Design for experiences

It is taken for granted that computing systems are designed to implement some functions, to do some tedious and repetitive jobs with precision, and thus to save us time and accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively. With this perspective, we focus on the content of the computing systems - the function, the jobs or "the what" that computers can do for us, and coorespondingly HCI is concerned to make these functions easy to access and use.

This point of view, of course bears some truth. Anyway, that's the strength of machines. However, to just concentrate on "the what" will limit our understanding of computers and ourselves, and probably lead to the departure of our true motivation. What is our true motivation? No matter how many ways we can state it, to say we want to promote the quality of life will never be wrong. What is quality of life is a philosophical question that is beyond my ability to discuss here, but at least I can safely claim that it is more than efficiency, effectiveness or "the what" - we have to take "the how" into consideration as well. The breakdown of the myth of paperless office testifies that. No matter how much information a computer can instore, how efficiently it can process, or how fast it can transfer, we still can't live without paper. Because what we concern is not just the information, but the way to interact with information. As far as interaction - "the how" - is concerned, paper provides very rich features such as portable, flippable, tearable and drawable, of which computers can hardly achieve, yet proved to be very important for us to attain, exchange and operate on information. So it is time step back, to rethink about our deep value of life, and hopefull to avoid the dilemmas such as whether technology made paper useless or caused an increase usage of paper, or whether technology has improved our quality of life or made it worse...

The inclusion of "the how" together with "the what" will lead us to a more broad view of designing - not just design to implement functions, but design for experiences. Once we move to this perspective, we are opened up to some new and interesting ideas about design. We can reach the same experience by different means. For example, to calm down, we can either listen to music, or look at a painting. To refresh, we can either go to the gym to work out, or dance with the music at home. To have some fun, we can either find some jokes, or watch some comedies. Here we take the experience and the feeling as more basic and root human needs, and we take those into focus rather than some concrete actions. At the same time, some slight change of media, environment or time can greatly change our experience of the same thing. With the same movie, dependent on whether you watch it in a movie theater or on DVD at home, your appreciation of it could be very different. With the same food, different containers, or dishes can change our appetite for it. With the same article, to read it on the computer or on paper could make a difference of your level of understanding.....

What's its implications for design? I am not clear yet, but let's use some imagination here. Now our requirement document will not be like ""this interface should list all the items in the database", instead, it would be like "this interface should give an overview of all the items with a glance"... Also we take computing systems as medium to exchange experiences of designers and users. In order to do that, we designers and users have to share some experiences. So designers go into users to do some ethnographic studies, and users join the designers team to see how much technology can do for them....

crazy about Experience

It seems I am pretty crazy about experience:

1. What does the picture in MSN make the communication experience different?
2. What does the handwriting instead of computer generated font types in MSN make the communication experience different?
3.How is the experience different whether you have CDs or not in your car?
4.How is the experience different if you can communicate with people from other countries with their native languages?
5.How is the experience different when you use different wordings to express the same content?
6. How is the experience different if you travel to the same place with different weathers, different seasons, or different people?
7. How does wireless make our life experience different?
8. What does the orientation of your room make your living experience different?
9. What's the arrangement of chairs in a classroom make the class experience different?
................


101. What are the words that can describe experiences?
102. What are quality experiences?
103.What's different between feeling and experience?
104. How can design create quality experince?

the history of Ethnography

read Bob Anderson's "Work, Ethnography and System Design"

Suchman's book "Plans and Situated Actions" made the social science, in particular ethnography a subject of much fascination, when another emerging trend was from the development of domain called CSCW, to which Suchman is an early contributor. Then CSCW became the paradigm arena for design-oriented ethnogrpahic work to be done. CSCW itself was the consequence of a number of radical changes within computers sciences - design sytems from for single user to for collocated or distributed collaborative work groups. To solve the paradox that huge investation in information and communication technology didn't result in the improvement of productivity. Social science was introduced to reorient the understanding of CSCW and other interactive systems, such as participatory design and socio-technical systems approaches.

To be able to fully understand how social science can actually contribute to design, Bob proposes that we need to apprecaite the heritage of social science, and the issues social scientists are facing. Here comes this paper, which is a description of one element in social science - ehtnography.

