computational technology as design material

(After reading "Abstract Information Appliances")
What computational technology to interaction designers is like what paint is to painters, or what sound is to musicians. It is a type of material for expressions. While in the field of computer science, some fundamental design aspects such as aesthetical considerations are easily hidden and forgotten. It might be not a big deal for traditional computers, which were almost exclusively used by a few experts to do computaitons. However, with the popularity of computers, when HCI is more and more of a concern, the design decision we make for computational technology can not be reduced to issues of functinality, performance, usability and user requirements anymore, other design choices such as aesthetic concerns should also be involved. Expressions and functionality - what is their relationship in computational technology?

Aesthetics conerns the formal reasons explaining and describing the appearance of given things. The concerns include structure and composition, use of material, overall consistency, etc. They are the basis to analyse how the choices are made and for what reason.

When computational technology is seen as only means for implementing some practical functionality, many aesthetical decisions become mere consequences of other concerns. However, since now we live with them as they surround us all times and condition the way we live, the expressional part becomes important because they form the basis for the presence of these things.

HCI has borrowed rudimentary asesthetics from areas such as graphic design, a disciplinary dominated by "design by drawing". It is obviously important for screen dominated interaction, however, it does not tell too much about the computational aspects of this new matieral.

Material is to build things. Form is the appearance what material builds. What is involved in making something computational in appearance? Programs, interactive appearance and hardware?

The inherent characteristics of computational technology as a new design material are the temporal structures enabled by programs. However, this temporal structures have to be manifested in space to make it perceivable, like the temporal structure of music is manifested as sound that is generated as musicians play their intruments. We need to combine other materials to manifest the temporal structures as spatial structures such as on a screen, or as sound coming from speakers.

As any new materials, this new material will challenge existing ideas about aesthetics and design as it opens up new possibilities. Traditionally, we start with a general notion of function and some general usability criteria, we use stepwise refinements that finally result in a concrete desing, which then can be subject to test using prototypes. These concrete things have appearances. They talk to us as we live with them. This expressiveness is more or less of design choices? Where do these design choices come from and how are they related to functionality and usability?

The function-expression-circle: expressions define functionality while functionality explain design expression. The functionalist leitmotif "form follows functions" is a a leitmotif that emphasizes functionality and where we start at the "function" side of the circle. What if we turn the functionalist leitimotif upside-down and try to work from the other end of the spectrum. Thus, we can use the following leitmotif to guide such an investigation: function resides in the expression of things.

The two methodological exercises in redefining and rediscovering the role of aesthetics in the design of computational things: "discovering functionality in a given expression" and "discovering expressionals in appliance".

leisure, tourism, work and ...

The existence of work and leisure depends on each other. If there is no work, there is no leisure, and if there is no leisure, there is no work, just like the relationship between high and low, rich and poor, failure and success. They are all relational concepts. Also the concepts of work and leisure actually overlap to some degree. For example, when we follow the tourism agency to visit, ususally we have to follow very strict schedules, getting up very early and only had limited time for each place. We have no freedom to choose the places we want to go or how long we want to stay. We are like materials going through the product line of the tourism industry, under the control of somebody else.

In tourism, what becomes things to visit usually is not the things themselves, but its representative significance. For example, people visit the hollywood, because it, to some extent, represents Los Angeles. People visit Nanjing Road in Shanghai, because it was part of the Shanghai identity. The same holds true for the Great Wall in Beijing, and the Statue of Liberty in New York. Some of them are truly masterpieces of humans, and can evoke deep feelings in our hearts, while others are just symbols, usually from historical importance, and even when the history is gone, they still stay there as simply a gear of the tourism industry. To visit those place mainly means "I have been there", just like to ask signature from a star, the only connection is the two things intersect at a particular temporal and spatial point.

Tourism is also a means to sharpen our perceptions. Without going out, you can hardly appreciate how nice the home is. Without experiencing the unfamiliar, your lose sense of the familiar. Without relaxation, you have no motivation to work.

tourism as status of leisure

---after reading "Behavioral conceptualization of tourism and leisure"

Without doubt, tourism is a very important phenomenon in contemporary life, whether from the point of view of economic significance, social, cultural and environmental influences, and the role it plays in the personal life. As its impact touches upon all the difference levels of the society - from the marco to the micro, and it involves a variety aspects of the world from transportation to international relationships, it is no surprise that this phenomenon has attracted research interests from a range of disciplines - sociology, psychology, geography, social psychology, economice - just name a few. And now, it also became one of the attractions for computation, since, you know, computing is supposed to be everywhere (Well, what do you think of the term "ubiquitous computing"). As a natural result, the definition and meaning of tourism, and its relationship with other concepts such as leisure are neccesary fuzzy and controversial.

