HuCo 500 – Weekly questions

An affordance, it is said, points two ways, to the environment and to the observer.  …It says only that the information to specify the utilities of the environment is accompanied by information to specify the observer himself, his body, legs, hands, and mouth.  This is wholly inconsistent with dualism of any form…  The awareness of the world and of one’s complementary relations to the world are not separable.(Gibson, 141)

Maybe I am misunderstanding Gibson’s point, but the claim that the theory of affordances dispels the notion of dualism of any kind seems to be quite a leap, making assumptions about what reality and perception are.  How do you separate subjective sense-making (i.e. perception of one’s environment/reality) from objective fact (what Gibson calls “invariants”)?  It is certainly true that the affordances of an object as evaluated by a biped, for instance, will be different than those evaluated by a quadruped, and that either evaluation says something about the evaluator (i.e. that they are a two-legged or a four-legged).  That doesn’t mean that the act of evaluating—the interpretive or perceptive act—is not subject to the context and experience of the ego.  Gibson makes allowances for “misinformation” and “misperception” (142); I’m not sure how he can reconcile this allowance with his claim that there can be no mind-body/abstract-concrete/mental-physical dualism.    

Is there still such a large gap in the affordances of paper compared to computers, as Gaver describes (115-117)?  Do computers today offer all the same affordances of paper?  Is there anything that paper affords that computers/cell phones/electronic devices today do not?

Readings:

Gaver, William W. “Situating Action II: Affordances for Interaction: The Social Is Material for Design.” Ecological Psychology 8(2), 1996. 111-129

Gibson, J.J. “The Theory of Affordances.” The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.

To Begin: I’m a news junkie. I think that figures into why I would analyze CNN.com as a user, because I use it all the time.

For someone who is constantly on the go, I understand the success of a website like CNN.com. First of all, CNN has become a household name for around the clock, around the world news that is the latest, most relevant, and most up-to-the-minute.  It is it’s own broadcast news meme.  CNN has always been broadcast news, which I think is important when considering the website. According to good old Wikipedia, Broadcast Journalism is simply “published by electrical methods, instead of the older methods, such as printed newspapers and posters”. Pretty simple. However, CNN has always been in the business of visual Broadcast News. It’s not just about what you hear (radio) or read (newspaper), but it’s about using two senses of seeing and hearing simultaneously that gives you the CNN news experience.

The Objection then becomes: Well, what’s so special about CNN? Local News has been doing that since television came out!

It is my opinion that CNN.com is an extension of the cable channel placed on the internet with more affordance for interaction by the news consumer.

To begin my discussion of CNN.com, I would like to begin with DESIGN:

Let’s first compare the CNN.com homepage to what you get when you turn on the T.V.

This is the brand new CNN.com. Launched in Mid-October, the brand new CNN.com has become more user friendly with many boxes of stories that immediately meet you when you open the website. This affords the consumer many opportunities for a news story to catch their eyes so they can click and read. One of my postings will be about the changes from the old website to the new website and what that affords consumers of internet news.

This is a shot of Robin in the Morning: Robin Meade from CNN Headline News. (courtesy of city-data.com)

The one specific thing I want to point out about the comparison between CNN.com and CNN are the boxes. Ok, so what about boxes? Well let’s think about it, there are lots of rectangular shapes surrounding all the text that is on both the CNN.com website and CNN broacast. It’s an obvious way to highlight the news, and draw your eye to what the broadcaster or webmaster wants you to read, however, I think that it’s more than that. Think about your weekly trip to the grocery store. How many boxes do you see? Tons, right? What occurs all over those boxes? Print.  Our television is technically a box; our computer screen is a box. It is engrained in us as consumers to consume media and information that is in boxes.

CNN and CNN.com work as sources of broadcast and internet news because they’re boxy. Little compartments of information for each one of use to look at and select or pass if we so choose. Boxes give us affordance. Every since we were young enough to select cereal or our favorite blue box of macaroni and cheese, we have been given choices to consume in boxes.

Last year I wrote about the insufficient affordances in the design of the emergency breaks in Montreal’s Metro trains. While the trains have been in operation for more than 40 years, it seems providing intuitive user interfaces is still not considered important to the STM (Montreal Transit Corporation) even today. Consider this panel found outside the elevators which were newly installed at some stations:

Elevator button panel (via fagstein.com)

Intuitively, which button would you press to call the elevator?

The correct answer is that both buttons issue a call but only the black button calls the elevator. The red button however issues an emergency call! With this panel design a lot of frustration is guaranteed.

So after only a few days, this design issue was “fixed” the following way:

"Fixed" elevator panel (via fagstein.com)

Let’s see how long it will be before the yellow stickers fall off and the panel has to be completely replaced with a more intuitive design after hours of time and frustration have been wasted for many people.

Thanks to Fagstein for discovering this!

The Webkinz website design relies heavily on the use of images. Because the design was created with children (the primary user) in mind, images are the most obvious choice to the site’s development.

