 - 未來的明確模型太過於說教了。相反的,這些設計混合了批判主義與樂觀主義,提供"複雜的愉悅性",就像我們在其他有想像力的媒體中找到的,例如電影和文學,特別是那些探索真實與虛構邊界的。

"These "material tales" are not utopian visions or blueprints - clear-cut modeling of the future is too didactic. Instead, they mix criticism with optimism to provide the "complicated pleasure" found in other imaginative media such as film and literature, particularly those that explore boundaries between the real and the unreal." p. xvii


_________________________________________________________________________________


Chapter 1. The Electronic as Post-Optimal Object



radio by Marco Zanuso


電子物件因此在這物質文化世界中佔據一個奇怪的位置,更像洗衣粉和感冒藥,而不像傢具與建築,並且像所有的包裝設計(尤其是符號的)一樣受制於語言學派。電子物件失落在影像與物件之間,它的文化認同是根據技術的功能主義和符號學的關係來定義。

"The electronic object accordingly occupies a strange place in the world of material culture, closer to washing powder and cough mixture than to furniture and architecture, and is subject to the same linguistic discipline as all package design, that of the sign. It is lost somewhere between image and object, and its cultural identity is defined in relation to technological functionalism and semiotics." p. 1



psychology of everyday things by Norman


人因社群非常值得被批判,他們發展出一套電子物件的觀點,主要從電腦科學與認知心理學領域,在電腦工業中極端的有影響力;舉例來說,Don Norman 的設計心理學

"This is useful to critique the human factors "community," who have developed a view of the electronic object, derived from computer science and cognitive psychology, that is extremely influential in the computer industry; for example, Don Norman's (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things." p. 2

人因取徑的一個嚴重的問題,是它毫無批判的接受 Bernard Waites 所稱的美國意識形態,或技術在意識上的合法性: 所有問題不管是自然的、人類本能的、或文化的,皆可以視為技術問題,可以透過客觀知識的累積,理性的解決。......如此,技術在美國意識形態中,成為工具理性的化身,技術官僚統治者的工具。

"A serious problem with the human factors approach though, in relation to this project, is its uncritical acceptance of what has been called by Bernard Waites (1989) the "American Ideology," or the ideological legitimation of technology: All problems whether of nature, human nature, or culture, are seen as "technical" problems capable of rational solution through the accumulation of objective knowledge, ..., so that technology, in the American Ideology, becomes "instrumental rationality" incarnate, the tools of technocracy." p. 2 

然而,對物質文化最豐富的反思,並不是來自人類學或社會學,而是來自那些關心日常物件詩意的文學。巴舍拉的空間詩學提供了一種深受心理分析影響的角度,強調粗糙傢具的詩意面向,例如衣櫥與衣櫃。谷崎潤一郎的陰翳禮讚研究日本物件關於陰影和黑暗的面向,以及電在欣賞時所形成的效果。

"However, the most fruitful reflection on material culture is to be found, not in anthropology or sociology, but in literature concerned with the poetry of everyday objects. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelar (1969) offers an analysis, influenced by psychoanalysis, that emphasises the poetic dimension of humble furniture such as wardrobes and chests of drawers; Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's (1991) InPraise of Shadows considers the Japanese object in relation to shadow and darkness, and the effects of electricity on their appreciation;..." p. 5

一旦這些原型要素受制於大量生產所要求的極端理性化過程,它們就被化約成抽象的、極端微小化的電子零件。基於物質的真相,它們的現代主義詩意,已經喪失了。

"But once these prototype elements have been subjected to the extreme rationalization required by mass production, they become reduced to abstract ultra-miniaturized electronic components. Their modernist poetry, based on truth to materials, is lost." p. 7

但一般來說,設計師探索新素材美學面向的努力,並不如工程師探索功能可能性的努力來得多。這領域中大部份的作品並不鼓勵詩意與文化的可能性,結合到實用性與技術性的面向。 結果就是產出一整串毫無想像力的提案。

"But generally, designers have not exploited the aesthetic dimension of new materials with the same energy that engineers have exploited their functional possibilities. Most work in the area does not encourage poetic and cultural possibilities to converge with practical and technical ones. The outcome is a stream of unimaginative proposals." p. 9



marble answer machine by Durrell Bishop


Durrell Bishop 的作品一個可能有意義的視野: 現存物件被當作實體圖像使用,資料的實體物質再現,同時指向被操作資料的實用面向與詩意面向。......雖然很實際的被應用,Bishop的思考與文化脈絡是接合的,而技術在其中被使用。一種"用的美學"湧現了。

"The work of Durrell Bishop offers a vision of what this might mean: existing objects are used as physical icons, material representations of data that refer to both the pragmatic and poetic dimensions of the data being manipulated.... Although applied very practically, Bishop's thinking engages with the cultural context in which the technology is used. An "aesthetics of use" emerges." p. 17





