From “Interaction Anxieties”

Q1:

We need to speculate on the cultural and aesthetic worth of interactivity in order to accommodate it more properly in our lifestyles. At the same time, we also need to recognize the opportunities that computing in its different forms – mobile, embedded, and pervasive – offers for changing our expectations and usage of space, architecture and urbanism.

Aren’t elements like “cultural worth” and “computing opportunities” difficult to accurately speculate upon, because they are often suggested by product marketing?

Q2:

McCullough states:

“Like most etiquette, architecture exists not out of pompousness, but because it lets life proceed more
easily. Situated computing extends this age-old preference, where as anytime-anyplace computing does not.”

“Letting life proceed more easily” is a relative statement; wouldn’t “anytime-anyplace” computing eventually fulfill this?

Q3: From “What is interaction?”

What is the distinct difference between the intuitive response of a human being, and potential ‘pattern recognized’ responses of a interactive learning machine?

01_Dubberly, Pangaro, Haque_pg8_The article discusses the interaction between a person and a steam engine as a learning system, coupled to a self regulating system. The article acknowledges the person as a learning system, but doesn’t quite equate them with being a computer. What is being asked here? If computers can learn like humans, or humans learn like computers? Are humans just another component in many of these higher-order systems? is there a loss or surrendering of human agency if so?

02_Khan_pg3_The article states:

“…architecture is a form of etiquette….[it] exists not out of pompousness, but because it lets life proceed more easily. Situated computing extends this age-old preference, where as anytime-anyplace computing does not.”

Can you explain this concept in a little more detail? Is it possible for architecture to follow an ‘anytime-anyplace’ model? are the two models incompatible? does this start to turn to the realm of sentient cities?

03_Dourish_pg15-16_The point was brought up in Sentient Cities, what the agency of the individual is in truly interactive systems. In the examples given of a tangible computing environment, the fact that the system knows your next step based on your interaction with the world is great, but it inherently follows a more linear path, simply reacting to what you are doing. (The tangible object is not able to be changed, they system is only able to react to your interest in it.) Is tangible computer capable of a higher order of system? Or is it relegated to the traditional man-machine loop?

History of Interaction:

Page (13): Visual metaphors. Developing of visual metaphors for information management.

As phases in interaction had a transition from electronic to symbolic, to textual and graphical followed by tangible and embodied interaction, there has been trends within each phase of development based how we have evolved in our understanding of the digital world.

Talking about Graphical Approach in computing and interface design, it is interesting to look at how the trend of Skewmorphism, was replaced by the trend of flat design as our familiarity with the world of computing and the need for visual metaphors decreased.

James Gibson, the environmental psychologist, once suggested that we perceive the world as a set of “affordances”. An affordance is an object that’s shape suggests its use. The most commonly cited affordances would include door handles and push buttons. Skeuomorphism also represents “perceived affordances”. It fits with our natural interpretation of objects but in a digital world. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/skeuomorphism-is-dead-long-live-skeuomorphism

What is Interaction?

Page(9): 0-2 Learning.

Today much of computer-human interaction is characterized by a learning system interaction with simple learning process. You signal the computer, it responds and you react…

Google receives the answer to the search query, but it treats your thousandth query just as it treated your first. It may record your actions but it has not learned – it has no goals to modify

Q) Is a search engine, an example of interaction in a learning model with humans as a learning system or is it an example of reaction. Are reaction and interaction mutually exclusive or they can be accommodated together?

Interaction Anxieties

Shifting Agencies,

One can imagine a self-regulating city where buildings monitor their own energy resources, negotiate their needs with a smart grid and communicate with other buildings to better collectively manage their shared resources. Human participation in the exchange world would be minimal since the interacting systems would be well programmed in bartering with one another.

Q) How will this shift of agency, affect the idea of expression and perception in architecture? With systems were efficiency will play the central role to design, with minimal human participation, will there be a change in the concept of architecture and technology shaped around human needs and emotions, to humans adapting their needs and emotions around an efficient system?

Paul Dourish page 16. He mentioned the two computing/ interaction: tangible and social. What is social computing? Can social interaction be programed? “At the same time, anthropological and sociological approaches have been applied to uncovering the mechanisms through which people organized their activity, and the role that social and organizational settings play in this process”.  Does “Activities around computer system” define the social computing?

What is interaction? Page 4. “The person is inside the computer-human interaction loop, … the nature of the system: the computer is not characterized in our model of computer-human interaction.” How to understand this two situation? They are kind against each other.

