convivio lecture 1 – michael smyth
“artefacts, place and interaction design”
starts by confessing that he doesn’t really know what hci is.
good icebreaker, charming, leads into a discussion of the importance of hci.
has us draw a computer, guessed that it would like a desktop, uses this as an example of why hci is important – because when we think about computers, we think about the means of interaction. but hci is broader than we first think. check.
[listen halfway as i sort my desktop]
it is still fascinating to me how much this initial setup of hci seems to be viewed as necessary even with proclaimed practitioners. it’s a sign of how young the discipline is, and i think our experience at iu is not typical. it would be good to have a better understanding of the typical experience, and of the difference between the american and european (and other) perspectives. i should read more of the history of interaction design around the world.
[tune in more as he discusses mcluhan and the impact of different media]
michael’s comparison between a digital document and a drawn document is that the digital document looks more finished. it doesn’t capture uncertainty, or history. that’s a more interesting way of looking at the difference than what i’ve heard before about it just Seeming more formal and thus influencing the way we think as we write, because i am more and more convinced that everyone does not feel this way, particularly younger people. but the history and scribbling points are the ones that keep me going back to paper, but it seems like those are rather easily retained. i have long thought of just better ports of freehand writing as an answer, but it is interesting to think about other solutions. wait, is that what he’s talking about now?
[tune back in, and then out again as i format these notes]
talking about architects and their use of prototyping – why and how simple models are used at early stages of the project.
physical models gave a sense of context that sketches didn’t, and were more easily manipulable – allows architects think with their hands.
so what is he getting at? trying to get us to think about pervasive computing?
cites lakoff
you should write a short paper – ‘things i take for granted about hci that i really shouldn’t’
another note on the history lost with digitization – opening a book and finding the most popular article because the book falls open to it. the notes in the margin.
we think of the ideal of technology as pristine, but we learn a lot from the patterns of use and the trails they leave.
[distracted]
this relates to the annotation thoughts that i have every time i start reading or taking notes. if i’m starting to talk about my interests as something like pervasive metadata interaction, with a goal of helping people organize, track, and share their ideas, how do the annotation of information that we are processing and the annotation of information that we are creating intertwine?
[yep, he’s talking about shared surfaces now.]
it seems like there are two parts – the annotation itself and the organization of the information once it is created. i am interested in where the twain meet, but i need to focus on a specific area to make it something real, and lately i’ve been drawn to the ideas that are lost, on the backs of napkins and in the minds of everyone we meet. but back to that later.
[back to lecture]
“interaction has lost it’s grounding in physicality” and woodrow, the professor from virginia tech, interrupts – “but it’s changing”, and he acknowledges yeah, it is in some places, and they namedrop dourish and hutchins. but then he gets back to the lecture, and the main point, which is that we need to think more about haptics and broaden our conception of interaction design.
so what are the people in this room doing who haven’t thought about before? what is their hci? what is the hurdle between the two?
i guess i know some answers to these questions, but i don’t think about them very much in terms of the hci that is being taught right now, to my contemporaries, and that’s naive, i guess. it seems like there’s a danger, in thinking about embodied computing, to dismiss the learning that we still can do very well with, um, disembodied? computing. or not?
[hee! he said disorientated. that is one of the funniest language differences between british and american english. it just sounds like a nonword to me.]
when i visited the lighthouse in glasgow, i was struck by thoughts on my place in the world of design. these things that michael is talking about blur the edges between digital and physical design as a part of interaction design, and i realize that i do believe that, but the training program is so different, the ideology… what is happening?
talking about skating’s relationship to the urban space.
recommend dogtown and the z-boys to erik – skateboarding and embodied cognition, and the uses of space that are not always envisioned by designers
the thing we don’t fully grok is that the digital can be just another layer of any object, and impact the other layers in deeper ways than previously imagined.
it’s true that i keep thinking about the metadata question in a more traditional sense. maybe the answer really is impossible on a screen. maybe that shift has to go hand in hand with a shift to more embodied computing.