come dice Frank “iconografia hells angels“ per Mike Giant

Although the video makes its points through a degree of exaggeration, the history of the stop sign in the United States does reflect some of the uncertainties depicted.

Add to del.icio.us

As Adam observes, ethnography was one of the first new methods incorporated by design research to meet these challenges in the market. However, he thinks ethnography is, on its own, unable to provide the kind of information needed to validate product and service ideas across wide audiences. He notes: 

Ethnography breaks down at the moment we ask not just for depth of knowledge, but breadth. Anyone who’s struggled to conduct a massive ethnographic study across multiple time zones can tell you this firsthand. While ethnography facilitates the generation of ideas in relation to specific users and use scenarios, it leaves us clueless as to which among these will satisfy a wider audience. Ultimately, we need complementary methods that scale more effectively and validate our work in a way clients can understand. What we need is quantitative research...

But how? Just as ethnography borrowed heavily from academia while applying a looser, more liberal lens, quantitative research can be similarly engaged. When individual observations can be contextualized within a data-driven knowledge of the market at hand, designers can have the best of both worlds. And there are many analytical tools that work well in this context. Segmentation analysis can be used to challenge thinking around current and prospective users, sorting consumers into salient, sometimes unexpected groups that hold together based on survey data – groups that defy traditional demographic segments can be linked by more relevant factors, such as behavioral patterns or attitudes towards technology.

Adam makes several very good points in his analysis of what quantitative methods can bring to design research. Though he recognizes the importance of sustaining a focus on users, I suggest that Adam's discussion does not give enough explicit recognition to the role of empathy in maintaining a productive relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in research for experience design. Making methods serve empathic purpose in the design of products and services is a key underlying principle, regardless of the quantitative or qualitative nature of the techniques.

Consider the project example Adam offers involving a redesign of a corporate Intranet for a Fortune 500 company. 

Without the ability to individually question the organization’s hundreds of thousands of employees, spread across some thirty countries, we did the next best thing: we interviewed 10,000 of them online. We asked them what was wrong with their current Intranet experience. What did they love? What did they hate? How could things be better? We did an online “card sort” in which we asked users to prioritize the content that mattered to them, then posed a series of free-response questions, in which they could say whatever they wanted.

Without knowing the strategic purpose behind the project it is difficult to gauge whether a traditional ethnographic approach might have worked as well as the methods chosen. Adam's point seems to assume a need to interview all employees for ethnography to work well. I don't think most ethnographers would agree that the expectation is either realistic or necessary for the participant observer method to provide effective results. Adam's critique also seems misplaced unless the 10,000 online interviews resulted from random sampling, which he does not say. Regardless of the answer, I suggest that either approach can incorporate principled empathic consideration for the meaningful experiences of the users of the Intranet.

Adam obviously recognizes the point made in the last paragraph since the techniques taken at the front of the project, before applying quantitative analysis to the data, were informed by an empathic concern for those using the Intranet, though Adam doesn't explicitly take note of it. The questions the team asked tapped into the meaningful experience of those users, and the online "card sort" provided additional qualitative information. Whether participant observation with carefully chosen ethnographic subjects might produce the same insights is a fair question. After all, Adam urges design researchers not to get hung up on the academic roots and concerns of quantitative methods, such as sampling, reliability, validity, etc. And I really do agree with his point on that issue.

Once the Intranet project collected all the responses to its open-ended questions from the online survey, Adam notes that:

We then tapped a vendor to break this sentence-level data into quantitative codes, creating a massive tally for common response themes like “It’s slow” or “I can’t find what I’m looking for.” Once we were able to look at this feedback quantitatively, common themes emerged...Some insights were limited to specific regions or business units, while others resonated with nearly all respondents, revealing the unique considerations of various user groups within the organization. Together, we synthesized 4,000 pages of tabs into fifteen slides, weaving in insights from secondary research, stakeholder interviews, industry best practices, and our own perspective to make a strategic recommendation to the client. When possible, we showed quantitative responses side-by-side with quotes from respondents to illustrate nuance and context while summarizing key themes.

It seems to me that the importance of the approach Adam advocates for using quantitative data in design research does not come down to traditional academic concerns about whether the results reliability predict this or that outcome from proposed design changes. Gerald Zaltman made a similar point in How Customers Think, noting that, "the various pieces of information that we gather through statistics, personal observations, and other data sources...are all stimuli that influence out thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. By viewing data in this way, most managers suddenly see the value of collecting multiple kinds of data" (p. 275).

Data don't speak for themselves, as much as stimulate meaningful conversations between design research, users/customers, and client management. Those conversations can result in interpretations that make a difference for the design of products and services offered by the business. In my reading, this is the main point offered in Adam's article. And it is a key point to make. I suggest that design practice works best when the research team doesn't choose between artistic and scientific techniques, whether qualitative or quantitative. The most effective design practice crafts a meaningful experience for users/customers from the tension between the two (art/science), and offers insights managers can relate to regarding the likely benefits for the business, e.g. ROI, time to market, product differentiation, cost containment, market share, etc.

Thanks to Mark at Putting People First for the pointer to Adam's article.

Add to del.icio.us

The essence of rich internet applications

An experience planner's blog

The doors were closed as we built the feature set to a sensible point, but now they're open!

Got to getcloser.com and start to play. If you just want to see what it's about you can visit the tour here without having to register.

The site is aimed music and film fans who like collecting, who want to broaden their knowledge and deepen their relationship with the things they love. It's also aimed at aficionados, those that are domain experts, music and film creators and people who just want to be in the know.

For the past year LBi have been working with HMV to conceive, build, seed and launch their new social property getcloser.com. It's a beta, so there is still lots to do, the data and product catalogue that sits behind it needs a little work, but it's now ready to unleash on the world so that the community can start driving the development, helping add content, improving the tags, data, descriptions etc..

I won't go into the details as to what the site does etc, the tour can do that, but what I will say is this; it's been one of the most enjoyable projects I've ever worked on. Building a community of this type has it's usual design challenges, not least that you need to build a community and to do that you need content, but you need content from the community!

HMV have been a fantastic client and the LBi team have been awesome. We used an agile development methodology that saw us release features every 2-4 weeks, slowly build a community, user test, evolve, sharpen.

As I say, there is lots to do though not just with the website as the idea behind getcloser translates to many channels; in store, on mobile and others. It will plug into existing social properties, blog tools and the desktop.

The relationship with HMV has been brilliant, long may it continue,

I very much look forward to taking Getcloser forward, but now it's live it's 'hand's off the steering wheel' as my colleague Stephen Barber would say, to see how people respond to it. We'll be making hot fixes and planning a new set of features that aid the tools there already, as well as developing new ones.

In Part 5 of this series (which more or less begins here), I sampled writings about designs from various design magazines to show examples of ways that people write about design. In it, I showed that people actually talk about design in some very diverse ways, and yet each of these ways was accepted and even used in more or less similar ways. For example, some people talk about the internal language of a design, while others talk about the design as an instance of a movement (e.g., modernism), while others describe the design's effect on the user-viewer-reader. In saying this, I am repeating an idea developed in a paper presented this year at alt.chi that I wrote with Shaowen Bardzell, "Interaction Criticism: A Proposal and Framework for a New Discipline of HCI." In it, we argued that criticism typically derives from one or more of the following core directions:

• Designer-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a product of its creator.
• Artifact-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as possessing its own "internal language" or aesthetic/functional value, and explicating what that artifact means (in itself)
• User-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a prompt that causes certain effects in the mind or experience of the user
• Sociocultural-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a part of a broader sociocultural movement, such as "bauhaus" or "Soviet" design

What I'd like to do in this post is show some examples of this kind of criticism in "serious" design discourse, by which I mean academic essays (as opposed to the magazine reviews in Part 5). As always, a goal of this entire series of posts is to demonstrate that interaction criticism offers a point of view, a type of insight, a series of methods, and (more fundamentally) an epistemological stance that differs from a scientific one. I do not here need to privilege a scientific versus critical or "designerly" stance over the other. It is sufficient to show that they have different methods, ends, and standards of rigor. The historically scientific HCI community is now openly seeking more designerly ways of knowing, and I am simply responding to that request.

The Designer-Centric Approach

I have approached this topic in the past by looking at theories about professionals/designers, especially the work of Donald Shön and those who have developed his line of thinking in design, such as (full disclosure: my program director) Erik Stolterman. But I want to get away from theory and show some examples. So here I will talk about an essay by Michael Bierut on one of his mentors and former employers, Massimo Vignelli, entitled, "Massimo Vignelli's Pencil." As before, I will string some quotes together for you and then talk a little about them afterward:

Unlike many designers, he didn't mind being imitated. On the contrary, he prided himself on creating solutions that could be replicated, systems that were so foolproof anyone could do them.... [He seemed to want to] enlist an army of disciples to design the world in his image....

[He was] [a]lways optimistic, never cynical.... Even creating something as simple as a business card ... would require sketch after sketch as Massimo tried to coax a few trusted elements and a famously limited palette of typefaces into some surprising new form....

[His singular] passion is what many of Vignelli's critics miss when they group him with a generation of designers dedicated to a sterile brand of modernism. To be sure, he always argued for functionalism and clarity. But the rationalism of modernism requires absolute self-control.... Instead, Massimo's signature gestures--the expressionistic black stripes in the print work, the surreal contrasts of scale in the architecture, the inevitable intrusion of sensuality in the product design--were utterly intuitive, almost indulgent, and clearly as impossible for him to resist as breathing.

