Reading Thoughts – 2/1

“Why We Need Things” excerpt from History From Things: Essays on Material Culture
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery

Our dependence on objects is not only physical but also, more important, psychological. Most of the things we make these days do not make life better in any material sense but instead serve to stabilize and order the mind (22).”

This reading suggests that humans are stabilized by the objects around them. On a personal level, an experience with an object can help to “focus attention, reducing entropy in consciousness” (25) and thus add to the richness of one’s experiences. Objects can also serve as “concrete reminders of life that otherwise would run the risk of getting lost in the labyrinths of memory” (26). These ideas provide an interesting perspective of how humans self-identify because it seems that we would be lost without the many objects we collect throughout our lives. Perhaps these days we experience the world more richly because the vast number of objects we accumulate add layers of detail and definition to our lives.  There are also important social considerations related to owning objects. The reading suggests that human desires to present one’s identity influenced the development of technology more so than the desire for survival. This definitely rings true today, as consumers flock to stores to buy the new hip gadget, many times for the sake of vanity. Our lives are defined by our relationship with people and objects, but also by our relationship with people through objects.  In order to be freed from our dependence on objects, we must become adept at using symbols instead of real things. It is important for us, as designers, to be smart in the objects or symbols we produce so as not to add to the cognitive clutter of our users, but to help them find order of the mind.

Hertzian Tales, Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experiences, and Critical Thinking
Anthony Dunne

(more to come soon…promise!)

Products as criticism (47).
Gadget – “a curious, original and witty accessory of no real use”, but causes wonder and surprise, which are not usually considered in industrial design.

Complementary strategies: Why we use our hands when we think
D. Kirsh

In Johanna D. Moore and Jill Fain Lehman (Eds.) Proceedings of the Seventheenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pp. 212-217. 1995.

Kirsh defines complementary strategies as “an organizing activity which recruits external elements to reduce cognitive loads” (1). Essentially, it is any trick or strategy a user employs in order to solve a problem or facilitate perception more efficiently and effortlessly. This paper left me wondering what sort of strategies a designer should employ in order to ensure that users can and will use complementary strategies to better understand a program or project, but also if a designer should suggest certain strategies. Does grouping certain objects together on a screen help users mentally group those concepts more easily? Is there a proper way to facilitate certain strategies, without knowing which strategies are easier for particular users? Can we cause more cognitive load for users by forcing certain strategies upon them? This is a topic I would definitely like to explore in my own designs and think it will be incredibly useful for designing usable interfaces.

Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms.
Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer

In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’97), Steven Pemberton (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 234-241

Tangible Bits are a link between the physical and digital world, an idea to bridge the gap between these two worlds in which we live. The MIT Media Lab proposes that we move away from traditional Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), which “fall short of embracing the richness of human senses and skills people have developed through a lifetime of interaction with the physical world” (7), and instead create Tangible User Interfaces (TUI). The idea to utilize our inherent knowledge of physical spaces in order to navigate cyberspace in a more natural way is compelling, and will also allow for a seamless experience of data in our everyday experiences. Perhaps this will further solidify our already Cyborg-like tendencies as consumers of technology, but I believe it will also enhance our overall human experience. Getting away from a computer screen and getting back into the physical world is definitely the direction that technological innovations have been moving toward in the nearly 15 years since this paper was written, yet there is still a great deal more to be created.

The Whale and the Reactor. Chapter 2: “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”
Langdon Winner

Winner writes about the ways in which objects, namely technical artifacts, have political qualities. His first idea is that technology can dictate social order and settle communal affairs. Comparing this idea with that of Lubar and Kingery’s “Why We Need Things” reading, it is reasonable to think that the “things” in our lives can help determine our individual and collective positions socially, as well as the values we hold as a community or society. While Winner’s second idea that the “intractable properties of certain kinds of technology are strongly […] linked to particular institutionalized patterns of power and authority” (38) is interesting and provocative, he negates this idea by giving nuclear power as an example. While some government officials, agencies, and laboratories push for the adoption of nuclear power plants in the US, the power of the (mostly fearful of nuclear anything) electorate will almost always stand in the way of this adoption. It is important, as designers, to consider the implications and reactions our designs will bring about and to consider the delicate interplay of a complicated political system with our ideas.

Tags: interactivity, reading