R1 radio by Chia Li-Gu


電子物件設計師最困難挑戰,並不是技術與符號學的功能性,這些表現的優化程度都已經可以達成,而是在其他尚未被充分研究的領域: 形上學、詩學、以及美學。

"The most difficult challenges for designers of electronic objects now lie not in technical and semiotic functionality, where optimal levels of performance are already attainable, but in the realms of metaphysics, poetry, and aesthetics, where little research has been carried out." p. 20


Oracle by Robert Rauschenberg


本書的立場是,設計研究應該為電子物件探索新的角色,促進更詩意的居住模式: 透過概念式產品整合美學經驗與日常生活的一種社會研究形式。在這個實用性與功能性被視為理所當然的世界中,後優化物件的美學能夠提供新的日常生活經驗,新的詩意面向。

"The position of this book is that design research should explore a new role for the electronic object, one that facilitates more poetic modes of habitation: a form of social research to integrate aesthetic experience with everyday life through "conceptual products." In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new experience of everyday life, new poetic dimensions." p. 20

2023年9月17日 星期日

week 3. critical dialogue and phenomenology

Critical dialogue: interaction, experience and cultural theory



1. 

"This workshop will explore the 

ways in which HCI can benefit from a constructive 

dialogue between critical theory and experience in 
questions of design and evaluation."

2. 
"
HCI has broadened from usability to experience and 

from productivity to fun, affect, aesthetics, and ethics. 
Experience, culture, enjoyment, design, and other 
related terms are now much used but under-theorized 
concepts in HCI. Yet they are all associated with rich 
histories of scholarship in other domains, and they 
include their own epistemologies, approaches, and 
outputs. Leveraging these terms in HCI will require 
thoughtful engagement with these traditions, and in 
particular, critical theory"

3. 
critical theory...
"These include: semiotics (the study of
signs and symbols), hermeneutics (the study of 
interpretation and meaning), structuralism (the study 
of underlying structures of cultural artefacts), post 
structuralism (the denial of the existence of such 
structures), deconstruction (well this is getting
complicated now), psychoanalysis (yes and perhaps 
each of these deserves a paragraph on their own), 
feminism, Marxism, and postmodernism. "

4. "Since post-structuralist semiotics critiqued the notion
that there was a direct correspondence between a
cultural artifact and any single interpretation of it, ideas
based in critical traditions such as reader-response
theory have supplemented traditional semiotic readings
of how interaction takes place. These approaches argue
that meaning is emergent, constructed through a
“performance” of the text in a particular context.
Clearly this kind of theory is more difficult to implement
as a set of design guidelines and perhaps for this
reason hermeneutics has received less attention in HCI
(however, see for instance [12]). "

5.
  "When Winograd and Flores followed Heidegger in
rejecting the view that things are the bearer of
properties independent of interpretation [18],
phenomenology’s emphasis on both phenomena and
the consciousness experiencing them began to be
influential in HCI, e.g. [8][10]. When attention turned
from usability to user experience, connections to critical
theory became more frequent and complex. McCarthy 
and Wright’s [14] book Technology as Experience drew
extensively on the Russian literary critic and
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and his problematic
relationship with formal theory and preference for a
decentred dialogue grounded in the particularities and
uncertainties of lived experience."




Technology as experience

Where the Action Is 

Reference:
1. 社會科學的理路 pp. 352-353, 365-366, 384-387
2. 反身性方法論: 質性研究的新視野, pp. 60-61



critical practice

agenda:  例如媒體四大律、揭露與排除四個 stumbling blocks (1. Blinders of assumption 2. Fallacy of intuition 3. The “U.S.” problem 4. The rush to give advice)
"By definition, critical dialogue is the ongoing “collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that comprise everyday life,” (Schein, 1993)."
注意避免 "Flaws in Thinking"

EX 2.

兩兩同學一組, 可以用中文,  為以下互動設計作品產生 批判對話.
互相輪流發言, 並針對方前一次的發言進行批判對話.
對話紀錄至少 400 字 (中英文皆可)

deadline: 2023/10/2





2023年9月9日 星期六

week 2. the three paradigms of HCI


The Three Paradigms of HCI
1. 1st paradigm: engineering/human factors
2. 2nd paradigm: cognitive science
3. 3rd paradigm: phenomenological matrix:
       "...addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues."

"These include participatory
design, value-sensitive design, user experience
design, ethnomethodology, embodied interaction, interaction
analysis, and critical design." (p. 2)

"a third (“3rd”) paradigm, which treats interaction not as a
form of information processing but as a form of meaning
making in which the artifact and its context at all
levels are mutually defining and subject to multiple interpretations." (p. 2)

強行將舊的 paradigm 套用到 HCI 的後果:
 "when force-fitting new insights to old paradigms
CHI fails to capitalize on the full value of these approaches." (p. 3)

 沒有清楚的認識論, 會限制 HCI 的發展:
"(3) the lack of clarity about the
epistemological distinctions between paradigms is a
limiting factor in the development of the field,..." (p. 3)

Thomas Kuhn's theory of the structure of scientific revolutions:
"A paradigm shift, then, is accompanied by a shift
in the examples which are considered to be central to
the field." (p. 3)