[Years later, the author revisits Vignelli's studio, after Vignelli has left it, and decided to leave a note for him, on Vignelli's desk, and using the master's signature pencil.] I picked up the pencil to leave a note and the familiarity of the sensation shocked me: I had switched to easier to find (and easier to lose) cheap black pens a long time ago. And when I looked at what I had written, I noticed something funny about the handwriting. It looked just like Massimo's.

This is a beautiful essay and I get goosebumps just retyping its closing words! What a lovely tribute! But that's not my purpose here.

I'd like to say a few things about the rhetoric of this piece. It talks about Vignelli as a designer, saying a few things about his philosophy and personal style. It continues to talk about how he fit into the dominant design stylistic movements of his age (the business about modernism), the particular characteristics of his work (his expressive indulgence), and how he has affected the author as someone familiar with his work. In short, this essay hits on all four points of design.

I call this designer-centered criticism, though, because the designer trascends the other three categories. Yes, you can call him a modernist, the author writes, but he's bigger than modernism; indeed, Vignelli transcends modernism exactly where modernism is itself weak. The designer stands as a critique to all of modernism. You can also talk about the particular features of his design--the expressive lines, the sensuality of its scale--but these are just signifiers of the designer behind them. He is not defined by these features; he, in his personality, biography, and beliefs, causes and defines them. Finally, the author goes so far as to suggest that he, and by implication his design work, is derivative of his former master. In other words, Vignelli didn't merely influence the author; the designer gave the author his very voice, and the authors works are in some important sense also Vignelli's.

Artifact-Centered Criticism

Here, I want to talk about a pretty well known essay in design circles: Richard Buchanon's "Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice," originally written in 1985, and (sadly) only now having a chance to get its message into HCI. I cannot do this article justice here, because it features a multilayered argument about technology and design that is rich beyond what I can do in few paragraphs. So I will stick to its core argument: design is a form of rhetoric.

[R]hetoric is an art of shaping society, changing the course of individuals and communities, and setting patterns for new action.... The primary obstacle to [understanding the design of technology as rhetoric] is the belief that technology is essentially part of science, following all of the same necessities as nature and scientific reasoning. If this is true, technology cannot be part of design rhetoric, except as a preformed message to be decorated and passively transmitted.... However, if technology is in some fundamental sense concerned with the probably rather than the necessary--with the contingencies of practical use and action, rather than the certainties of scientific principle--then it becomes rhetorical in a startling fashion. It becomes an art of deliberation about the issues of practical action.

[Buchanan moves onto the nature of the design argument:] the designer [is] a speaker who fashions a world, however small or large, and invites others to share in it.... This article suggests that the designer, instead of simply making an object or a thing, is actually creating a persuasive argument that comes to life whenever a user considers or uses a product as a means to some end.

In a lengthy and well illustrated and exemplified argument that follows, Buchanan says that a design argument involves "the interrelated qualities of technological reasoning, character, and emotion, all of which provide the substance and form of design communication." I paraphrase what he means by each of these below. (Incidentally, Buchanan's division here is adopted fairly literally from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which comforts me in its familiarity and authority, and concerns me in its, um, not-exactly-up-to-dateness.)

Technological reasoning is both the "how it actually works" of a design (from a spoon to a coffee grinder) to how the design communicates how it works (reveals, obfuscates, simplifies, metaphorically suggests, pseudo-reveals, etc.). A steering wheel gives me a sense of how a car turns, while the meaning of the "Publish" button on this blog software has a more distant relation to what happens behind the scenes when I click it.

Character reflects the designer, or more precisely, how the designer wants to appear in the design. Whether a design is playful, modest, utilitarian, ostentatious, user-friendly, avant-garde, etc., all get at its character. The difference between, say, a BMW and a Volkswagon is not merely a matter of engineering (the technological reasoning), but also the character the cars project on us.

Emotion (or pathos) refers to the way that a design connects to its user. Buchanan here emphasizes movement and lines and the way they beckon a user to touch, interact with, and relate to designs. He explicitly rejects exploitative or "coercive" emotion--such as (these are my examples) pictures of grotesque human corpses as a technique for engaging in the abortion or Iraq war debates. Instead, good designs serve practical human life in emotionally engaging and desirable ways.

Stepping back and looking at Buchanan's argument, he is focusing entirely on design artifacts, claiming that embedded in these artifacts is an internal language that makes an argument to users to partake in its vision of practical life. Certainly, this reflects the intentions of the designer; the sociocultural contexts of design, distribution, and use; and the interpretation and appropriation of the design by its user. But all of these are secondary, in some important sense embedded in and a consequence of the design argument presented by the artifact itself.

User-Centric Approaches

I wrote quite a bit about this in Part 5 of this series. Indeed, I had something of a personal breakthrough, in distinguishing between empirical, historical, actual, flesh-and-blood people as "users," and what I think I'll call the "hermeneutic user," that is, the "user" as a discursive construct created by the critic as a way to explore ways that humans deeply and subjectively respond to the experience of interacting with a design. This hermeneutic user is tied to notions of the "reader" from semiotics, which argues in some sense that a text not only contains "codes" that provide access to its content, but also "codes" that tell one how to be that text's ideal reader.

This is akin to the approach taken by Ann C. Tyler in "Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience in Visual Communication." She begins the piece by saying that she is continuing the rhetoric approach of Buchanan (described just above), but to me, she actually takes it in a different direction. Her essay emphasizes the interpretive process of the viewer of several posters. For example, she describes two 1972 airline travel posters, promoting travel to Asia.

The PanAm images are architectural in nature: the terraced land [of gardens in Bali] forms a contrasting figure/ground pattern; the two people standing with their backs to the audience become shapes against the sky. People and land become objects of beauty. Distanced from the scene through perspective and the lack of any reference back to the viewer, the audience thus remains "outside" a beautiful, tranquil scene. Landscape and people are frozen in time for the audience to view as they choose--as in a museum of artifacts. Both posters promise the audience an esthetic, non-participatory experience if they travel to these distant lands.

The rhythm of Tyler's rhetoric is like that of a tide coming in. Back-and-forth it goes between talking about objective features of the artifact and the response in the viewer. But with each back and forth, it inches ever toward the meaning in the interpretation of the viewer. As I asked in the previous post, just who is this viewer? It is the hermeneutic viewer; she is not talking about a survey of actual viewers but is rather using a hypothetical viewer as a strategy to explicate what the artifacts mean in the phenomenal world of humans that see these posters (as opposed to the posters in-themselves).

Sociocultural-Centered Criticism

This last category is perhaps the broadest. Whereas designer-centered criticism is often biographic, and artifact- and user-centered criticism are often rhetorical or semiotic, sociocultural-centered criticism borrows much from cultural studies, including art criticism, literary criticism, Marxism, feminism, new historicism, and a host of others.

For this section, I'll talk about an essay written by Tony Fry, "A Geography of Power: Design History and Marginality." He begins the essay with a fairly theory-heavy frame:

Design history is understood here as various and competing explanatory models of design. As with other emergent and established forms of institutionalized knowledge and practice, it exists in and produces conditions of marginality. The aim of this paper is to explore such conditions in the context of the rise of design in Australia.

It is not particularly uncommon for sociocultural-centered design criticism to be theory-heavy, given the vastness and sheer complexity of its subject. Obviously, the scope of the semantics of a juicer arm and the that of the entire history and institutionalization of design in Australia are on a different scale. And, to be fair, this article of all of the ones I include in this post is the most theoretical. But it does contain sections of criticism. Here is one of them:

Design, even prior to the management of a design profession, intervened to undercut the formation of a modern Australia as a discordant bricolage. Appropriation [of imported design materials and processes from the United States and Europe] was organized but not within a systemic plan. There was neither total chaos nor directed order but a pragmatic falling together of fragments. The disparate arrival of Ford [Motor Company] and Fordism [the industrial assembly line] is one contained example of this history.

The first Ford car was brought to Australia in 1904. Commercial importing began in 1909 with the Model T. As sales increased, an ad hoc system of distribution became locally established. Because of corrupt and profiteering practices that grew up around this network, the Ford company refused to trade with it and set up its own local administrative and distribution system instead. Ford Australia was formed in 1925. Fordism, however, was an industrial system of mass production based on the in-line assembly of interchangeable parts, arrived in Australia a year earlier. A Sydney-based manufacturer of compressers introduced such a method to its factory in 1924.... Product design and advertised image (the symbolic forms) were drawn from the USA. Here, then, was a mixture of appropriation and imposition, order, disunity, and disorder, and the object (the car, its system of production and distribution, and its symbolic form) as a sign of modernity. All of this adds up to one example of a local sign of a particular conjuncture and paradigm of modernity--"Americanism and Fordism" in Australia.

In this passage, we are understanding design from the twin lenses of theory and history, focusing on the twenty year period in which Ford and Fordism--which had emerged practically simultaneously in the United States--spills into Australia in non-systematic, non-random ways. The historical circumstances, in this passage, appear to overwhelm the design. In other words, the intentions of any individual designers are so tiny that they don't even register here. The product semantics of the cars and their reception by Australians are also dwarfed by the sheer cultural force of the assembly line and the Model T Ford.

Conclusion

I hope through these examples my readers, in particular those with scientific backgrounds who are hoping to appropriate more "designerly ways of knowing" (a phrase I keep using that also is the title of a wonderful book), are able to see how criticism both differs from science and yet has its own rigor. Obviously, Tony Fry had to master his history before he could develop his theory and criticism of Australian design history. Buchanan knew his Aristotle and yet had the intellectual creativity to appropriate it for design and make it mean something (not only is his essay great for anyone interested in design, but he also leverages it to offer a compelling argument for designerly approaches to technology). Tyler's comfortable mastery of rhetoric and semiotics, though not explicitly shoved down the reader's throat, is evident in her incisive ability to apply it so fruitfully in her interpretations of graphic designs. And Bierut's reflective and articulate ability to tease out what made both his master's and his own creative sensibilities tick is a model for anyone who wants to understand how designers analyze creativity, a rich mix of personal psychology, philosophy, anecdote, taste, and embodied gesture.

