• Find an example of a portable/embedded interactive interface (does not need to be related to transportation), and present it to the class.
• Readings: Productive Interaction, Art As Experience (handout), Experience Design (handout)
  

due week 03:

• Develop and present proposals for midterm project

The goals of interaction design - Four perspectives

Usability

Make it easy for the user to perform useful tasks. The designer's job is to make the things users want to do as simple as possible. The best approach is to get out of the way and make users as successful as possible. The designer should pay attention to the following:

• Responsiveness - download times should be minimal and the system should react quickly
• Perform user testing to see how users actually use your system. Pay attention to paths through your site and eliminate any situations that cause mistakes, hesitation or confusion.
• Don't violate user's expectations
• Be as consistent and predictable as possible
• Users want instant gratification, and the designer should enable the user to go where they want
• Function is primary
• Keep learning time to a minimum

Create a great experience that satisfies the user's expectations. The designer does this by building an attraction, engagement, and conclusion that takes into account the following:

• Wider boundaries than traditional design and striving to create experiences beyond just products or services
• Viewing a product or service from the entire lifecycle with a customer, from before they perceive the need to when they discard it - considering the entire context and outcome of the work
• Creating a relationship with individuals, not targeting a mass market
• Invoking and creating an environment that connects on an emotional or value level to the customer

Experience design emphasizes the need to broaden the designer's view beyond just “the thing” to include the entire context and outcome of the work.

The designer/artist selects, simplifies, clarifies, abridges, and condenses according to her interests and presents this perspective in a way that is open and sustains a certain tension and disturbance. This creates an opportunity for the participant to reflect and create their own experience, recapitulating the designer's process, but not necessarily their conclusions.

• The benefit of art [and design] come from the interaction of the work and the participant. It is an embodied experience that requires an active participation of the audience.
• Experiences are made by the one having the experience, and depend on her active participation, prior experiences, interests, and personal perceptions
• Aesthetic experiences have an emotional aspect to them that comes through the experience of resistance or discord and eventual resolution to stasis. This rhythm is a natural one that people have everyday. In other words, the aesthetic experience is directly related to human's daily survival and existence in the world
  
• The aesthetic experience does not have the wholly practical and intellectual character that a scientific conclusion has. It is more felt as a consequence of the integrated experience as a whole.
• "Life goes on within an environment, not merely in it, but because of it, through interactions with it."
• "The artist has his problems and thinks as he works. But his thought is more immediately embodied in the object. Because of the comparative remoteness of his end, the scientific worker operates with symbols, words, and mathematical signs. The artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in, and the terms lie so close to the object that he is producing that they merge directly into it." ** see references below for more on the topic of design research
• "Pleasures may come about through chance contact and stimulation, but happiness and delight are a different sort of thing. They come to be through a fulfillment that reaches to the depths of our whole being with the conditions of existence."

Create a system that enables users to create their own meaning through productive interaction. Instead of creating scripted, enveloping experiences, the productive interaction designer frames an exploration of a meaning space, making sure the audience has the affordances to create their own "take". The designer does this by managing the design of:

• Content: Information, narrative elements, meanings and sensations as communicated in text, image, video, sound, tactile and other modes.
  
• Context: The integrated presentation of content in form, decoration, attitude, organization, selection, values, and experiences.
  
• Affordance: The handles that enable the audience to work with and manipulate the content and context.
  
• Audience: The users as integral elements of the total system, who operate it through the affordances, and who create the final expressions.

In this framework, design is a non-linear process of engagement and making, spinning a complex and interdependent relationship between the domains of content, context, affordance and audience.  Here, each element influences the design of the other as the designer builds up a flexible and open work that relies on the user as an active collaborator.

• This approach to interaction design focuses on creating meaningful, rich interactions that engage the user in a way that encourages agency and participation in the creation of the outcome.
• In Productive Interaction, the user is able to directly manipulate the content, participating in the outward act of creation -- this is an important difference between interactive media and other forms, which may allow a kind of interaction (e.g. turning a page or thinking about it), but that don't afford the explicit reworking (and possible addition) of material to create something new.
• Content needs to be authored and designed so that it is flexible enough to be remixed and manipulated in a non-linear fashion.
• The designer should use a variety of interactive techniques (e.g. juxtaposition, serendipity, simultaneity, presets, center vs. periphery, etc.) to assist the user in seeing the range of possibilities, complexities, and interrelationships of what's being presented.
• The designer should provide affordances that enable the user to work with the content in a process of engagement, understanding, reflection, and creative reworking. Some examples include interactive filtering, remixing, excerpting, and user contribution.

A comparison of the philosophies of Experience Design and Art As Experience/Productive Interaction, as derived from writing on both topics.

Usability

• Designing Web Usability - The practice of simplicity, Jakob Nielsen
• www.useit.com
• www.usabilityfirst.com

Experience Design

• Experience Design - Nathan Shedroff
• www.aiga.org/content.cfm?contentalias=what_is_ed
• www.nathan.com/resources/
• www-306.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/publish/2558

John Dewey

• Art As Experience - John Dewey
• Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art - Richard Shusterman
• Aesthetic Interaction - Petersen, Iversen, Krogh, Ludvigsen
• Decorational Blog, Toward a definition of the Decorational- Denise Gonzales Crisp
  

Related to this is a major theme in the MDP, Design Research

• Design Research - Edited by Brenda Laurel, Designed by Anne Burdick
• "The Reservoir": Toward a Poetic Model of Research in Design - Terence Rosenberg
• Speculation, Serendipity and Studio Anybody - Lisa Grocott

Productive Interaction

• www.productiveinteraction.com - Philip van Allen

all materials on this web site © copyright 2007, Philip van Allen