Category: hci

Ironic Architecture: The Audience And Its Double

Published May 2, 2011 by cgerrish

My eyes trace the curve of a jet black line as it snakes across the paper. There’s a point at which the line stops and my eyes keep going, tracing the trajectory of where the line might have gone. It’s within the bounds of that short distance that we travel into the future. It’s this tracing that doesn’t trace anything that is the subject of this meditation.

“and now I can go on,” is the phrase Wittgenstein used to describe a certain relationship to a series. Given “2, 4, 6, 8, 10,” I think I can see where things are going. “Even positive integers” is a possible answer, but no matter what numbers come next, a logic can be found for it. If the number is 12, that’s one sort of logic; if it’s 22, that’s another. Based purely on the visible, the adjacent invisible can always be colored in with a reasonable pattern.

It turns out that perception works in a similar way. The gaps in our apprehension of the world are bridged, filled in, to create the sensation of the smooth flow of time and experience. We project ourselves into the future. And our memories make liberal use of sampling to construct a rational narrative to account for the dramatic beats of our lives occuring before this one.

While past is not necessarily prologue, if you have enough data on what ‘usually happens’ you can make an educated guess about what will happen next. Through a statistical analysis of big data, the trajectory of partial behavior can be made visible, and the completion of that behavior can be projected. Correlations in the data emerge to tell a story that is unavailable to any one individual. Here the life of the human becomes actuarial, a set of probabilities for the possibilities. Once the percentages of the probabilities have exhibited some durability, casino economics can be installed to manage the risk and profit from these tendencies. The owners and operators of big data systems have a private view into a higher-dimensional phase space. And despite what these organizations tell us about good and evil, they are purely commercial enterprises.

A big data interlude: capturing big data on the Network, used to be the province of spiders. In the search business, it was only through expedition, return and accumulation of pointers and meta-data that a sufficient store of big data could be created. With Twitter and Facebook big data is created second-by-second within the walls of a single location. It’s the users who do all the traveling, sending postcards and pointers back to the archive.

As the probabilities solidify, another landscape emerges—along with the building materials for another level of architecture. For instance, using the tendencies that behavioral finance has uncovered, Thaler and Sunstein suggest building architectures that frame choice in such a way that people are ‘nudged’ into getting with the program. The program might be putting a percentage of one’s salary into a 401k to fund their retirement, or selecting a healthy lunch at the school cafeteria. We tend to accept the default and choose the item put in our path. Sunstein and Thaler call this activity ‘Choice Architecture‘ because while an individual is free to make any choice, the selection set is tilted toward a particular policy agenda. This tilting toward a particular outcome is what they call “a nudge.”

I like to call it “Ironic Architecture,” because while any choice can theoretically be made, the character in this little story is unaware of the manipulation and tilting of the selection set. When the character accepts the nudge and acts as the statistical analysis suggests they might, another level of the story is being played out.

Here’s Fowler’s Modern Usage on irony:

“Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware of both that more and of the outsider’s incomprehension.”

While we make a big show of talking about how we want to engage the rational needs and desires of a user in the networked hypertext environment, more and more we’re seeing choice architecture employed to win without fighting, to persuade without engaging in a rational discussion.

This kind of strategy plays out in a number of domains, in politics, it’s called framing, or a little more obscurely, heresthetic:

“Like rhetoric, heresthetic depends on the use of language to manipulate people. But unlike rhetoric, it does not require persuasion. ‘With heresthetic,’ according to Riker, “Conviction is at least secondary and often not involved at all. The point of an heresthetical act is to structure the situation so that the actor wins, regardless of whether or not the other participants are persuaded.”

Personal behavior data is being created and recorded at an ever increasing rate. The phrase ‘information exhaust’ is an apt description of the continuous inscription of our activities into digital media. And while we may think that some superior form of personalization will be available to us based on this large data set, it’s more likely that big data will yield correlations and trends that are built into our environments and make us characters in stories of which we are unaware.

Harry Brignull has coined the phrase ‘dark patterns’ for this kind of architecture. Brignull writes eloquently about Alan Penn’s lecture on the architecture of Ikea and how consumer movement through that environment results in the unfolding of a singular story that its characters are unaware of:

“What Ikea have done is taken away something which is very fundamental, evolved into us, and they’ve designed an environment that operates quite differently, given that we are forward facing people, embodied […] from the way it would happen if you just looked down from outer space. Its effect is highly disorienting.”

“Ikea is highly disorienting and yet there is only one route to follow. […] Before long, you’ve got a trolley full of stuff that is not the things that you came there for. Something in the order of 60% of purchases at Ikea are not the things that people had on their shopping list when they came in the first place. That’s phenomenal.”

The best minds of our generation are designing dark patterns to entangle us in a story in which we spend more than we intend. They’re also designing choice architectures to get us to save for retirement, eat a healthy diet, get immunizations and show up for school. But the conversation and the narrative is happening at a level we don’t have access to—rhetoric without argument.икони

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Opening A New Interaction Surface: Microsoft and Kinect

Published November 27, 2010 by cgerrish

It’s an unexpected moment for Microsoft. What was formerly called Project Natal, and is now called Kinect, has opened a new interaction surface to the Network. I’m trying to think of another example of Microsoft introducing and providing stewardship for an interaction model with this kind of uptake. Generally Mr. Softy has been a follower, an embracer and extender of pre-established modes.

You can tell that Kinect has connected because it’s immediately overflowed its use cases and taken up residence in a whole series of unanticipated projects. It’s an interaction surface that has corporate competitors starting up their copy machines and trying to find the best position as a fast follower. Somehow it’s hard to imagine Microsoft actually getting something out of their labs and on to the street for around $200.00. I suppose it could be the harbinger of a pipeline finally unclogged. At least that’s the marketing spin I’d put on it.