What started as a blog post is turning into a paper. I need to wind this down. I will post some readings here just to conclude it, but it may be a week to ten days before that happens. But the main argument, and my core purpose for beginning this, is, for better or worse, finished here. Thanks for bearing with its length and please share critical comments, because its next iteration will be peer reviewed! (One must make a case for tenure, after all!)

The more I immerse myself in readings that explicitly call themselves "design" (e.g., architecture, visual/graphic design, fashion, product design, interior design), the more obvious to me that certain forms of interaction "design" don't resemble design at all. I have considered writing a post (or maybe even a paper) explaining why "game design" is not "design" at all, by showing its intellectual roots, methodologies, and above all slightly depressing history of copycatting (99% of games) and deifying those very few that have had original ideas ("ZOMG Will Wright is a genius"). (I respect Will Wright, but romanticizing him as some Achilles of intellection is a cop-out.) Game "design" needs to move beyond the idolatry of the auteur, and at least one way to do so is to connect itself more rigorously to the field of design than it currently does. </rant>

I'll settle for a more modest focus today. This morning, I read a paper by Roger Scruton, noted British philosopher of aesthetics. Now, I'm normally not a big fan of his; he's hostile to the continental philosophy that has shaped my ways of thinking. But he's no slouch, and in the article I read, "Judging Architecture," he was grappling with an idea that I care very much about: demonstrating that aesthetic judgments are not anything-goes subjectivism, but are in fact grounded in rationality. After reading so many scientific papers (which are structured as a straightforward narrative of a study design, its results, and a deliberately narrow interpretation of the data), it was refreshing to read a truly philosophical argument concerning reasoning about judging architecture.

In the essay, Scruton carefully distinguishes among a number of key concepts: chief among them are taste, judgment, experience, preference, and rational thought. I didn't necessarily agree with his treatment of them all, but I sincerely appreciated the fact that he treated each of them with intellectual rigor.

After I read, I had a brief conversation with Erik Stolterman, and we discussed the absence of most of these terms in the field of interaction "design." Interaction design, as a field, has developed only the concepts of reason and (recently) experience from that list. The rest of the terms--taste, preference, and judgment--don't come up seriously in HCI literature. When I bring them up in papers, I inevitably get some smack-down from a reviewer that these ideas are "just subjective."

Scruton opens his essay attacking this position (that taste is all subjective and isn't worth arguing about) as indefensible. In his introduction, he writes,

Our [aesthetic] preference means something more to us than mere pleasure or satisfaction. It is the outcome of thought and education; it is expressive of moral, religious, and political feelings, of an entire Weltanschuuang, with which our identity is mingled.

Taste here is both based in human rationality (i.e., it is not irrational) and in education (i.e., it is intersubjective, not individual). So if taste is rational (not completely arbitrary) and shared by groups of users, it is something that interaction designers ought to care very much about. Other designers obviously do. Yet reviewing the previous paragraph of key words, the only one that traditional HCI cares about is "satisfaction"--one of the two terms Scruton rejects with a contemptuous "merely." The rest of the categories, which arguably are the most important in our lives, don't yet register: socio-cultural morality, an intersubjective world-view, and our identity itself.

There are objective and empirical aspects of a domain that obviously have huge importance for interaction designers, and social science research methods can be extremely effective at getting at them. But there are other aspects of a domain that require interpretation: identity, beauty, taste, morality, judgment among them. Why not turn to disciplines, especially sister design disciplines, that have developed rigorous approaches to dealing with them?

Last week I posted Part 4 in my series on Interaction Criticism. Since then, I have read many more examples of design criticism, and so I want to expand on what I wrote in Part 4 with a bonus post.

First, I'd like to revise something I wrote in the last edition:

magazine critiques are not academic and they are generally very positive (even gushing–I think one of their cultural functions is an intellectualized form of marketing and promotion, but I’m going to leave that alone for now).

It remains true that most of what I am writing about comes from magazines, and not peer reviewed journals, so I don't want to lose sight of that context. That said, the "gushing" I referred to was not quite right. After flipping through a bunch of magazines again, I realized that I needed to distinguish between features and reviews.

Now, feature articles do lots of gushing. I think their underlying claim is, "this is an exemplary design, which everyone in the field would probably appreciate as an excellent example." Of course, identifying and being able to make use of excellent examples is a very important aspect of being a designer and a design critic, so there is nothing particular dubious about this stance.

That said, I've seen lots of more negative writing, and that is in the review sections. Not all magazines have reviews, but those that do critique design in a much more traditional sense, as in the following excerpt from a review of a new type face, called Emmy, written by Step Inside Design magazine's Hermann Puterschein:

Emmy isn't elegant, certainly isn't sophisticated, and it's not even very pretty. It does, however, have an honest, childlike charm.

Obviously, this--and most of Puterschein's and others' reviews--is not gushing!

I will continue to maintain, though, that design features and design reviews, though they tend to differ in tone, both commonly orient themselves to offering rational explanations of the je ne sais quoi of a design, its organic unity, its chic + useful innovation, and so on. One difference, though, and this is visible in the Puterschein quote just above, is that reviews critique the extent to which a design achieves these goals, and the extent to which in (not) doing so it is (not) of use to designers; in contrast, the features tend to take the affirmative as a given, and explicate how so.

So, to try to get a closer look at specifically critical language, I suspended feature articles from consideration and focused exclusively on reviews. I highlighted passages that struck me as interesting, in one way or another, from the point of view of importing design criticism into HCI. Put another way, I tried to find things that a design critic might say that (a) is of some value to me as a designer and (b) is something a social scientist practicing social science probably would not say. In that way, I could start to tease out contributions from criticism that can complement (but not replace) contributions from social science.

This post presents a number of those quotes and the reasons I found them interesting.

I'll start again with Puterschein, this time on a type face called ITC Intro:

Its tall ascenders and sweeping descenders give the design an elegant and sophisticated aura, but there's also a brushy, almost dashed-off quality to the script.... The design abounds with distinctive character shapes, from the unusual tail of the q to the baseline curve of the I to the loosely curved stroke of the g.... [The type face] has energy and movement, as if the brush that drew it was just lifted from the page.... Its sinuous capitals could easily double as initial letters; combine them with an Old Style text face and the results will be striking.... Also, because it is unusual, Intro should be used sparingly.... Use Intro for brief headlines or for a handful of words on an invitation or poster.

There are a number of different types of statements here. Some get at a very subjective reaction on the part of the critic; "aura," "almost dashed-off," "energy and movement"--the critic is interpreting the type face. His interpretation would be difficult to validate empirically, and yet any of his readers seeing the type face would at the very least understand where he is coming from. He does substantiate his interpretation by pointing to very specific elements of the artifact, such as descenders and baseline curves. Finally, he orients the review to design, by prescribing ways that designers can use this type face (and presumably ones like it) well, that is, in their own designs, which themselves aspire to organic unity, gestalt, a je ne sais quoi, etc. Thus, in spite of the different sorts of statements, none of them ventures far from the orienting goal of offering a rational, though not empirically validated, explanation of one's subjective, yet expert, response to the artifact.

Such strategies are not anomalies, but in fact are quite common in design writing. Here is Daniel Jewesbury writing a review of an exhibition of Darren Almond's photography, this one from Source magazine.

Darren Almond's series of moonlit landscapes, which suggestively reference ... prehistory and mythology, are made using long exposures under the light of a full moon.... In fact, they're not straightforward "moonlit" scenes at all...; in these brightly-illuminated views, both time and space are made strange.... Most obviously, the details of his images are rendered soft by the exposure time.... In certain cases, the image looks as if it might have been made through gauze, and the softness is reminiscent of painting.... There are also unexpected shifts in the colour spectrum....

This passage (and I obviously edited it down quite a bit) shows a relentless to-and-fro between an ineffable visual effect Jewesbury is trying to describe, and the production technique used to cause it. At the interpretive extreme are global metaphors: myth and prehistory. We then have specific explanations of a photographic technique. Finally, we have intermediary metaphors, which help bridge between objective technique and subjective interpretations: made as if it was shot through gauze or maybe like painting. This attempt to rationally explain a culturally complex subjective interpretation is at the heart of criticism.

So far, my examples have emphasized relationships between the form of a design and its meaning. Indeed, this is a common strategy in all criticism that I have ever seen; doing it well requires expertise in both the formal realm of the design (especially technique) and the cultural significance of that artifact's whole field of design.

But there are other strategies, such as this one, written by Nancy Roth (also in Source) about an exhibition of photographs by Hans-Peter Feldman featuring 101 photographs of people, one each at 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years ... 100 years old.

The photographs are hung in a single horizontal line, in order of increasing age, so that a visitor looks at them one after the other, at a tempo that generates the idea of a biography. And suddenly, it becomes clear that the specific details of these photographs matter much less than their success in building, out of such simple materials, the very abstract idea of "a life." More generally, one begins to wonder whether in fact Feldman uses photography to propose mental events--to re-enact the process of building complex concepts out of many concrete instances.

I spent a long time on this passage. I originally marked it as an example of criticism focused on the user (in this case, the viewer). That is, the whole passage is not based on the artifacts themselves, nor does it tell us about the photographer. The orientation of this passage is the mental process of the viewer. As someone trained in comparative literature, I have written many passages about the effect of XYZ on the reader, and what the reader realizes as she reflects on Proust's use of X, or the depiction of Y in Milton's Paradise Lost. etc. This form of criticism is very familiar to me.