Images help to create meaning for the user during the time he or she spends inside the Webkinz world. According to Kress, images entitle the user to assume that things are exactly like the image depicts it. For example, my little sister believes that the only way to play with her stuffed animal is online. She sees the life meter in her Webkinz’ home which constantly reminds her that she must keep it living. This image is especially important because the meaning of the stuffed animal lies within it. She must keep it alive or else what use the animal to her anymore? She “loves” the animal so much (as she tells me) that she gets online every day, after she has completed her homework of course, to replenish her Webkinz life source.

The placement of every image in the Webkinz world also affects the user’s thought process. In my sister’s homepage she sees every aspect of how her Webkinz stays alive. There is a clickable image that leads her to play games which give her points to keep her pet alive. There is another clickable image that leads her to the store, where she can buy furniture, toys, food, etc for her pet. If these images were not placed in a obvious place (i.e. the first page she accesses after logging in) would she remember all these things she needs to do to play this game? I believe the designer had in mind that children need to be reminded to do certain things.

The design of these images – color, size, order, etc – also afford the user to use them. Every image in the Webkinz world is vividly colored and looks exciting. At first, one might think the assortment and blast of color makes the site too busy, but I believe it is necessary to keep children busy. The color entertains them and gets a creative thought process going, in my opinion. The colors also help to keep the children’s interest. I know that if I were playing in a virtually pet world, I would want the colors to excite me.

I believe a combination of the images, color, and layout develop the design to afford the children’s interaction with the site and keeps them coming back to play more. The site becomes meaningful to the user as they want to continue playing with their pet. They are reminded they must keep them alive and all the ways to do it by placement and positioning. They keep coming back because the layout is inviting and fun to be around. Overall, the images are effective by creating a relationship with the user.

Wipe the slate clean, abandon scanty data and computations. Seize the opportunity focusing on universal affordace, which any environment offers to any human.

‘Handmade’ by E. Sandorfi

Yesterday we had a meeting with Nello Barile and Andrea Miconi from Universitá IULM.

Nello’s paper “From post-human consumer to the ontobranding dimension” for forthcoming Mobile communication and social policy conference points to an interesting aspect how new social technologies together with consuming practices within these technologies can create certain ontobrands.

He writes:

To explain this connection between consuming, technology and geolocalized experience the theorists invented several formulas such as hyper-geography, hybrid ecologies and geotagging.

The idea of assigning an IP address to every square meter of our planet suggest that there will be a complete isomorphy between the net and the planet so that every movement in one dimension implies an immediate modification on the other. Every element of our urban and natural environment could be able to interact and dialogue with this integrated system and other system connected with it. In this way when the idea of a traditional branding strategy will be overcome by a sort of diffused kind of branding.

Nello claims that : “branding becomes a flexible and spread technology”.

He writes:

If the traditional branding was just a tool in the hands of companies to build their own image and positioning in the collective mind, the selfbrandig approach demonstrates how the marketing thought is a state of mind that produces an existential positioning

Unfortunately, Nello does not define clearly his ‘ontobranding’ idea, but i can see that it is exactly what we were doing in our Hybrid Narrative Ecosystem studies.

We wrote with Mauri in our forthcoming book-chapter for IGI Gobal “Participatory design experiment: Storytelling Swarm in Hybrid Narrative Ecosystem” that one representation of hybrid ecosystem is ontospace, which consists of ontodimensions – descriptive features of an entity within a domain of information (eg. cool, expensive, cheap, nice).
People take perspectives of ontodimensions that can be fixed with ontocoordinates in this ontological space (eg. i can prefer more cool but cheap dimensions).
Niche is such a range of ontodimension perspectives that certain community members jointly define in ontospace, that effectively meets their understandings, expectations, and behaviour. Practically, niche is an abstract communality of community members personal preferences and perspectives.
Niche defines a subspace in ontospace that constrains the personal selection of perspectives of each community member. (simply you don’t fit to this community if your perspective is out of this range).
We also claim that every person evokes affordances as perceived perspectives in ontospace when they interact within this hybrid space. So they are simultaneously keeping and shifting the community subspace in ontospace. (This can be imagined as brand shift, changes in fashion).
However, this activity is not centrally coordinated, but may appear in the swarming kind of behaviours. In swarming each individual relies on signals left by swarm members into the ecosystem (practically the geotagged content). Again, the more strong is the signal, the more likely it will be picked up and it becomes a brand.

For me this is how the ontobrand can appear. I don’t know if Nello Barile will agree with this explanation

Anyway, i think we can continue discussions with him.