The paper "Behavioral conceptualization of tourism and leisure" seeks conceptual clarification of tourism as well as leisure by examining the relationship between these two. By limiting its discussion around the behavioral aspects of these two areas, it focuses on the proposition that tourism might warrant "special status" within a leisure context.

As for leisure, this paper proposes that while there are different concepts of it, such as a work/non-work dichotomy, a state of being, state of mind and a multidimensional construct, one conceptual strand threads through all the above conceptualizations - that is "freedom". Also leisure is examined in relation to many aspects of life such as family life cycle, and Kelly has made an important contribution to characterize the multidimensional nature of leisure, from leisure "core", which involves relatively accessible, low cost, low effort, and often home-based activites, to a balance to "core", which require significant effort and are senstive to resource difficulties such as education and income. Conceptualizations of tourism are as varied as leisure. Smith states that tourism "does not have a real, objective, precise, and independent existence", but is "to a significant degree, whatever we decide it will be". It has been defined as an industry, tourists' behavior, as well as geographic tour from a "generating region" to a "destination area" via "transit routes". So the interdisciplinary nature of both tourism and leisure is acknowledged and to integrate a large number of perspectives into a highly complex framework is required for both fields of study.

Then this paper seeks common ground between these two fields at the level of individual behavior, especially from the demand side of the phenomena. Demand of travel has often been analyzed in terms of two sets of factors: travel facilitators that enable person to travel and travel motivators that help explain why people who are able to travel actually choose to do so. According to the paper, while it is mainly social economic factors that contribute to the former, the "pleasure" represents a motive for behavior. And this facilitator for travel has its parallel in Kelly's dialectic analysis of leisure. Thus at the behavioral level, there is room for the investigation of common social, economic, and political factors that may effect all forms of leisure behavior, including tourism. And in behavioral terms, there seems little neccesity to insist on a major distinction between tourism and leisure phenomena.

The paper also argues the distinct differences of social theoretical treatment of these two fields reult from iedological thrust of researches into these two areas - one is dominated by industry needs, profit, and development goals and another is from "welfare" concerns, not due to the "nature" of these two phenomena.

Finally, it suggests that a potential starting point for the behavioral synthesis of tourism and leisure is through conceptualizations of leisure that integrate into the context of everyday life. By developing such an approach, the relationships between leisure and tourism could than be clarified by progressive research into the way in which they affect and are affected by the process occuring along three planes, which are "life line", "family" and "work" respectively. At the same time, a further avenue of enquiry that could lead to the production of a more synthetic behavioral account of tourism and leisure would be to develop a "motivtional matrix" for all leisure. This matrix could in turn be connected to the ongoing development of an overall lifestyle in which various motivational needs are met through unique mixes of leisure, family, and work careers.

What is "context", anyway

A major line of research in ubiquitous computing is "context-awareness", which means computational systems can sense and respond to various aspects of the settings where we live and work. Attractive as it might be to have sensors and computational systems to take care of somethings for us, more fears and doubts are aroused considering how much privacy we have to sacrifice for it. Do we really want computers to be able to figure out our needs and even emotions for us? If that is not the direction we want to drive - to sacrifice our privacy for automation, then where is the direction?

Advancement of technology and desirable pictures of future life should form a symbiotic relationship. On one hand, a digital future with computation embedded in the fabric of the world is driven by the development of low power, low cost, ever smaller and ever smarter devices; on the other hand, the advocate of these pictures should also foster the development. It seems most literatures around ubiquitous computing simply emphasize the former, while do not give the sufficient attention to the later as it deserves. Part of the reason can be traced back to when the notion of "ubiquitous computing" was coined by Mark Weiser. He proposed "transparent computing", where users only need to know what to do, with little concerns about how to do. Thus, the computing should be smart enough to figure out our situations and do things for us with our least attention. While "transparent" is a nice concept to describe how easy it is to use computers to commit our tasks, its implication that computings can fetch our personal info without our attention is a different story. How should we resolve this ambivalence around ubiquitous computing? How should we make the technological development and the vision of its usage benefit each other?