What gave me pause, having spent a couple years among social scientists, was this: just who is this viewer that is having this mental process Roth describes? Is Roth suggesting that these photographs cause this particular sequence of thoughts in viewers? If we interviewed 100 viewers of this exhibit, would a statistically significant sample of them describe their thought processes like this? Because if the answer is no, and it surely is no, isn't this just the kind of fuzzy and muddled thinking that social scientists so stridently object to? Taken literally, Roth's statement probably is borderline nonsense. To "restore" it as legitimate knowledge in the scientific sense, we probably would need to do a hundred interviews (indeed, this is exactly what Czikszentmihalyi and Robinson did in their work on the psychology of aesthetics).

But there is nuance to this; Roth is writing in a short-hand that people trained in design and the humanities recognize. Roth is not talking about a sample of viewers. Roth is talking about herself, but she is doing so in a special way. She is not talking about herself as an ordinary human being, with parents, perhaps children and siblings, favorite colors, fetishes and phobias, and so forth. Rather, she is talking about her reaction as a professional critic, as someone who is highly trained in interpreting cultural artifacts, such as art photography. She is saying something like this: "Someone with a background in photography and criticism, who is immersed in this culture, who knows its history and has seen thousands of similar examples, might have the following chain of thoughts when experiencing, appreciating, and reading this collection of art: ..." That's cumbersome, hence the rhetorical stand-in of the hypothetical "viewer" who has all these thoughts.

What I'm saying is that Roth is modeling the act of reading these photographs. She is not representing an empirical state of affairs (e.g., the "content" of the photographs that she has "decoded"); she is showing us a way to think productively about a complex cultural artifact, which (once again) ties objective characteristics of the design (such as the number of paintings and their linear arrangement) to the subjective yet productive (critical, inspirational) responses and readings that afficionados and professionals have to these.

So far, I have shown lots of artifact-centric examples, and a non-empirical user-centered example, all of which are common in design, art, literary, and music criticism, if not HCI. Here is an example of a different type of strategy, a socio-cultural strategy, from David Evans, reviewing an exhibition by Alexander Rodchenko for Source magazine:

[The Rothchenko collection in this exhibition] is a Postcommunist perspective not in the sense that it seeks to divorce aesthetics and politics, but in the sense that it assumes, like Eric Hobsbawm, that the Soviet era is well and truly over. Only now, it seems, can Rodchenko be appreciated as a specifically Russian master.

I don't know enough about 20th century Russian photography to say anything sensible about this argument itself. But I will point out a formal characteristic: artifacts here are interpreted as belonging to a corpus of an individual photographer, and he himself is interpreted vis-a-vis his participation in historical cultural styles that are themselves entangled with each other: Communist style, Postcommunist style, and Russian style. Don't ask me what distinguishes these three (except the fact that in Communist style, aesthetics and politics are apparently "married"), but each style is a lens through which to interpret certain photographers, and through them, their works. When making this kind of argument, the elements that make up a photograph (e.g., the article cites his subject matter, captions, and subtitles) are meaningful not in themselves, but rather as typical or atypical of a socio-cultural-historical movement--in this case, the tension between communism and Russian national identity during the twentieth century. The viewer is not foregrounded here--the viewer hardly exists at all! So again, we have a different lens for criticism by looking at designs and designers as symptoms of a particular era or cultural context.

I have one last example to share. This is from Colin Graham's review of an exhibition by Irish photographer Bill Doyle (Source magazine):

Doyle's gently photojournalistic eye looks at Dublin, over several decades, with an urban lyricism that tends to see the best even in the worst of the city. His Aran Islands are a spare, heroic, masculine place, and are treated with reverence.

Doyle's street photography is recognisably in the tradition of European photography, though the sharpness and self-reflexivity of, say, Cartier-Bresson's irony, is not readily apparent in Doyle's work. Perhaps a more important influence on his work is early- to mid-twentieth century American urban photography in the vein of Strand or Walker Evans....

The approach here does not closely read individual photographs, nor does it particularly emphasize production technique. Instead, talks about a collection of photographs' collective style. This style, though, itself is described less as a set of explicitly named formal features, and instead is described as the embodiments of individual photographers' oeuvres. If you, like me, don't know what Cartier-Bresson's irony looked like before you read that paragraph, you're not any wiser after reading it, either. Here, Cartier-Bresson isn't an historical individual, who was born in such-and-such a year; Cartier-Bresson is shorthand, the name of a style.

So in this type of critique, design is made by individual artists, and these artists participate in networks of other artists. The artists themselves embody (and give name to) certain styles. If you know those people and their styles, then these sentences probably are quite meaningful.

I also want to point out the opening sentence, which I'll repeat here: "Doyle's gently photojournalistic eye looks at Dublin, over several decades, with an urban lyricism that tends to see the best even in the worst of the city." What exactly does "gently photojournalistic eye" mean? How about "urban lyricism"? What is the "best" and "worst" of the city? How can, as the next sentence asserts, an island be "masculine"? Taken literally, this sentence is nonsense. I certainly would not want those as coding categories for a visual analysis of a collection of Flickr images. Perhaps they could be operationalized in a way that would make such a study possible--but that operationalization is not offered here! Instead, what is offered is an educated, subjective response, and then a string of rich associations, metaphors, and comparisons, which to the right audience (in this case, I'm afraid I'm not really in it) is evocative and ultimately verbally expressive of the most subtle and nuanced aspects of this art.

Evocative descriptions are certainly a contribution to our understanding of these design and/or art works. And evocation can come from many places--the artifact itself and its internal language, the history of production and design choices, the genealogy of design styles, the interpretive process of a work's community, and even the national origin, gender, race, or ethnicity of the designer, the critic, and/or the viewer. Their contribution is to expand our own capacity to appreciate the cultural, semantic, formal, emotional (etc) complexity of human interaction through and with art and design--and not just appreciate it, but begin to articulate it.

If we can't, or don't bother to, articulate these responses, how can we evaluate, teach, or improve design beyond easily measurable features, such as usability, and get at what we ultimately care about most, which is human experience, enlightenment, social bonding, identity and belonging, magnanimity, and empathy, to name a few?

Continue to Part 6.

Links:

Viewzi

Vídeo sobre o produto

]]> http://interactionculture.wordpress.com/?p=534 Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:28:06 +0000 jeffreybardzell http://interactionculture.wordpress.com/?p=534 Produce a Critique, Or, What and How to Write

Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I apologize that it has taken a week to resume writing in this series. Part of the problem was a very busy week, but another part of it was that I wasn't quite as sure what I wanted to say for this segment. I have taught composition for years and have a lot in general to say about that, but that wasn't really the right direction for this post. So, to be perfectly honest, I am a little less certain of what I am saying here, but it is a blog post, so I will put something out there, and perhaps later I will be able to iterate on it and make it better.

As a starting strategy, I decided to go back and read a bunch of criticism. Not theory (i.e., abstract philosophical reflections on interpretive strategies, such as "semiotics" or "new historicism"), but actual criticism, in which a critic talks about actual, explicitly named cultural artifacts. I started with Roland Barthes' Mythologies, because, well, that collection of short critical essays on everything from soap to Greta Garbo's face is kind of an intellectual comfort food for me. As fun as that was, I realized that Barthes pop culture criticism was a little too far away from design criticism, not in the artifacts considered, but rather in the gist of his criticism, which was to expose cultural "mythologies" (often bourgeois values foisted on everyone as if they were natural, with a particular emphasis on the role of language in making that possible), whereas design criticism is typically more focused on the aesthetic response of its intended audience/user.

So my next step was to go to Barnes and Noble and buy a bunch of design magazines: indesign, Objekt, I.D., Architect, and Case da Abitare (which also gave me an excuse to practice my rusty Italian). There were others (this was one pricey Barnes & Noble trip). So I wanted to see how design writers write about design. Where there were interviews, I wanted to see how the designers themselves explained their designs. The goal was to see, in simplified and clarified form, what design discourse looks like as a discourse. Who is it written for? How long is it? What does it talk about? What are its central themes? And above all, how does it differ (both textually and epistemologically) from social scientific writing?

HCI as a field traditionally writes within the social science paradigm. As HCI increasingly embraces design, and here I am opining a bit, it seems to me that HCI seems to continue to want the familiar form of social scientific writing but amplified with the new content/insights of design-oriented thinking. The thing is, and here is a rant for another day, the form of social scientific writing carries with it epistemological positions that are appropriate for social science, but not necessarily appropriate for design critique. To say this another way, if you want to see legitimate design critique, you (HCI community) have to develop literacy in another paradigm of writing. Because when critique is translated into social science (which is how most critical approaches to HCI get past the gatekeepers), while it may certainly have its own rigor, value, and contributions, it has become something other than critique.

Briefly, the classic social science publishable paper looks more or less like this: introduction and literature review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion. There is nothing wrong with this structure and I am not attacking it. But it makes fundamental assumptions about the type of work being presented, and it foregrounds a certain kind of intellectual rigor (namely, formally executed empirical research). If, however, one brings to the table a different kind of intellectual rigor (say, criticism), one either must shoehorn the contribution into this template and thereby play to one's own weaknesses (criticism is hard to explain in terms of a formal execution of a "proven" methodology), or one must resist the template and risk alienating an audience whose respect is best earned through excellent use of the template.

OK. So how did designers talk about their designs? How did design writers write about design?

