Where the Action is (D-WTAI)
DOURISH, P.
Location In Research
An account of emerging trends within the computer interface design and development communities of "Tangible Computing" and of "Ubiqutous Computing" which are drawn with reference to Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology amongst other diciplines. Dourish describes his theory of a humanist approach to interface development as describing an "Embodied Interaction" after the embodied Phenomenology of amongst others Hursserl, Shultz, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the philosophy of Wittgenstien.
From this investigation Dourish outlines six design principals in which the theory of embodied interaction may be utilised.
These are:
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Computation is a medium (p.162)
The designer should pay attention to the type of communication going on and how it is taking place.
Dourish describes how meaning is communicated in an interaction over time and space but also through the practices which surround it.
Computation as a medium requires the system to allow users to see through it, to understand how the system modulates their actions and those of other users.
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Meaning arises on multiple levels (p.166)
Dourish describes how meaning arises around interface artefacts in three ways, firstly as objects in their own right, secondly as objects in the system of practice and thirdly as signifiers of some social meaning.
Representations can be Iconic (directly representative such as a map) or Symbolic (an abstract representation such as the numeral 1).
The meaning encoded into any interface representation also extends to the object, action or metaphor to which the representation refers.
The designer should be aware of this and strive to ensure that representations are used in a thoughtful manner.
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User, not designers, create and communicate meaning. (p.170)
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Users, not designers manage coupling. (p.170)
Dourish take these two principals on at once and so shall I.
Traditionally designers are responsible for the form and function of an artefact as well as how these are related. Secondly they are traditionally responsible for managing the set of activites users will engage with the artefact.
Responsibility for the artefact still rests with the designer or how else could it be located? However the responsibility for the way in which an artefact is used is negotiable. As a result of human intuition and adaptability artefact will be used and misused in any number of ways which a designer cannot possibly account for. So any artefact needs to provide an indication of it's probable use.
Systems need to be able to lend themselves to incorporation and appropriation into a set of working practices. The designer needs to be aware of how the system might offer its resources to this kind of appropriation.
The designer needs to focus on the ways in which a user might understand and employ a tool, how they may work on or through an artefact.
The system should provide useful feedback from any action.
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Embodied technologies participate in the world they represent. (p.177)
This principal stems from Heidegger and the asssertion that "Embodied Technologies" participate in the world they represent".
An embodied interaction is a technically mediated communicaion from the designer to the user and back. A mediation which can help make sense of a practice of work in the way that file system customisation application (p.182-183) was able to transalte between two users differing file system interpretations.
System design should anticipate and facilitate this kind of cementing within an established system of practice.
Embodied interaction turns action into meaning (p.183)
It turns action into meaning within the context of use (actually I'm struggling to see how this differs in implementation from Users, not designers create meaning. I'll emphasise the "in implementation" rather than in concept where it is markedly different).
Meaning resides not in the system but in the way the system is used.
Designers need to consider whether the user will be able to see an action or merely its consequenes.
The consequences, the context and the action itself all play a part in the meaning which is created within the interaction. This feeds off a similar set of phenomea as the discussion of the "war stories" discussed by the Xerox engineers and described in "The Social Life of Information". The source of process information is people, not machines.
A combination of intersubjectivity, meaning arises as a collective phenomena and ontology which describes affordance and so links to one major area of Donald Norman's discussions.
This book forms the foundation of a number of important elements of this project:
- From here and from "The Social Life of Information" come the need to utilise my own practice of research as a starting point when defining the actions and interactions possible within this web-application.
- Dourish's 6 principals outlined above form the basic structure into which ideas of how meaning may be created between reader and comic may be applied to the field of user interface design.
Notes
| Page | Type | Details | Notes On || Quotes On || Synopsis On |
|---|---|---|---|
| 160 | Quote |
The sequential organisation of interaction does not simply result from the "execution" of a formal plan in the users head, but instead arises from a process of continued response to the circumstances within which it is being produced - circumstances that include not only a set of prior expectations about likely actions, but also the outcome of earlier actions and the emergence of new concerns and opportunities. |
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| 186 | Quote |
Communities of practice share histories, identity, and meaning through their common orientation toward and participation in practical activies. |
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| 150-160?? | Synopsis |
Support the improved sequential action by giving users more direct control of how activity is managed. Perhaps by organising the interaction as an informal assemblage of steps rather than a rote procedure driven by the system. Support the process of improvised, situated action by making the immediate circumstances of the work more visible. The system should make information available to guide the user from minute to minute. Any action fits into a wider scheme of ongoing activity. Inside a community of practice which provides it's members with a set of common orientations and expectations, fluid but persistant over time. |
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| 158-159 | Synopsis |
Of paramount importance is the socially constructed setting in which the interaction takes place. |
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| No page set | Notes |
As a software process is located in a human process which is located in a human environment and culture. From this arrives the method of storyboarding this process to arrive at a control representation. By examining the storyboard and removing the elements which can be suggested by proximity to the remainer a single subject representation can be arrived at. |
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| No page set | Notes |
Controls need to reveal themselves within both the users' sphere of experience and also within the culture of the specific task they are engaged in assisting with. In this respect visual controls are better able to suggest a process through the comic book device of proximity as discussed by Scott McCloud. The human drive to form meaning through visual proximity and intuition is discussed by Wolfgang Kohler. By contrast, written language is alienating when it begins to contain unfamilar terms. |
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| No page set | Notes |
Traditional software development approaches to user interface design tend towards a representation of contols, process and data that is borne directly from the computational processes they represent - hence the almost ubiqutous usage of wizards. In fact simply providing the tools and context is enough. Any participant in this interaction needs to be given space to improvise. |
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Book / Article Details
| Title: | Where the Action is |
|---|---|
| Author: | Paul Dourish |
| Publishers: | USA: MIT Press |
| First Published: | 2001 |
| ISBN: | 0-262-04196-0 |
| Research Ref: | D-WTAI |