Interaction Anxieties, Omar Khan. When the future/ sentient cities/ sentient buildings are about interaction, what is the role of architect? At past, interaction of architecture can be understood as the experience of inhabiting the space. What is the interaction for architecture today? Does the computing help us to understand/design or is it the bonus, not fundamental?

1.Paul Dourish, Where The Action
“In contrast, the new perspective on which tangible and social computing rest argues that a disembodied brain could not experience the world in the same ways that we do…..,
Physically, our experiences cannot be separated from the reality of our bodily presence in the world; and socially, too.”(p.18)

Now we see that baby X can talks or other movie talks about clone human. Is any possibility that one day they may have their own will? and How does interaction system influence society?

2.Khan, Omar, “Interaction Anxieties”
“One caution that I have with this approach is that it runs the risks of reifying the everyday. With its focus on developing interactive technologies that support situated actions, it inadvertently fixes located practice and undermines any….disrupt them..”(p.3)

Is any negative or positive influence by human interacted with computers?

3.Dubberly, Pangaro and Haque, “What is Interaction?”
“Search services work much the same way. Google retrieves the answer to a search query…..It may record your actions.”(p.9)

In this era, we all use search services. We input something, then we can know a lot of answers, how can we filter the information and protect our privacy when we use the search service on the internet?

(Dourish) Where the action is?

1. Tangible computing is trying to create an environment where people interact directly with physical objects rather than the graphical interfaces. Social computing is trying to “incorporate the social world into interactive system.”  Both approaches changes the way we experiences our everyday world. This strengthened the idea of embodiment. How much does the technology is currently influencing our physical and social environment?

(Dubberly) What is interaction?

2. “Behavior can be bottom up, in which an event in the world triggers the cycle, or top-down, in which a thought establishes a goal and triggers the cycle. If you don’t say it, people tend to think all behavior starts with a goal. It doesn’t – it can be a response to the environment.” When we interact with technology, do we tend to go from bottom-up or top-down? How does this effect the outcome and effect of technology to us?

(Khan) Interaction anxieties

3. “We need to speculate on the cultural and aesthetic worth of interactivity in order to accommodate it more properly in our lifestyles. At the same time, we also need to recognize the opportunities that computing in its different forms – mobile, embedded, and pervasive – offers for changing our expectations and usage of space, architecture, and urbanism.” When architects and designers incorporate technology to their works, it changes people’s lifestyle and the way they interact with each other. Do we feel the empowerment and the feeling of control? How much do we want that? Where do we find the balance?

1
In the feedback-loop interactive model, the user is closely coupled with the dynamic system. Dubberly, Haque and Pangaro note that both the human and the system are unspecified (pp.3). What does that mean? Is the interaction between the user and the dynamic system a process of mutual specification?

Boulding’s diagram maps nine system types of increasing complexity. The fourth level of the Cell is particularly interesting, as it seems to mark the transition from inanimate units to living entities (Dubberly, Haque and Pangaro, pp.7). Autopoetic systems, like cells, can handle unpredictable inputs because of their inherent ‘through-put’. What is a through-put? What kind of information does it consist of? In which ways can it accommodate unpredictable inputs?
If it resembles the genetic code of a cell, does it also evolve over time in response to random inputs?
Also, is the production of space autopoetic?  (the relevance, if any, of Schumacher’s “The autopoesis of architecture”?)

2
“Like device protocols and personal conduct, architecture has a form of etiquette” (Khan, pp.162) Etiquettes, as a form of control, define interactions in a definite, but not necessarily deterministic way. Is this suggestive that a truly participatory relationship with our environment should not be mediated by any structures of control? I am wondering if control points empower interactivity, as Galloway, referring to the paradox of protocols, wrote that they “have to standardize in order to liberate” (Galloway, Protocol, 2004, p.95).

I found the notion of interpassivity to be alarmingly familiar in the way digital technologies affect our agency. If “in the interpassive the subject forgoes participation” (Khan, pp164), what does that mean for the citizens’ agency in the Sentient City? In which ways could this transfer of responsibilities alienate us from our civic duties and eventually our citizenship itself?

3
Leaving behind its traditional cartesian foundation, computation is now seeking to appropriate the relationship between embodiment, the quality of being embedded in the world, and sense-making, the way we perceive experience and assign meaning. Throughout the history of interaction, this has been a trajectory where computation moved from representation of the real world (for instance through textual and visual metaphors, Dourish, pp.11-13) to participation in it, as the approach of ‘embodied interaction’ builds on how we perceive through being-in-the-world. Dourish writes that we need to “consider how computation participates in the world it represents”, as it is “fundamentally a representational medium” (pp.20). The question to ask here is, how can a system participate in the environment it represents? Isn’t representation already a filter, an interpretation of the world? How does the representative quality of computation affect its participation in the world?