Obligatory disclaimers paragraph! Obviously, the many critiques I read were diverse in their themes and approaches, so I'm simplifying. Also, note that magazine critiques are not academic and they are generally very positive (even gushing--I think one of their cultural functions is an intellectualized form of marketing and promotion, but I'm going to leave that alone for now).

Good design is not something one really tries to understand with empirical precision. Instead, designers and design aficionados "develop and eye for" good design, much like (to borrow an example from my colleague Erik Stolterman) a wine lover develops a taste for good wine, or a literature enthusiast develops a sense of what makes a great novel or poem. Now a good work of culture is often described as having a "je ne sais quoi," an I-don't-know-what, that is, something that you can't express but which makes it good. A central problem of the social aspect of design (from merely expressing appreciation to developing product lines or teaching design in universities) is that good design is ineffable; it can't be put into words. But to be socially useful, it must be put into words.

And so one of the core contributions of the critiques I read was to try to get behind this je ne sais quoi and try to explain rationally why a design has the aesthetic effect that it has. One article described a major house remodel. It described the original construction, including building materials, spatial form, historical context, and historical style. It described the new design, by explaining its process. For example, it talked about conflicts and the decisions (and their grounds) that led to a resolution. It spoke of both form and function, but more often than not about how they harmonized (blurring, rather than accenting, the distinction between them). It talked about the use of color, and the cultural associations of the colors (e.g., white = pure). It talked about the designer and noted that his designs recall the style/influence of an earlier designer. Here are the final lines of the article:

The house is still relatively modest in size.... However, for [the homeowners], the internal spaces, together with the garden, seem more than adequate. "Space is all relative. It's not just the size of the space. It's how they feel."

From the point of view of positivist science, the last line, "it's how they feel," is cognitively empty. What could "it's how they feel" possibly mean? And yet, it's clear from its position (the closing words of the article) that it not only means something, but in fact it encapsulates all that has come before it and offers a satisfying conclusion. Now, I'm not advocating that design discourse should tolerate muddled writing. I am saying that aspects of the aesthetic response to design, which is shared by designers and design aficionados, are both ineffable and yet also shared.

So this blog series is subtitled "How to Do It," and now I feel some pressure to say something fairly explicit and directive. I'll try. One major strategy in design criticism is to attempt to rationally explain the je ne sais quoi of a design. To do so, one attempts to show how the design has (to borrow a phrase from literary theory) "organic unity." Now, the origins of this unity are incredibly diverse:

• Form and function
• The cultural semantics of individual design elements, such as colors
• The tendencies, history, and semantics of its materials
• A design as a physical record of a process of decisions (like an exposed cliff shows the history of sediment that composes it)
• A design as an instance of one or more styles
• A design as an instance of a designer's work (where the designer is also an instance of a history of designers and styles)

The contribution of the critique is to make these and similar issues visible and explain how they relate to each other to compose the organic unity of the design, which in turn presumably helps demystify the je ne sais quoi. And that in turn facilitates practical and useful communication about something (a design) that is difficult to put into words, because of its culturally embedded complexity and the wholly (and ineffably) subjective nature of an individual's experience of it. To be able to perceive and analyze these different design issues or characteristics requires expertise and a certain kind of intellectual rigor (perhaps above all, an erudition of similar artifacts). But again, claims about any one of these issues (e.g., the meaning of a color, the influence of rococo on a given interior designer, the "feel" of "warmth" given off by a given material), let alone claims that assemble them together into an interpretation, would be daunting to evaluate as truth-claims, in the social science sense. They are not conclusions derived from data obtained by following a proven methodology; neither are they tightly derived inferences from the data itself. They constitute an expert's interpretation.

Perhaps the skill of writing critique is also ineffable. Perhaps the best advice I can give is for anyone who wants to be able to add criticism to her or his interaction design research repertoire is to read a bunch of criticism! I hope that this post gives my readers an idea of what to look for when they read design magazines, London Times book reviews, and other criticism hot spots.

Continue on to Part 5, in which I explicate lots of quotes of actual design criticism.

Los medios masivos –gobernados por enormes corporaciones de negocios– actúan como reguladores del orden social, propagando las “tendencias” del diseño y la moda, las artes y las ciencias, el espectáculo. Difundiendo las noticias y modulando la realidad se va estableciendo la jerarquía y el orden de importancia de los temas que le “interesan” al público masivo. En este contexto, los medios masivos actúan como verdaderos puntos de fuga de la información. El sentido y la misión para la cual fueron creados en su origen ha mutado a una función inversa. La sobresaturación de información provoca un vacío, una anulación de la eficacia, una perdida de sentido de los mensajes. Esto genera una considerable perdida de energía. El mensaje se reduce hasta desaparecer.

Un modelo de cybersespacio
¿Que es el cyberspacio? ¿Cuáles son sus límites? ¿Cuándo comenzó? ¿Hay un ciclo “natural” de las cosas virtuales?
Lo primero que podemos afirmar es que –al igual que nuestro universo real– el cyberspacio se encuentra en proceso de expansión. Sus limites se extienden, los objetos digitales se reproducen y se proyectan hacia el infinito.
Dado que el tiempo y el espacio son un objeto único, irregular, deforme y en expansión, los actos (los hechos) del cyberspacio tienden a expresarse en diferentes niveles de materialidad, en la sutil escala entre lo Real y lo Virtual. La posición de deslizamiento mutante de los objetos digitales cuestiona la idea de la existencia de un centro. En la estructura de la trama digital, lo real no siempre está del lado de la maquina.
La importancia de un objeto digital –como la de cualquier otro objeto– es relativa a su posición en la estructura. Su valor es función de su relación con otros. La Bolsa de Capitales es llamada “el mercado de Valores”. Y efectivamente de eso se trata; de valores, no sólo de dinero.

“La famosa fuente del Xerox PARC, en la cual la fuerza de la corriente de agua refleja el comportamiento del mercado de valores a partir de los datos que llegan por Internet en tiempo real, ¿es el ejemplo de la escultura pública del futuro?”
Lev Manovich

El espacio/tiempo se reconfigura a cada instante. Se gana velocidad, desaparecen las distancias. Los objetos se diluyen en la in-materialidad. La desaparición, la aceleración, la relativización del tiempo y la distancia. El cyberspace es la representación extrema de la figura del espacio-tiempo curvado o “deformado” por la distribución de masa y energía en él presentes (Einstein).

Así como el universo tiene su inicio en el Big Bang, el cyberspace tiene el suyo: en su novela Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984) describe un futuro en el cual la conexión en red de millones de computadoras hace posible que los personajes habiten ambientes virtuales. Para darle un nombre a ese futuro, introduce un nuevo concepto en el universo del lenguaje: el “cyberspace”. En esta palabra se sintetiza con fina precisión lo que será la sociedad interconectada y global.

Pasados 20 años desde su formulación, esta metáfora –como la realidad– se ha extendido y multiplicado. El estado de las cosas de la Sociedad Global de la Información ha superado todos los cálculos. En la actualidad, ninguna de las acciones humanas se articula por fuera de la trama de la Red. Esa extensa galaxia de computadoras, hubs, servidores y bases de datos se ha convertido en el Sistema Nervioso Central de la sociedad contemporánea.
La tecnología –que por fin ha abolido el tiempo y las distancias– permite ahora que un obrero de Nike en Indonesia tenga que trabajar cien mil años para ganar lo que gana, en un año, un ejecutivo de Nike en Estados Unidos.

En tanto fuente inagotable de información, la Red soporta el movimiento de valores de toda la economía mundial. Del pago de una cuenta de luz en un cajero automático, a la venta de acciones de millones de dólares en la Bolsa de Tokio.

Los teléfonos celulares han tenido enorme protagonismo en los atentados de Atocha (Madrid), al ser utilizados como detonadores. Es el mismo dispositivo que posibilita a la gente comunicarse con sus seres queridos a la distancia, sacar fotos, u operar con el banco.
La biotecnología genética experimenta con los cruces de cromosomas, en la búsqueda de un mejoramiento de la “vida artificial”. Nuevas vacunas y medicamentos van mejorando eficazmente la lucha contra las enfermedades. Al mismo tiempo, las clonaciones y mutaciones genéticas efectuadas sobre plantas, animales y humanos van construyendo un paisaje artificial, peligrosamente semejante al real. Lo siniestro.

La inteligencia artificial hace posible que la cabeza de un misil “sepa” con precisión cuál es su target, a dónde debe ir una vez que es lanzada. Eso no impide que cada tanto se cometan “errores lamentables” o “daños colaterales”(léase: masacre total), como cuando la caída de un misil en medio de una fiesta de casamiento en un pequeño pueblo de Afganistán, en el transcurso de la campaña de Bush por la captura de Bin Laden.

La existencia de la Red da lugar a infinidad de comunidades virtuales, sociedades y transacciones diversas. También permite comprar, vender y distribuir pornografía, drogas y armas. El mercado negro y la marginalidad también han ganado su lugar en el universo digital. Y su lugar en ese universo es de un enorme poder gravitatorio.

El espacio mediático y la cultura digital
Las constelaciones de estrellas, los planetas y asteroides del espacio digital giran en diferentes órbitas y a distintas velocidades. El avance de la microelectrónica y la digitalización ha creado nuevos satélites artificiales que modifican radicalmente el entorno cotidiano, generando un nuevo “medio ambiente” global.

“...La digitalización y la convergencia tecnológica han producido un nuevo medio ambiente global e interconectado en los medios de comunicación (MEDIA). Para referirnos a este nuevo medio ambiente usamos el concepto de Espacio Mediático (MEDIASPACE)”
Kari-Hans Kommonen
ARKI/MEDIA LAB UIAH/ Finlandia

El Espacio Mediático es el nuevo medio ambiente global de la llamada Realidad. ¿Que significa esto? Simplemente que todas las comunicaciones, intercambios y desplazamientos que se producen entre la gente están mediatizados.