The history of Ethnography:
A. Inventing the Professional Stranger:
Bronislaw Malinowski invented it in 1915, until then ethnography and anthropology were bookish in extreme. It was Malinowski who invented the modern form of "fieldwork" as a social science investigative technique and ethnography as its analytic complement by living in the Trobriand Islands. The intimate familiarity became neccesary to integrate and correlate various types of data, which could be categorized into three: synoptic chart, detailed description of day to day life and stories, myths, .... The motivation for ethnography is to look behind the appearance, which means they should not just describe what thing are, but to colligate them with evidence, and set all these evidences in a frame, in which accidental forms are explicated in terms of universal needs. The forms are those of social life and the needs are those of social structure.

But ethnography and functionalism are not identical, and other theoretical frameworks can be invoked. What Malinowski solved was "credentialisation" problem. "fieldwork" becomes de rigeur.

American anthropology is different from British by its interdisciplinary outlook such as Psychology and Psychiatry, instead of Biology. American Athropologists instinctively compare what they found "over there" to what was left "at home". Gregory Bateson bridged American and British traditions.

European ethnographers tended to focus around institutional and hence "objective matters", Americans often oriented towards experiential and hence "subjective matters", which was refined into a whole paradim called "interpretative Anthropology".

In the late 1970's, the authority of Ethnographer's experience was undermined by "de-constructionism", with assertions about ethnography's "perspectivalism", "constructivism", "ahistoricalism " and the like.

The encounter with desconstructionism has made ethnographers unconsciously self-conscious about their "place on the scene".

The ethnography in University of Chicago used ethnography to turn a mirror on American society.Here comes the important point to note for ethnography, that is "they" are "us".

Another step to connect ethnography to system design is the rediscovery of culture as "communities of practice". Becomming a member of culture - moving from the peripher of the culture to its centre - involves a complex process of assimilation and learning. But the legitimate peripheral participation is one of the crucial elements constituting the communities of practice which make up a culture. This notion of communities of practice has been deployed by many ethnographers to counter the overly cognitivist interpretation of learning which was dominated current thinking. An alternative to this cognitive model is "distributed cognition", which became of a key notion for CSCW.

The final step is about "context", the "situated ", "local" and "occasional" appropriateness from "Ethnomethodology", another branch of sociology created b Garfinkel.

understand ethnography

Ethnography-I heard this word long before I had any idea of what it exactly means. In my imagination, it was about to live in a strange and isolated island or village, with primitive life styles and some weird religeous practices. Simply put, it was some kind of adventure to me. I finally got the chance to go into it by taking the course called "Qualitative Research Methods". I think it is time for me to take it seriously, and see how this mythic word can have something to do with technologies.

Let's start with the called paper "Representations and Requirements: the values of ethnography in system design" by R.J.Anderson(The weirld thing is I couldn't find this guy by googling...). He firstly trys to distinguish enthonography from data colletion, as taken by most system designers. It does make information available for system designers, but it is different from data collection. To me, it seems data collection means you have ideas of what information you want. But for ethnographers, that is not neccesary. They are more open to probability. How are those ideas from, first of all! Anyway, the methodologies ethnographers apply to access that information is an important issue.

Obviousely, there seem some debates about how formal the representation of ethnographic should be to be used by system designers(That's one of the questions I want to ask since we have a homework to observe and write about waiting. I am wondering what kind of form it should be to make the representation about what we observe to be meaningful). Besides, according to the author, while the designers expects some prescriptive thing as requirements for the system, ethnographers seem staunchly refuse to be prescriptive but rather descriptive(don't know why). The author also mentioned "design sensibility", which means the design problems and the possible ways to approach it(not quite understand).

How did ethnography become so popular in the field of HCI? It was from the motiviation to facilitate requirement capture. Since for users' daily life, it is pretty much oriented towards the practical managemnet of organizational contingencies, the shared cultures, the hurly burly social relations in the workplace, the locally specific skills. All these dimensions of working knowledge, the formal methods of requirements capture, are not able to make visible. Here is where ethnography comes to complement.

But it seems that's a misconception of ethnography, because designers take ethnography as a way to collect data. Actually, ethnography is not data collection but reportage. So it not about recording or summery, but patterning obervation and their interrelationships.Using the author's words, the ethnographers' eyes are always interpretative(But if we can borrow some of its ideas to do data collection, why not?) Such as how to observe, and how to find the underlying orders or patterns. Furthermore, ethnography is analytic, not just about what life looks like.