After an initial misstep, Microsoft seems to have embraced the so-called “hacking kinect” movement. What they seemed to think was new kind of game controller turns out to be a general purpose interaction modality with use cases all up and down the Network. It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft handles the stewardship of this new device. Running a race from the lead position is an entirely different kind of game.

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Planes of Silence and Interruption Across The Network

Published October 5, 2010 by cgerrish

A brief note on two planes of the Network landscape that have recently caught my attention. They are the terrains of interruption and silence. Each of these areas is going through a transition. Each signals changes that are starting to bubble up in other areas of the Network.

The terrain of silence, for the purposes of this discussion, will be defined as unvisited web page locations. Web servers are not purposefully asked to send these pages to waiting browsers, their activity is indistinguishable from background noise. An unvisited page published by an individual is a perfectly acceptable event; here I’m more specially addressing the corporate CMS (content management system) driven behemoth web sites. The enterprise CMS brings the cost of brochure-ware publication down to almost zero. Marketing departments, assembled and calcified in the Web 1.0 era, churn out copy that is sent out to occupy the hard-won turf of their little section of the company’s web site. The products battle for shelf space in a self-defined, self-limited topography of web 1.0 information architecture— home page, tabs, pages, categories, sub-catagories. The navigation scheme based on the hyperlink and the outline implies an almost infinite number of potential pages that can occupy the space below the tip of the iceberg.

Many are learning that if you build it, it doesn’t mean they will come. More often than not this multitude of pages is met with silence. The analytics show that there just aren’t any clicks there. Generally companies retool to get clicks to those pages, because clearly “they” should be coming, there’s simply some adjustment that needs to be made. “User-centeredness” is bolted on so that users will understand that the pages they don’t want to look at are “needs based.” All kinds of lipstick is applied, but in the end, it might just be that the user just isn’t that in to you. The conversation is one-sided in an empty room, the analytics show it. It turns out that automated publishing of linked hypertext documents isn’t the same thing as interactive marketing. The growing silence will eventually change the character of the interaction. The old 1% response rate for junk mail is transferred to the web when direct marketing model is employed without alteration on the Network. The web is just a way of lowering production costs, it’s a notch above the economics of spam. Think of it as the negative space of the page view model.

At the other end of this candle that burns at both ends, is the terrain of the interruption. For the purposes of this discussion, the this terrain will be defined as the the set of Network-attached devices you’ve given permission to ping you when something important occurs. The classic examples are the doorbell and the telephone. Each was originally anchored to a specific location and would signal you with a bell when they required your attention. The telephone went mobile, and then was subsumed into the iPhone as a function of a personal computing device. The bell that signals a telephone call is still there, so is the alert that tells you a text message has arrived. But now there are a whole series of applications that will send you an interruption signal when something has occurred. A stock hits a certain price, a baseball team scores a run, you’re near a store with a sale on an item on your wishlist, or someone just commented on an item in your Facebook newsfeed.

The terrain of interruption used to be limited to a few applications that signaled a request for a real-time communication from another person. The interruption is still event-driven and unfolds in real time, but it’s no longer only an individual signaling for your attention. Now it might just be a state of the world that you’d like to keep tabs on. If any of these things happen, feel free to interrupt me. If I really don’t want to be interrupted, I’ll turn off that channel— so ping me, I’ll pick it up in real time, or as soon as I’m able. What was a sparse and barren landscape is quickly filling with apps that want the privilege of interruption. Multi-tasking becomes simply waiting for the next interruption: interruption interrupting the last interruption— or as T.S. Eliot put it in his poem Burnt Norton, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” The economics and equilibrium of the interruption have yet to find their balance. These interruptions threaten to become an always-on real-time backchannel to daily life. Constant interruption is no interruption at all.

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Stories Without Words: Silence. Pause. More Silence. A Change In Posture.

Published July 25, 2010 by cgerrish

A film is described as cinematic when the story is told primarily through the visuals. The dialogue only fills in where it needs to, where the visuals can’t convey the message. It was watching Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai that brought these thoughts into the foreground. Much of the film unfolds in silence. All of the important narrative information is disclosed outside of the dialogue.

While there’s some controversy about what percentage of human-to-human communication is non-verbal, there is general agreement that it’s more than half. The numbers are as low as 60% and as high as 93%. What happens to our non-verbal communication when a human-to-human communication is routed through a medium? A written communique, a telephone call, the internet: each of these media have a different capacity to carry the non-verbal from one end to the other.

The study of human-computer interaction examines the relationship between humans and systems. More and more, our human-computer interaction is an example of computer-mediated communications between humans; or human-computer network-human interaction. When we design human-computer interactions we try to specify everything to the nth degree. We want the interaction to be clear and simple. The user should understand what’s happening and what’s not happening. The interaction is a contract purged of ambiguity and overtones. A change in the contract is generally disconcerting to users because it introduces ambiguity into the interaction. It’s not the same anymore; it’s different now.

In human-computer network-human interactions, it’s not the clarity that matters, it’s the fullness. If we chart the direction of network technologies, we can see a rapid movement toward capturing and transmitting the non-verbal. Real-time provides the context to transmit tone of voice, facial expression, hand gestures and body language. Even the most common forms of text on the Network are forms of speech— the letters describe sounds rather than words.

While the non-verbal can be as easily misinterpreted as the verbal, the more pieces of the picture that are transmitted, the more likely the communication will be understood. But not in the narrow sense of a contract, or machine understanding. But rather in the full sense of human understanding. While some think the deeper levels of human thought can only be accessed through long strings of text assembled into the form of a codex, humans will always gravitate toward communications media that broadcast on all channels.

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