1. Human-computer relationships seem to be based on the idea of “control.” How much control do we have in our relationships with computers presently? In terms of the shifting agencies from interactivity to automation to interpassivity, how much control are we willing to give up, or allow to be automated, and how much would we rather not have any control of at all?
2. When I think of a  “Conversing” relationship I think of a conversation and how both (or more) participants are completely autonomous but react to and affect the other by means of their communication. It seems like the most “human” relationship. This reminds me of artificial intelligence which seeks to simulate human-to-human interaction. As we continue to seek more human-like interactions with computers, what will happen to our interactions with other humans?
3. What does Paul Dourish mean by “embodied interaction” and what does this mean for user interfaces of technologies?

1 – Where the Action Is – I’m very interested in his description of the design of computing machines as charting the sets of human skills that could be incorporated/emulated. I’m also interested in the evolution of computers as used by experts/coders/engineers almost exclusively (Because they needed to know the specific language or how to do electrical engineering) to this integration of human/computer interaction into everyday lives. How will this interaction continually evolve, when thinking about technology such as “wearable technology” like apple watches or fit-bits which monitor your own anatomy and lifestyle, to the point of making changes to our health or diet? how does that engage with his discussion of phenomenology?

2 – What is Interaction? Are there different types? – I was very interested in the extension of the different types of interaction from just  human/human vs human/machine or human/non-human to include different styles of interaction in which a human can be part of the system. I was interested in this distinction between a linear system and more complex cyclical systems, but how if a linear system is paired incorrectly with a cyclical system, it essentially lowers it to the use of just a linear system. He gave examples of technologies which fit the linear models (the automatic door) but didn’t go into higher examples of how computing machines would fit into the other systems as much. For example, what would a conversing system of human/computer interaction look like? Have we achieved his definition of conversing interaction yet with a human/machine combination?

3 – Interaction Anxieties – I was most interested in the section on changing agencies between technology and humanity. I was especially interested in this idea of giving up some of our passive roles to machines. What does it mean to give up not only active roles (such as manufacturing) but also passive roles (such as the example of the smart buildings which monitor energy use)? Do we risk giving up both active and passive roles to much? or does this free us up for something other than the roles of “active” and “passive” in favor of something altogether different?

Hi all, pleasure “meeting” you last week. Hopefully I can meet some (all?) of you in person when I’m back north in November.

On to the tasks at hand …..

I’ve been grappling with a lot of the questions raised in the articles over the last decade, particularly in the interaction design classes I’ve been running. A lot of it comes down to “what does computational media add to human existence?” How do we jointly create meaning with a machine?

• Dourish writes of the graphical interface, and with it the ability “to exploit further areas of human ability as part of the interactive experience.” Later, in the section on tangible computing there are three models he mentions; 1) distributing tasks among devices across different locations so they can be reconfigured based on the environment 2) augmenting everyday objects with computational abilities for altering the user’s environment and 3) direct manipulation of computers through alternative interfaces (that is, something other than a mouse and keyboard). What is the fundamental difference between screen based and physical interaction? Is one ultimately more meaningful than the other? What would one excel at that the other fails?
• Dubberly p 12 “By looking beyond common notions of interactions for a more rigorous definition, we increase the possibilities open to design. And by replacing simple feedback with conversation as our primary model of interaction, we may open the world to new, richer forms of computing.”  Chris Crawford, in “The Art of Interactive Design” defines interaction as “a cyclic process in which two actors alternatively listen, think, and speak.” This would fall neatly into any of the models that were explained in the article. However, he also talks about interactivity as something that exists along a spectrum, where a refrigerator light that turns on when you open the door is something with very low interaction and an engaging and stimulating intellectual conversation as an example of something with high interaction. Could the three models of interaction (linear, self-regulating, learning) also scale along another axis that indicates intensity? Might this give us a way to engage in more meaningful interactions over time?
• Myron Kreuger is a total hero, and it’s astonishing that outside a number of specialized galleries and museums that interaction is still such a novelty in the art world. I wonder if the level of engagement that is needed in an audience for an interactive piece to be too high for these traditional institutions. When we perceive work, we need time to think about it, reflect on it. Video art in these contexts suffers from the same fate a lot of times. There’s not enough attention afforded work that demands more.