Another point the author wants to make is that ethnography aims a slightly higher goal. Its goal is not just to tell what users are, but to be germane to new ideas and issues for the designer.

The authors traces some reasons from which those misconceptions are from. Simply put, the author wants to say, ethnography is not just to look, instead it is to motivationally look. He emphasizes some special kills are required to be ethnographers.

Then he emphasizes one of the important techniques is representation. He puts froward a concept called "synecdoche problem for cultural form"( That is an interesting concept. It inspired me to think about cells on our body. Undoutedly, cells are parts of our body, but paradoxically enough, we can grow out a new body from one cell. ) He stresses the analytic strategies based on the justapositioning of antinomies.

After the author explained what ethnography is, he goes ahead to examine issues to apply ethnography for technology design. It seems, there are two choices we can direct to examine ethnography for design, which is reportage genre and the play of possibility.

The author mentioned sometimes, ethnography tends to focus on social relationships, while technology vanishes to be replaced by the familiar nexus of social institutions, power, economic and social itnerest, and historical contingency. Then how can we remedy this outcome?

The author introduced a strategy called the adoption of a faux naivete (don't know why they like to use french sometimes, and don't explain at all). Anyway, I guess it means the other phrase "engineering strange" he uses( What a wierd word! )

A more intuitive way to explain this way is from Latour:

...every time you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do, were this character not preesnt. This imaginary exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little character..

Very straightforward and much easier to understand, right?

I like the author's comment against to take the design frame as that of design problem and its designed solutions. Then the author sketches several rationalizations of organizational life that run against just to be efficient and productive, which is the goal for most designs.

a little summery

In the last quater, I took a course called "social analysis of computing". Activity theory for computing system design was emphasized in this course(To me, activity and interaction almost mean the same thing). When we talk about interactions, we usually refer to the interaction between users and systems, but to me, the interactions between designers and systems sounds more interesting.

Firstly, I'd like to question how "design" works. Usually we complain about the bad designs of different systems, saying that the designers don't know the users or don't know the environment where the system will be used. Is it true that to know more about the users is the only answer to improve the human computer interaction?Who are these designers? Are they software engineers? Are they usability experts? Are they graphic designers? Are they interaction designers? Or all of them (it seems to be a very natural answer in such a society with a high level of labor division)? Then how should them work together? What are required for an individual part of the whole design network? More importantly, according to actor network theory, the players in the design network should include nonhuman as well as human. That means to study design, we should be concerned about technologies, media, knowledge and skills, besides all different kinds of human designers and their interactions.

Then what exactly does design means? For some fields, design is too obvious an concept to explain, such as architecture design, graphic design, or car design. But if I say to plan a trip, to work out a market strategy, or to find a way to solve an everyday problem, you may be a little hesitant to take these activities as design. Furthermore, if I say I install a variety of softwares on my computer, and it becomes different from the original one and the others' , is that design? Maybe not. Here we should distinguish between design and development. Design has some purposes involved. We have certain goals in mind and design things to achieve them. According to this definition, we can certainly take the trip plan, market strategy or problem solution as designs, although they may not mean a physical object at the end. But we can only call installation of softwares as development. Because although we install different softwares to satisfy different purposes, but very possibly they are all independent, and we don't have a general goal about how to install and why. This process, as well as our adding furnitures or house appliances, if there is no general goal involved and these furnitures and appliances are irrelevant, their arrangement shouldn't be called design. Using Herbert A. Simon's words(he used the idea called artifact), the designers are concerned with how things ought to be to attain goals.

Herbert A. Simon is pretty much focused on engineering design or problem solving. There, the goals are relatively easy to define. However, when we enter the fields that are directly connected to end users, like buildings, HCI, or ubiquitous computing, the goals become complex and fragile to define, because humans are complex, flexible, diverse, developing and with emotions. When we focus on human computer interaction, it makes the design even harder. Not like architecture, it is static after it is built, HCI is dynamic, with time dimension involved.

Since HCI has its special quatlities, such as with end users and time dimension involved, then what special methods should be employed for HCI design? What knowledge or skills are required for HCI designers? How should these knowledge or skills be distributed among a variety of designers? What processes are appropriate for this variety of HCI designers to work together?I don't have answers to these questions right now, but I will be trying to answer them during the next quater...