"In particular, Agre argues, following a long line of research
in scientific metaphor, that technical fields tend
to be structured around particular metaphors which
suggest the questions that are interesting to ask and
methods for arriving at answers to them. So, for example,
the metaphor underlying cognitive science –
that human minds are like information processors –
suggests questions it could be interesting to ask - how
humans process their input, how they represent information
internally, how they access memory, etc. - and
also suggests methods for finding answers to those
questions, for example that we can effectively model
human mental activity using computational code and
validate these models by comparing computational and
human input and output."  (p. 4)

"Following Agre, we argue that central to each paradigm
in HCI is a different metaphor of interaction. Each such
metaphor introduces ‘centers’ and ‘margins’ that drive
choices about what methods are appropriate for studying
and designing interaction and for how knowledge
claims about interaction can be validated." (p. 4)

為何 usability study 對 non-task-oriented interaction 無效?
"A fourth set of issues arises out of the domain of nontask-
oriented computing. These approaches tend to
be bad fits to the 1st and 2nd paradigms, whose methods
tend to require problems to be formalized and expressed
in terms of tasks, goals and efficiency - precisely
what non-task-oriented approaches are intended
to question. It is difficult, for example, to apply usability
studies to ambient interfaces, since standard
evaluation techniques are ‘task-focused’ in the sense of
asking users to pay attention to and evaluate the interface,
precisely what the system is devised to avoid." (p. 4)

Embodiment 在三種 paradigms 的角色:
1. In human factors, attention is paid to such factors as the fit of a mouse to the human hand or the amenability of particular font sizes to be easily read.
2. Cognitively based work in HCI has laid out physical constraints that usefully inform interface
design such as the speed at which humans are able to react in various situations.
3. Embodiment in the 3rd paradigm is based on a different, central stance drawing on phenomenology: that the way in which we come to understand the world, ourselves, and interaction derives crucially from our location in a physical and social world as embodied actors.

"A focus on embodied interaction
moves from the 2nd paradigm idea that thinking is
cognitive, abstract, and information-based to one
where thinking is also achieved through doing things in
the world, for example expression through gestures,
learning through manipulation, or thinking through
building prototypes." (p. 7)

3rd paradigm 的 中心是 現象學觀點, 而非物理的體現性:
"Despite the centrality of embodied interaction to the 3rd
paradigm, it would be a mistake to take physical embodiment
– i.e. having a body - as its central, defining
characteristic. Rather, what is central is a phenomenological
viewpoint, in which all action, interaction, and

knowledge is seen as embodied in situated human actors.
This position leads to a number of intellectual
commitments that contrast with those taken by the first
two paradigms."  (p. 7)

意義在三種 paradigms 中的角色:
"meaning, ignoring it unless it causes a problem, while
the 2nd interprets meaning in terms of information
flows. The 3rd paradigm, in contrast, sees meaning and
meaning construction as a central focus. It adopts the
stance that meaning is constructed on the fly, often
collaboratively, by people in specific contexts and
situations, and therefore that interaction itself is an
essential element in meaning construction."

3rd paradigm 的 central metaphor:
" ...whose central metaphor is interaction
as phenomenologically situated." (p. 9)

1st paradigm: reduce error
2nd paradigm: more efficiently
3rd paradigm: situated meaning-making


Different Ways of Knowing


"The three issues described previously – limited and inappropriate measures of success, acceptable methods,
and recognition of innovation – can be traced to a lack of awareness of the epistemological distinctions between the paradigms,..."

see Table 2: Epistemological distinctions between the paradigms

Objective vs. Subjective Knowledge
Generalized vs. Situated Knowledge
Information vs. Interpretation
“Clean” vs. “Messy” Formalisms


所有的 paper 都應該交代 underlying paradigms:
"We would expect that calling out the underlying paradigm
will become a standard part of every publication
in our field." (p. 17)


參考:


EX 1. short essay
Critically introduce "InTouch" project with three paradigms respectively. (including 1st, 2nd, 3rd paradigms, at least 500 words in total) Deadline 2023/9/25

Reference:






2023年9月3日 星期日

week 1. Introduction

Interaction design paradigms:

Interaction design paradigms from Rung-Huei Liang

Critical Practice as a method of inquiry?
How to make good critical practice ?  Critical Practice
1. 社會科學的理路。(圖 1-1 主要典範基本信念)

   互動設計派典是是什麼?

2. Guba, E.G., & Lincoln, Y.S., Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research

3. Heron, J., & Reason, P. (1997). A Participatory Inquiry Paradigm. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 274-294

Questions:
1. What is "Participatory Design" in your impression?
2. What is Participatory Paradigm? (reading and discuss next week)
3. Participatory 派典與其他派典最大的不同為何?
4. What is Critical Design?

英國:
Dunne & Raby
Hertzian Tales

Matt Malpass
Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practice

美國:
Jeffrey Bardzell & Shaowen Bardzell
What is "critical" about critical design?
Humanistic HCI

北歐:
 Slow Technology
 Difficult Forms

Readings:


1. Paper reading (1/2)
2. Critical writing (1/4)
3. Critical design proposal (1/4)

Grading:
60 % Projects and reports
40 % homework presentation and discussions