La trama del espacio mediático invade todos los ordenes de la vida. Esto obliga a reformular cuestiones centrales de la estructura y el modo de funcionamiento social, económico y político de la sociedad actual y a reflexionar sobre el lugar que ocupa el sujeto en este contexto.
El sujeto como espectador, su viejo rol en la cultura audiovisual y mediática clásica, es sustituido en los new media por la figura del “usuario”. Esta figura trae incorporada la idea de un sujeto activo, emprendedor. Sea como consumidor o como productor, el sujeto debe interactuar. Esta apelación al sujeto como artífice de su propio destino encubre una trama en la que sin duda debemos actuar, pero en la que –en definitiva– ya está todo decidido de antemano. Otra puesta en escena para representar el pseudo ejercicio de la libertad en la sociedad global. Alea jacta est. La suerte está echada.
Los límites del cuerpo se desdibujan, su ubicación en el espacio es variable, incierta. El sujeto adquiere prolongaciones artificiales de todos sus órganos. Todos los sentidos son “amplificados” por la intervención de diversos aparatos, mecanismos, sistemas. (cirugías estéticas, celulares, hand held, sensores, etc.)

Esto supone un cambio trascendental en la relación de lo PÚBLICO y lo PRIVADO, y cuestiona también el limite entre lo NATURAL y lo ARTIFICIAL. Todos nuestros movimientos pueden ser monitoreados segundo a segundo. Conversaciones por mail, chat o teléfono, la navegación por la Web, el uso de la tarjeta de crédito, el registro de cámaras de vigilancia, Todas nuestras trans-acciones dejan una “huella” mediática. La invasión de lo público en lo privado, la disolución de lo privado en lo público. La pérdida de un derecho constitucional: la privacidad.

La fuga de la información
La alta exposición a todo tipo de “fuentes de información” genera una paradoja: esta súper oferta informativa provoca la obturación de la capacidad de percepción del “sujeto mediático”. El altísimo grado de repetición y superposición de mensajes, multiplica la redundancia. Millones de millones de bits de información se producen y circulan por el espacio mediático.
En un punto, se hace imposible “procesar” semejante cantidad de información. Por este motivo, gran parte de lo que producen los Medios (prensa, radio, tv) se convierte en cuestión de segundos en basura informativa. Y la basura tiene un enorme valor en el mercado.

¿Cuál es la naturaleza de la “información mediática”? Si enfocamos el análisis por fuera del punto de vista lingüístico, debemos entenderla como un fenómeno que va mucho más allá del plano comunicacional. Los medios masivos –gobernados por enormes corporaciones de negocios– actúan como reguladores del orden social, propagando las “tendencias” del diseño y la moda, las artes y las ciencias, el espectáculo.
Difundiendo las noticias y modulando la realidad se va estableciendo la jerarquía y el orden de importancia de los temas que le “interesan” al público masivo.
En este contexto, los medios masivos actúan como verdaderos puntos de fuga de la información. El sentido y la misión para la cual fueron creados en su origen, ha mutado a una función inversa. La sobresaturación de información provoca un vacío, una anulación de la eficacia, una perdida de sentido de los mensajes.

Esto genera una considerable perdida de energía. El mensaje se reduce hasta desaparecer. De este modo, los medios masivos se han convertido en los Agujeros Negros del Espacio Mediático. Capturan información (materia) y la convierten en anti-información (anti-materia)

Diseñar la experiencia
En el universo hipermediático, las galaxias del arte, la ciencia y la tecnología se encuentran y dialogan a menudo. En cada cruce se atraviesan mutuamente, constituyendo nuevos paradigmas en las formas de la vida cotidiana, global y tribal.

En este escenario, el Diseño ha pasado a ocupar un lugar estratégico en el trabajo de formateo y control de la masa consumidora. Una estrella rutilante, que ilumina el camino de la vanguardia, de la modernidad. La inflación del concepto Diseño provoca una perdida de sentido. ¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de diseño?

La desmaterialización de los objetos virtuales profundiza las exigencias del trabajo proyectual. El discurso que debe articular el diseño –comunicar con eficacia, construir diferencia, lograr una identificación inmediata– se ve afectado por la mutación constante, característica de los objetos virtuales. Por lo tanto, el diseño debe desplazar el eje del trabajo proyectual. No se trata sólo de diseñar la imagen del objeto, definir su función. Se trata de diseñar la “experiencia” que implica su uso. El marketing y la publicidad proponen un Plan. El diseño lo ejecuta.

Afortunadamente, el universo mediático-digital está plagado de fenómenos y situaciones que escapan al Plan. Las vemos irrumpir como un error en el sistema. Insisten en aparecer, en hacerse ver y en producir sus efectos. Son acciones que explotan las posibilidades de transversalidad, movilidad y jerarquía relativa presentes en la conformación de la trama mediática.
Comunidades que se organizan para defender sus derechos, estudiantes que no temen aprender e investigar, artistas que cuestionan tanto despliegue de cinismo e impunidad, científicos y técnicos preocupados por el bien común, etc.

Todos estos fenómenos van constituyendo circuitos paralelos de enorme circulación y alta productividad de información, de hechos. Se constituyen en planetas, estrellas y asteroides virtuales, que atraviesan la Red y posibilitan la aparición de soluciones y alternativas reales a problemas de la vida cotidiana, que el Plan Estratégico Global no ha podido ni siquiera formular.

MARTÍN GROISMAN
PROFESOR TITULAR DE MEDIOS EXPRESIVOS,
CARRERA DE DISEÑO GRÁFICO, FADU, UBA.
(Este artículo forma parte del libro “Cultura Digital, comunicación y sociedad”, publicado por Ed. Paidós, Buenos Aires, noviembre de 2004.)

BIBLIOGRAFIA
–Deleuze, Gilles: La imagen Tiempo, Editorial Paidós Comunicación, Barcelona, 1987.
–Eisenstein, Sergei: Cinematismo, Editorial D. Cortizo, 1982.
–Hawking, Stephen: Historia del Tiempo, Editorial Grijalbo Mondadori, CIUDAD, 1988.
–Massotta, Oscar: Conciencia y estructura, Editorial Jorge Alvarez, Buenos Aires, 1966.
–Murray, Janet H.: Hamlet on the Holodeck, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1997.
–Manovich, Lev: La vanguardia como software, 2002.
 

This post continues a multi-part series on interaction criticism begun here. The series goal is to offer a useful introduction to criticism in the context of interaction design, targeted at interaction design professionals.

In the previous part, I laid out some critical reading strategies, that is, techniques that critics use to identify specific interesting or resonant passages/elements of a cultural artifact, for example, particular passages from a novel, phrases/diction from a poem, phrases from a sonata, architectural details in a building, camera angles in a film, or the shapes of the heels in haute couture footwear.

What does a critic do when she has identified a number of interesting individual elements, passages, or features? The critic develops a critical interpretation, that is, an expository explanation drawn from an analytical reflection on each of these elements or features. The development of this interpretation is the subject of this post.

A note before I begin: The linearity of a multipart series and written discourse itself exaggerates the linearity of this process. It is, of course, not at all the case that a critic identifies resonant passages without having any idea of the interpretive direction. Having a sense of your overall purpose and audience obviously shapes the kind of things you look for in the first place. Anyway, the point is not to take the implied linearity of what I am writing as a step-by-step recipe to be followed in order. I only separate strategies to tease out nuance that might be hard to see otherwise.

Now, the critical explanation that the critic is trying to produce may or may not make claims about the work as a whole. A book review ultimately does offer an overall sense of whether one should buy the reviewed book. But one might equally only focus on a focused aspect, such as sound design in several French New Wave films; these critiques may not say much of anything helpful about the overall quality or entertainment value of these films, though they would help filmmakers and students of film master their craft. And "critical theory" in its classic sense, associated with the Frankfurt School, studied cultural artifacts with the hope of exposing social injustice in such a way as to facilitate (design) interventions; they had comparatively less to say about the overall aesthetics of a work.

In other words, although a critical interpretation organizes resonant passages around a coherent and largely unified theme, the particular direction of the theme is up to the critic. Or to put it another way, the reason for the criticism (book/fashion/film reviews in the newspaper, criticism in service of product design, art or aesthetic criticism, etc.), the intended audience of the critic, and the critic's own dispositions determine or at least shape the theme.

For professional interaction designers, my assumption is that criticism would often be oriented in one of two directions. If a designer has a specific design problem, criticism would be oriented toward generating insights particularly useful to that problem or problem space (e.g., if I were designing an interface for an online radio station, I might do a critique of the Pandora's training interface as an instance of experience design). If, on the other hand, the designer wants to improve her craft in a more general domain, criticism could accordingly be geared to understand a particular technique, material, or experiential effect (e.g., if I were designing wearable computing, I might critique instances of high functionality in haute couture, say, comparmentalization in Louis Vuitton handbags, and then contrast it to fashion in high tech gadgets, such as, say, a GPS device built into a BMW). (Damn--I just made that up, but it sounds like a fun project!)

Specific Strategies of Critical Interpretation

Obviously, it is harder to be explicitly directive in this step, as opposed to part 2, but I can offer a handful of broader interpretative strategies that are at least illustrative of common patterns in this step.

