participation & affordances lcc 2700: intro to computational media
TRANSCRIPT
Participation & Affordances
LCC 2700: Intro to Computational Media
Borges Forking Paths
A book that is a labyrinth
An action that is a coded message
A view of human life and the meaning of our choices
Borges Forking Paths
Fictional exploration of philosophy
A stable genre: the detective stories- clues and puzzles => solution
Time branches into infinite futures
Space - Time- conceptual space- time as space
A Novel that can be read in multiple ways
The book/maze of Ts’ui Pen
Everything is possible, and everything occurs in some reality
4 properties of the digital medium
• Procedural• Participatory• Spatial• Encyclopedic
4 properties of the digital medium
• Procedural• Participatory• Spatial• Encyclopedic
Agency
• What does it mean to be “active” in a computational environment or system?
Postmodernism / Poststructuralism
• Structuralism– The study of fundamental elements that constitute higher
order structures– Humanistic movement of the 19th and 20th c.– Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure)
• the system over the use of language• Fundamental linguistic structures• Semiotics• Linguistic signs = signifier/signified
– Anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss)• Fundamental mental structures• Cultural phenomena: mythology, kinship
– Literary studies• The structures or formulas for literary production
Postmodernism / Poststructuralism
• Poststructuralism– A response to structuralism – Intended to unseat the former’s intention to craft absolutist,
top-down understandings of cultural systems– No generalizable meta-language is sufficient to understand
human experience– Poststructuralists believe such experiences are culturally
situated and can only be understood in light of such contexts– Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan)– History (Michel Foucault)– Literature (Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, etc.)– Philosophy, art (Gilles Deleuze, etc.)
The Rhizome
• Concept from Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus• One of many poststructuralists models or analogies for
artistic/literary production and consumption• Rhizome: from botany
– An underground stem or root system that extends new shoots from its nodes
– In contrast to the branching root system, the rhizome symbolizes arbitrary growth
• Deleuze and Guattari borrow this term for todescribe literary, artistic, and cultural practicesthat allow for non-hierarchical movement withinsystems of meaning
• Any point connects to any other; a part of a muchlarger theoretical framework
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Relationship to Literature and Art
• “Free play” in a signifying system engenders multiple meanings
• Notion of artifacts as “texts” to be read in a variety of contexts
• De-emphasis of the intention and role of the author– “Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes
• New emphasis on the role of the reader/viewer/etc.– Texts as co-produced by the author and the
reader• Rhizome as one way to characterize this free play• “Rhizome” is borrowed heavily in hypertext theory
and practice• Hypertext and “new media” as “realizations” of
poststructuralism
Problems with the Rhizome
• Practically, the notion that “anything is possible” is not so productive, perhaps even impossible– Texts can be read creatively– Computational systems?
• Janet Murray, “the rapture of the rhizome”– “unheroic and solutionless”– Postmodernists “privilege confusion” over
representation, liberation from the “tyranny of the author”
• Solution: A return to intentional experiences: design for intended, but open effect
Can you really “do anything you want”?Would you want to?
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Participation as Structured Expereince
Constraints structure the possibility space of experiences
Constrained action
Computational expressive artifacts as goal-directed works with constrained action
Constraint produces and structures expression
Some examples
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Some examples
Epi oinopa ponton the wine-dark sea
Some examples
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Interplay of free play and structured rules
MUD examples from HoHVideogamesSoftware as media for work, playInteraction through fixed input systems withProcedurally authored rules
Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
• Well-known computer scientist• VP at Apple, “Human-centered products”• Partner, Nielsen-Norman Group (with Jakob
Nielsen)• “The Andy Rooney of design”
Norman’s design principles
• Conceptual Models - the way human minds find meaning in things
• Affordances - “appropriate actions are perceptible, inappropriate ones are invisible”– Jointly determined by environment and
organism• Constraints - limits to choices• Feedback - showing the effects of an action
Norman’s design principles
• Mostly interested in physical and cognitive affordances
• And perceived affordances in particular
• Determinsm? Free-play? Expression?
Determinism? Free play? Expression?
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Relationship between usability, interaction, and expression
Gadgets and affordancesThe economy of use: efficiency
Expressive systems rely more on possibility spaces
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