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