• Reflect on and relate what you are seeing to prior/similar examples. This reflection is not casual; it is creative, erudite, innovative, speculative, thoughtful. It cannot be lazy or complacent. You, the critic, are constructing meaning by examining these relationships--you are not decoding or finding what is empirically there (social sciences are much better suited to this goal). Instead, you are offering a new way to see or think about something; you are developing the very concepts that you and others later on (including social scientists) will use to understand and evaluate a phenomenon in a new light.
• Speculate: What would X look like if...? Elizabeth Churchill often uses the metaphor of science fiction when talking about design. She thinks of design as offering a fictive projection of a possible future, a possible world. This fictional world isn't uselessly disconnected from our reality; instead, it is connected to our reality through ... design! But the point is that this is only possible through speculative leaps of imagination, not through evolutionary iteration (which is obviously valuable too, just in different ways). The key obviously is that some speculation is vacuous, implausible nonsense, while other speculation can be operationalized into a design strategy. Here the quality of the critic (to have a worthy vision in the first place) and the designer (to evaluate/develop the plausibility of the vision) work hand-in-hand.
• Expose the hidden in order to subject it to possible intervention. One of the primary contributions of criticism is its expository nature. Criticism renders visible aspects of our lives that are so everyday that they seem natural, and yet they are arbitrary (i.e., could be otherwise), and they may also be undesirable. For example, Foucault's theories of power implicated knowledge production in the social sciences within systems of power, exposing a dependence of knowledge professionals on the docility of disempowered groups (e.g., mental patients, prisoners, schoolchildren). Today, human subjects committees reflect a sensitivity to this relationship and proactively intervene to manage it. Roland Barthes' critiques of popular culture (magazine advertising, slogans, clothes) brought the rigor of literary analysis to texts hitherto considered unworthy for that type of analysis; one benefit has been to raise our collective awareness of how the values of dominant social classes are insinuated into everyday life.
• Use concepts from criticism (e.g., organic unity, construction of the self, panopticon, dialogic, signifier, space/place, story/discourse, base/superstructure, embodiment) to develop one's understanding of cultural artifacts and their features. I say "develop examples," not "tag examples" because we are not trying to find an example of X concept; rather, we are trying to use concept X to help us think creatively and originally and profoundly about a particular cultural artifact in such a way that we understand the example much more robustly than we would without the concept. This sometimes leads to a technical vocabulary that is hard to understand, which can lead to one of two unfortunate extremes--obscurantism (e.g., deconstruction's "mise-en-abyme") or banality (e.g., "the medium is the message")--even when the original contexts and uses of that vocabulary are intellectually powerful (as is the case in Derrida's use of deconstruction as a critique of Western philosophy or McLuhan's theories of media).

Common to all of these is that the interpretation itself is original, carefully and rigorously developed through extensive reading and reflection. Its contribution is not the glimpse into external reality it affords, but rather an expert's take on that external reality, with the assumption (that must be justified) that the expert's take helps us understand that reality in transformative ways, that is, ways that transform how we act or understand this reality. Because it is about the expert's take, criticism is not fundamentally empirical, though of course empirical evidence surely contributes to the expert's take in important ways. In simpler terms, the expert interpretation, not the data, is the message.

It's probably worthwhile to recapitulate the main points from the first part of this series about what critics do:

• Think deeply about associations and relationships among the studied artifact/experience and other artifacts/experiences
• Model the act of reading/interpretation in such a way that others can appropriate interpretive strategies in their own critical encounters with culture
• Identify resonant passages/examples

I hope that parts 2 and 3 flesh out and illuminate these points.

In the next part of this series, I will talk about how criticism is written. As a form of intellectual prose, it has distinct features and characteristics, and these are often different from the forms of prose that social science is often embedded in. As I have tried to show, the two enterprises have different goals and epistemologies, and it should not surprise that their written forms also differ.

Link: Google Earth API

In Part 1 of this series, I covered three high-level critical strategies: thinking through associations, modeling the act of reading/interpretation, and identifying resonant passages/examples. Reading through them, I can imagine interaction design professionals thinking that all that sounds fine and well, but still not really knowing how to go about doing those things with any clear purpose, let alone rigor.

This post will offer much more concrete, do-it-yourself strategies that I believe anyone could start doing today. It's not a comprehensive list, since the whole point of what makes a critic a critic is a personalized and cultivated habit of thinking that consistently leads to productive, deep thought. We all develop this over time, through practice, and (of course!) through engagement with other critics and acts of criticism. All too often, however, this need to develop one's own critical voice becomes an excuse not to teach critical strategies explicitly, out of the fear they will be misappropriated or used in slavish and/or stupid ways. (Deconstructionists were infamous for denying that deconstruction was a "methodology," which was a legitimate philosophical point that somehow wound up in service of obscurantism.) Misappropriation is a risk we'll have to run.

I'll stop ranting here. :) As always, the goal is to make critical approaches accessible and try to walk the line between oversimplification and obscurantism.

Critical Reading Strategies, Or, How to Do a Close Reading of an Interaction Design

Following are six particular strategies you can use, which are not presented in any particular order and which are interrelated anyway.

• Try to make explicit to your own consciousness the overall effect ("gestalt" or "organic unity") of the design. Next, identify diverse elements (graphics, interaction types, uses of language, fonts, white space, etc.) that make up that overall whole. How does each individual element contribute to/compete with/undermine the whole? How does the particular combination, juxtaposition, or "syntax" of these elements give them new or interesting meaning?
• Seek out the affective. It's no secret that information, cognition, and disembodied universalizing knowledge have been dominant in interaction design for decades, often excluding emotion, affect, embodiment, desire, etc. HCI is belatedly addressing this, and critics, I think, are uniquely positioned to help interaction designers become more sensitive to these thoroughly subjective phenomena. Interaction is personal. Make that visible.
• Identify key terms/concepts in the interaction (e.g., the user, the participant, the company, the site, its value to you, incentives, other users, news, truth, terror, home, ethnic). Next, rather than passively accepting these terms as representing something "we all know," explore the extent to which this term or concept is constructed in the interaction design, that is, how it is described, labeled, and positioned. How else could it have been positioned or constructed? Why would the designers/company behind the interaction have positioned or constructed key terms in these particular ways?
• How does the design "want" you to interact with it? Literary critics say that every novel projects its ideal reader. Surely interaction designs do the same. How does a design construct and project its ideal user? What are ways to resist this projection? What are the consequences of resistance? Griefing, emergence, harassment, evolution, and frustration (that is, some of the most important issues in HCI) all seem tied to resistance.
• Interaction designs often change our relationships with other humans. In some cases, an interaction design replaces interacting with a human (such as an ATM). In other cases, it may facilitate interactions with humans that you might never have otherwise known (e.g., World of Warcraft and Second Life). In still other cases, it may facilitate simple interactions that help maintain one's largest social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). In each of these, technology enters human-human relationships, and in so doing, shifts them. What are those shifts and how can we intervene as designers to understand and then encourage the best outcomes?
• Examine the marginal. If we can understand why something is in the margins, we can often understand better features in the mainstream. Marginal content/features often reflect social anxieties (e.g., the reluctance to talk about human sexuality in HCI), arbitrarily subordinated discourses, and opportunities for future innovation.

Conclusion to Part 2

OK, so that list gets at many of the things critics look for when they do a "close reading." When I was doing close readings in literature, I would read the same thing over and over again. Through repeated readings and reflection, those patterns, those margins, and those resonances begin to become visible. In each iteration, the critic is focusing more or less on the same things; what happens is that focus evolves, or dials in, and when that happens, that which is hidden and yet often most significant begins to emerge.

In Part 3 of this series, I'll talk about how the grist found from strategies here in Part 2 start to come together through critical interpretation.

In my previous post I concluded that those of us who have a foot in the two worlds of literary/art criticism and interaction design should promote interaction criticism. I often get asked--by students, by design professionals in the HCI community--how someone without degrees in literature (etc.) can practice criticism. It's tempting to resist such a request and point people at a bunch of handbooks of literary theory, and I'll probably also add a post that does just that.

But for the sake of accessibility, and at the risk of being flamed for attempting to present the practice of criticism in a bullet-list laden blog post, I offer a high-level overview of what (I think) interaction criticism looks like. To make it manageable, I divide it into sections:

Part 1: What generally a critic has to offer, that is, high-level goals

Part 2: Low-level, everyday strategies of applying "close reading" to interaction design experiences

Part 3: Techniques for robustly and powerfully interpreting experience with interaction designs

Part 4: Some general thoughts on how to present these interpretations in the form of a critique

Part 5: Analysis of critical writing: Design magazine reviews

Part 6: Analysis of critical writing: Academic design writing

Part 7: Further reading: an edited list of accessible works on criticism

[Update: The above list has been expanded to reflect deviations from the original plan]

Without further ado, the rest of this post is devoted to some rough thoughts on what I think the primary strategies of the critic.

1. High-Level Strategies: What an Interaction Critic Does

Critics make sense of cultural artifacts in part by thinking deeply through associations, that is, what a particular interactive artifact can be connected to. Connections might include personal, socio-ideological, material, bio-historical and other associations. Though computationally we often represent knowledge hierarchically (remember Yahoo in the mid-90s?), humans think associatively and metaphorically (see Lakoff and Johnson for more on this). Critics cultivate these associations in profound, reflective, personal, and intimate ways as a means to develop deep, subjective understandings of phenomena. (In other words, I am certainly not talking about a network diagrammable set of objective relations; each critic builds her or his own networks of connections.)

Critics model expert reading (or, in our case, they should model expert interaction). What this is not: How do people do X (which is an empirical question that psychologists of aesthetics and user researchers often ask)? Instead: How does an expert do this to have the most comprehensively aesthetic experience possible (which is a speculative question without a definitive answer)? The point is that there is no single best or authoritative reading or interaction, and therefore there is no one to point out what that would be. The critic instead models how she or he approaches an interaction with the goal of doing so in the richest, most fulfilling, and/or most worthy way. Those who read criticism incorporate these models into their own interpretive practice.

