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Together Designed: an actor-network approach to the design of websites

Dr Mark CypherMurdoch University

( Please read the notes in Slideshare )

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The Australian Asbestos Network- website

http://www.australianasbestosnetwork.org.au/

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http://www.stephenthomas.com/about/index.php

- neo‐classical economic model which assumes there is value in individual action and independent components- aesthetic experience as bodily and singularly subjective- “focuses on the interplay of these constituents of the totality of a person acting, sensing, thinking, feeling, and meaning making in a setting, including his/her perception and sensation of his/her own actions”. (Wright, P., Wallace, J., and McCarthy, J. 2008. Aesthetics and experience-centered design.)

User Experience Design is the process of evaluating all the components of an application to make the whole worth more than the sum of its parts

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• Dewey’s description of experience:

• “ [W]hat men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure…—in short, processes of experiencing. . . . is ‘double barrelled’ in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality

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Actor-Network Theory /Method (ANT)

Basic concepts

Actor Symmetry -human and non-human, can and should be described in the same terms-actors/actants ,

• differences between them are generated in the network of relations

• actors for the most part act ‘in relation’ as part of a collective

Network----designates a mode of inquiry not a thing

• A heterogeneous network of aligned interests or how organisations/ things mobilise, juxtapose and hold together the bits and pieces out of which they are composed .

• —replaces, society, subjectivity, action, power

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• Part of an ANT method 1. - first look at the associations that make up a thing like the

AAN website 2. - later look at how these relations shape it

1. Associations that make up a thing like the AAN website

• EG, Australian Asbestos Network website is a heterogeneous collective

- embedded in a hard drive in a server in Melbourne, coded in HTML, CSS and ASP.NET, with various social software, computers, journalists, communities of interest, content writers, programmers, designers, portions of the text itself and users

- Each actor • acts on others, ‘mediate’ one another, modify, translate and

delegate their various interests• is relatively indispensible, • provides affordance for the next actor in a chain • each is co-ordinated and ordered in a specific sequence, thus

defined by their association

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2. How do relations shape the website- practices include a whole range of actors that

extends far beyond people.

• Website as an inscription device –excellent means of gathering disseminating and accumulating inscriptions (content, writings, documents, illustrations, and objects)

• allow people to see a distant thing and then travel back to the source and bring back more such resources

• cycle of accumulation, format inscriptions into a centre that creates influence, knowledge, power, enrols others (becoming more valuable)

• Valuable knowledge is underwritten and can be described by considering this collective cycle of the accumulation of inscription

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Inscriptions are also scripts• Akrich - inscriptions act “like a film script,

technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act”

• visual, technical and material inscriptions force my eye, hand, and intention around the page and thus guides me and contributes to the task at hand

• Users following prescribed scripts (computers require scripts, websites require interfaces with scripts, visual composition) actors are prescribed and do what is expected

• Users are caught up in contested ‘modes of ordering’ or ‘patterning’ – thus actions are in part collectively coordinated by inscription

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Human experience embedded in the object world

On submission stories themselves are also shaped, formatted, becoming artifacts with a network of connotations

Users stories become an artefact with a network of connotations – that have been attached to it through all the intervening translations

Interface, story and the experience is an outcome of such constant and never ending sociotechnical collective shaping

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Aesthetic experience as distributed and collective

- assumption- that aesthetic experience is singularly subjective (KANT-1784)

Porter (2009) sensations are not direct empirical imprints of some outer material reality

• Language of affect and aesthetics acquired as a prerequisite to social life, sensations are learned thought structures

• Hennion (2007) -aesthetic taste “is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things,

• Hutchins (1995) - cognitive anthropologist -“One cannot perform the computations without constructing the setting; thus, in some sense, constructing the setting is part of the computation”

• Aesthetic experience with the AAN website is always made in relation , ordered , framed by a setting- or other things. Therefore aesthetic experience is distributed throughout the collective

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Users perceptions and experiences are translated through the methods of instruction the visual and technical composition of actors provides

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