(The following arguments are mainly based on Dourish's paper "What we talk about when we talk about context")
One approach to draw a desirable picture is to gain insights from social science point of view. Actually, according to Dourish's paper "What we talk about when we talk about context", the incorperation of "context" or "situation" in computational design is a repsonse to social scientists' critique of traditional interactive systems. Social scientists have argued that traditional interactive system design often fails to take into consideration the specific setting where action unfolds, and Suchman's notion of "situated actions" becomes a common souce for reponsive and sensitive computational systems. However, it seems to make responsive and sensitive computation do not address the sociological critique successfully, and "the social and technical ideas often sit uneasily together". Obviously there are problems to translate ideas between these two intellectual frames: computer science and social science.

The difficulties of turning social observation into technical design come from the incompatibility of the respective approaches adopted by these two disciplines. Computing system designers take the positivist's tradition, the rational, empirical and scientific tradition, seeking to reduce the complex observable phenomena to underlying idealized mathematical descriptions, reduce social phenomina to essences, or simplified models that capture underlying patterns, and seeking for objective, independent descriptions of social phenomena, abstracting from the detail of particular occastions or settings. On the other hand, social scientists' approach are heir to a phenomenological legacy; in this view, social facts are emergent properties of interactions, not pre-given or absolute but negotiated, contested, and subject to continual process of interpretation and reinterpretation. They turn the attention away from the idea of a stable external world as unproblematically recognized by all, and towards the idea that world is essentially a consensus of interpretations.

With these two distinct approaches, they have different interpretations of "context". System designers take a representational approach, concerned with how context can be encoded and represented. The concept of context in this perspective have 4 assumptions: context is a form of information - it is something that can be known and hence encoded and represented; context is delineable - so we can define what is context in advance; context is stable - the determination of the relevance of any potential contextual element can e made once for all; context and activity are seperable. However, this definition of context is not the kind of context in social scientists' minds. They take an alternative point of view: context is not information, but a relational property that holds between objects or activities - the question is not whether something is context or not, but whether it may or may not be contextually relevant to some particular activities; the scope of contextual features is defined dynamically; context is an occasional property, relevant to a particular setting, particular instance of action, and particular parties to that action; and context arise from activities. So we should not consider context as a representational problem, in which the question is about "what is context and how can it be encoded". Rather, we should take it as a interaction problem, and ask "how and why in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain mutual understanding of the context for their actions". So just like ordinary-ness, context is also an "interactional" problem.

Since the main concern of the use of context is to discriminate or elaborate the meaing of user's activity, the link between aciton and meaing as a primary concern, and we find the link in "practice". According to Etienne Wenger, practice is not just what we do, but what we experience in the doing. It is a process by which we can experience the world and our engagement with is as meaningful. The unification of action and meaning is also central to the question of context, since context is essentially about the ways in which actions can be rendered as meaningful - how a particular action, for example, becomes meaningful for others by dint of where it was performed, when, or with howm. So what constitutes context, how people may orient to features of the world as contextual or central, how relevance is managed, etc. - are questions of practice.

What is crucial to the interactional view is to see practice as a dynamic process - it evolves and adapts. By turning attention from context as a set of descriptive features of settings to practice as forms of engagement with those settings. Thus, the concern of ubiquitous computing is not a "transparent" computing interface where computing systems take care of everything automatically, rather a open-ended new form of interaction where users engage, adopt and adapt technologies and incorporate them into their own work, and new meanings are created and communicated.

tourism vs. travel

I never thought that there would be any big difference between these two words: "travel" and "tourism" until I came across this paper "Representations of international tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights,Savings, and Servility" by Malcolm Crick. According to Crick and other sociologists, these two words certainly mean different things. While traveling is to discover the undiscoverd, or at least "reveal what history has discovered", tourism, on the other hand, "is merely about a world discovered (or event created) by entrepreneurs, packaged and then marketed". As MacCannell puts it, "the term 'tourist' is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences". With the development of modern travel industry, tourism becomes a degenerate offspring of travel.