Critics identify "resonant" passages and examples. Social scientists often seek to find representative passages, and so we get sampling, statistical significance, and so on; in doing so, they are trying to get a handle on "what's out there." Criticism identifies passages not by claiming they are representative, but rather by claiming they are "resonant" of something deep and messy (in speaking of "resonance," I am appropriating Stephen Greenblatt). Often what resonates to a critic is below the surface consciousness of the designers (i.e., their intentions) or their users. This may sound elitist or perhaps even somewhat hocus-pocus, but it need not be; Dick Hebdige's classic study of subcultures revealed much behind the emergence of punk and countercultural fashion and ideology that none of its stakeholders--the punks themselves, the music industry, the fashion industry that both sells to and borrows from them--were aware of. Thus, the worth of one critic's versus another critic's "resonant passages" is connected to erudition, insight, experience, conceptual command, and domain expertise. The cliché that "everyone is a critic" may have some truth, but that certainly does not mean that everyone is an equally good critic!

I'll wrap up part 1 here. I welcome constructive criticism and insight. I am putting this out there in good faith and hope to expand criticism to a new domain, rather than impoverish it by oversimplifying it. If you can help me walk that line better, I certainly want to hear from you!

Onto Part 2!

One of the talks at the IA Summit was by Luke Wroblewski, author of two books and various resources published on his site. If you can see/hear the presentation at this location, I would urge you to do so. There will be something in there I have missed!

The content he shared, was an insightful window into how we design pages and how the business requirements of a page may actually work against it. It really reminded me about the mechanics of persuasion, and he highlighted some insights explicitly. The following observations were made by Wroblewski.

The web ecosystem

Conceptually, although we illustrate site maps as tree-structures, we know the pages exist with specific unique relationships to other web content.

We also know that the paths to content are becoming more fluid and not just about search. They are becoming more about authority recommendations from trusted sources or conversations around subjects with peers.

Wroblewski breaks this ecosystem down into;

• Communication – Instant Messenger, Twitter, Email

• Display Surfaces – Facebook, Netvibes

• Content Creators – Blogs, websites

• Content Aggregators – Digg, Slashdot

• Search – Google, Yahoo, MSN etc

This ecosystem will be different for every site, and every user has their own network (whether its explicitly or tacitly known).

Presenting the user with clear CTAs

Calls to action are often ignored and yet it’s the reason for a user's site visit. On news websites, users want to read content   and yet commercial pressure tends to crowd the content area.

This slide highlights the NY Times content area

Wroblewski showed some examples of where advertising and irrelevant page content took up 76% percent of screen real estate leaving 24% for content. He compared that to the New York Times which had a 90% focus on content.

Surely a no-brainer as to what we need to do? Obviously the business context needs to be considered here but a few charts made me think about the rationale used in designs.

This slide outlines the access areas that a page needs to display, note that it must be adaptive and that the technology of the site doesn't prescribe a treatment for the interface.

Instead of showing everything available on the site on every page, we need to be more targeted about what we present to the user. Wroblewski backed up his observation by urging us to do some thinking for our users.

Why do they bounce

He cited the book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz. The upshot is that when confronted with too much choice, a user will use the back button, the most simple choice – and bounce rates are inevitably increased unnecessarily. More bad news is that the peak value for a user conversion was between 2 and 3 seconds.

This slide states the attention deficiency of users in general  

The idea of giving the user a tailored experience, and not making the user think is exactly what helps define a good design and fulfil its business objectives.

Design principles for engagement

From what Wroblewski said about good content page design , I took his comments and also added some of my own to form some overarching principles.

1. Content – build for focus, deliver on what you offer, short, concise and easy to scan, forms the best platform for engagement. Build bespoke channels for visitor flow but ensure they are flexible. Flexibility, or adaptable user paths are key to an engaging and versatile site that can accommodate changes in site structure and user needs.
2. Calls to action – think about CTAs and their presentation, give clear choices and make sure they are not too numerous. CTAs (and even the necessary evil of advertising) will be welcome if relevant.
3. Context – Maximise credibility through visual design, this helps build trust. Build credibility through visual hierarchy in the minimum space possible and an appreciation of a user’s situation (where they came from, the origins of the traffic). Make sure the user gets easily grounded on arrival  and can orientate themselves.

I think Luke Wroblewski deserves great credit for crystallizing the thoughts of many designers and getting the statistics together to back up his common sense approach to the problems designers face.

By stating methods to enable engagement, Wroblewski has furthered my thoughts behind the arts of persuasion and conversion. For this reason I have bought his latest book, Web Form Design and will be posting a review on the site, later in the year. Form design is a major hurdle where so many users fail to convert, and I believe this book will be invaluable in addressing that.

Another interesting post from the same blog is the director chair exercise. you take a member of the design team and you nominate him/her as the director, than you nominate one member as the customer and a third one as the service attendant. the director has to design the interaction on the basis of the behaviour of the other two acting the service. Of course it requires that the customer behave very honestly...

To make it short: Nói (the main character) get into the coffee of the local gas station (where Iris works as a waitress) and asks for something to drink. Normal - so far.
Then Iris asks Noi if he wants to drink it in the coffee or take it away. Again, this is really common in places such as Starbucks and similar.
The surprise is that in this case the juice is actually cheaper if the customer drinks it in.

Subverting the "eat in / take away" balance has an economic reason: the juice bottle has a cost, and drinking it inside the coffee means the possibility to have it back.
But it also has a social reason, or at least a social consequence: it invites people drinking inside. The rule becomes one of the factors to spark a bit of "social life" into the bar (much needed, if you work at the coffee of a gas station in a remote fishing village in western Iceland).

Fostering participation is a difficult stuff. It involves environment design, a consistent conception of every touchpoint, a content to share, a great work on identity and trust, but also strong business rules: everything should row in the same direction. That's the experience design, I guess.

Hoje, fizemos (eu, Leandro e Fabrício) uma palestra na aula do Daniel sobre um trabalho que fizemos no ano passado. Escolhemos fazer um projeto de melhorias para o Genius (sim, aquele brinquedo da década de 80 da estrela, que eu adorava inclusive). O trabalho incluia uma fase de pesquisa com usuários, para identificar contexto de uso, limitações do ambiente em que era jogado, padrões de comportamento, problemas de usabilidade e também impacto visual e emocional que o objeto exercia sobre os seus possuidores e um modelo conceitual sugerindo melhorias no mesmo.

O trabalho foi um pouco além de uma análise de usabilidade tradicional, por se tratar de um jogo eletrônico, ou seja, a própria experiência do jogo, contava mais que os fatores clássicos da usabilidade, como "facilidade de uso", "facilidade de aprendizado" etc... Hoje, depois de concluído o curso, percebo que a nossa análise estava mais próxima do design emocional do Norman. Levamos em consideração os 3 níveis emocionais, a saber:

• visceral (impacto visual)

• comportamental (relativo ao uso); e

• reflexivo (valor emocional do objeto com o usuário).

Para quem tiver interesse de conhecer melhor como foi o projeto segue o link para a apresentação no slideshare:

Apresentação Genius

As products become much more complex, it's not about designing the individual product, it's about orchestrating this complex ecosystem to create a wonderful customer experience. So my job touches on all aspects -- all the tangible, visual, real-world aspects of that experience. If you just think of a customer journey, it's everything from collateral and point-of-sale to packaging to the industrial design, the user interface, and the area where interface and the software and the hardware come together, which we call product interaction. So it's orchestrating all of those touch points

Sam Lucent had the foresight to understand that in order to achieve competitive advantage, companies need to engage customers in an emotional level by providing delightful experiences. By servitising their products, companies can not only create strategies that are difficult to copy, but also open new market opportunities. In most industrialised countries, the service sector accounts for approximately 70% of the GDP, offering a great potential for product-based companies to expand.

Nike+ is another great example. They've managed to migrate from this 'company/product centric' campaign - Just do it, to a networked and co-created way of evolving the brand. I just love seeing all these paradigms being broken! Welcome to the service economy!

They gained insights from the processes and organizational structures of various creative entities such as the highly structured restaurant kitchen, and the theater experience, “Too Much Light makes the Baby go Blind” written and performed by Chicago’s Neo Futurists .

As a creative professional in a dynamic agency setting, it is thrilling to see a project go from initial seeds of an idea, to a fully formed product. However getting through the process can be intense, complex, and challenging. Ultimate success relies on a certain set of constantly changing rules, circumstances, and resources.

By dissecting other successful creation models, and applying the analysis to their current business model, Adaptive Path is saying: We don’t know it all. We can be better. We can be different. We're always learning.

Adaptive Path's work environment seems like one that supports and fosters creativity -- and it’s not just about putting your people in a room and asking them to emerge at the end of the day with THE BIG IDEA. It’s about finding activities and processes that will allow that stuff to naturally and smartly emerge.

I want to work in an environment that subscribes to the following points Adaptive Path presented:

• Cross train the team. Foster empathy – let people see what it’s like for others. Its about cross-pollination, more like a web, not nodes.

• Rotate creative leadership. Don’t let people get burned out. Let leaders play a support role sometimes.
• Actively turn the corner. Know when its time to stop brainstorming (where collaboration rules and roles are less important) and start making/producing (roles become more important people need to know what’s expected).
• Know your roles. Hierarchy streamlines production. Clear sets of responsibility enables communication.
• Practice as a team. When in execution mode, it’s not time to practice individual s