This is also the case with “Chindogu”. Their individual
elements are recognizable, but the reason for combining them is at first bewildering.
The meaning behind the object is derived from “sense-fiction”: the objects
make functional sense, but are still useless.
Forbidden Emotions: Para-functionality and Design
In a field where “product design is thoroughly integrated in capitalist production, [and] bereft of an independent critical tradition on which to base an alternative,” only a few
designers use the function of products as criticism.
在產品設計完全整合在資本主義產製的領域，失去了獨立批判的傳統，只有一些設計師使用產品功能作為批判。
...what Baudrillard has called the “crisis of functionalism.”
Baudrillard (1981) argues that the acceptance of functionalism as an arbitrary
but dominant rationality gave rise to an irrational counter-discourse that
moves between the two poles of kitsch (庸俗作品) and surrealism:
The surrealist object emerges at the same epoch as the functional object, as its derision (嘲笑)
and transgression. Although they are overtly dys- or para-functional, these phantasmic (幻想的)
objects nevertheless presuppose—albeit in a contradictory sense—the advent of functionality
as the universal moral law of the object, and the advent of this object itself, separated,
autonomous and dedicated to the transparency of its function. When one ponders
it, there is something unreal and almost surreal in the fact of reducing an object to its
function: and it suffices to push this principle of functionality to the limit to make its
absurdity emerge. This is evident in the case of the toaster, iron or “undiscoverable objects”
Heterotopian Gadgets: Para-functionality and Art Objects
異托邦工具
The heterotopia
described by Michel Foucault (1970) illustrates what a literary gadget
might be like:
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic,
untroubled region in which they are able to unfold;... Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax which causes words and things (next to and also one another) to “hold together.”
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
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."
"By definition, critical dialogue is the ongoing “collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that comprise everyday life,” (Schein, 1993)."
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)
"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)
EX 1. short essay
Critically introduce "InTouch" project with three paradigms respectively. (including 1st, 2nd, 3rd paradigms, at least 500 words in total) Deadline 2025/9/22
You may also include the 4th paradigm (the next wave) to criticize the work.
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?
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