หลายๆคนที่ไปดูภาพยนตร์เรื่อง ห้าแพร่ง มา
คงจะมีประสบการณ์คล้ายๆกันตอนที่มีหนังตัวอย่างเรื่องหนึ่งฉายขึ้น
 

นั่นคือเสียงกรี๊ดระบบเซนเซอร์ราวนด์โดยมิได้นัดหมายของสาวๆทั้งโรง
เมื่อพบกับหน้าใสๆของพี่เคนธีรเดช เบ้อเริ่มเทิ่มทิ่มเข้าเต็มๆสองตา
กับภาพยนตร์เรื่องใหม่ของค่ายฟีลกู๊ดอย่าง GTH (@gthchannel)

มีเสียงสงสัยประปราย ว่าทำไมอะไรกันกับพี่เคนนักหนา
ทำไมพี่เคนถึงได้เป็นที่ปรารถนาของสาวทุกเหล่าทัพโดยแทบจะพร้อมเพรียงกันขนาดนี้
หลังจากใช้โครโมโซม XX ที่มีอยู่ในตัว บวกกับประสบการณ์ที่สั่งสมมานานปี
เราก็ได้คำตอบว่า
 

“เพราะว่าพี่เคนตอบครบทุกโจทย์”

 
ใครๆก็อาจจะนึกแค่ว่า ผู้หญิงชอบคนหล่อ รวย นิสัยดี ฉลาด
แต่จริงๆแล้ว Requirement พื้นฐานที่ผู้หญิงมีต่อผู้ชาย
จะหนีไม่พ้น Requirement ทางด้านความรู้สึกดังนี้

 
Requirement ขั้นที่ 1. การได้ครองโครโมโซม XY
ถ้าเป็น Maslow ขั้นนี้จะเป็นปัจจัยสี่ พื้นฐานของชีวิต
ซึ่งตรงกับความต้องการพื้นฐานของผู้สาวสักคนที่จะหาผู้บ่าวมาเป็นแฟน
คนๆนั้นต้องเป็นผู้ชายก่อนเลย อันดับแรก ข้อนี้ พี่เคนผ่านฉลุยโดยไม่ต้องสอบ

 
Requirement ขั้นที่ 2. ความเป็นน้องสาว ลูกสาว
อย่าง Maslow นั้น จะต้องการความปลอดภัยในชีวิต
ในที่นี้ ผู้หญิงก็ต้องการความมั่นคง และอบอุ่น
เหมือนที่ได้จากพี่ชายที่แสนดี คุณพ่อที่แสนใจดี
ผู้หญิงหลายๆคนก็อยากได้ฟิลที่เป็นเด็กสาวตัวน้อยๆในอ้อมกอดเจ้าชายอันองอาจ
แน่นอน พี่เคนให้ได้ (ถ้าเขาจะให้) ทั้งปัจจัยทางกายภาพและจินตภาพ
สาวๆสัมผัสความอบอุ่นผะผ่าวของพี่เคนได้จากแววตาและท่าทาง
ข้อนี้ ถ้าพี่เคนต้องสอบ ก็สอบผ่านอย่างไม่ต้องสงสัย

 
Requirement ขั้นที่ 3. ความเป็นคนรัก
Maslow เรียกขั้นนี้ว่า ความต้องการที่จะได้รับความรัก
ดูไป พี่เคนก็มีความโรแมนซ์อยู่ในตัวอีกนั่นแหละ
นี่ยังไม่นับว่าหน้าตารูปร่างดึงดูดเพศตรงข้ามประมาณหนึ่ง
ความเร้าใจ รอยยิ้มที่มีเสน่ห์ กล้ามใหญ่ไหล่กว้าง (สำหรับสาวๆบางคนอาจจะรู้สึกว่าดึงดูดจ้าดนัก)
แถมยังรักเดียวใจเดียวอย่างนี้ บวกไปอีกห้าสิบแต้ม ข้อนี้ ให้พี่เคนผ่านแน่นอน

 
Requirement ขั้นที่ 4.  ความเป็นแม่
ผู้หญิงจำนวนมาก แอบมีสัญชาตญาณความเป็นแม่อยู่ ไม่ว่าจะระดับลึกหรือระดับตื้น
แม้แต่คนที่ไม่รักเด็ก ก็มักจะมีสัญชาตญาณนี้แฝงอยู่บ้าง
ผู้หญิงที่ชอบผู้ชายที่เด็กกว่า หรือท่าทางเด็ก มักแอบมีความต้องการและสัญชาตญาณส่วนนี้สูง
ความมีฐานะเป็นครอบครัว เป็นแม่ที่ให้ความอบอุ่นกับลูกๆได้ เป็นที่พึ่งให้กับหัวใจของเด็กในตัวผู้ชายคนนั้นได้
ขั้นที่สี่ของ Maslow เรียกว่า Self-esteem/ Respect
ซึ่งพี่เคนของใครหลายคน มีรอยยิ้มและหัวเราะที่อ่อนวัย สดใส
มีความเป็นเด็กอยู่ในตัว ทำให้พี่เคนตอบสนองความเป็นแม่ได้ ฟันธง!

 
สุดท้าย – Requirement ขั้นที่ 5. ความรู้สึกที่ดีกับตัวเอง
ถ้าเทียบกับของพี่ Maslow ก็คือ Self-actualization ซึ่งจะไม่ค่อยตรงกัน
ถ้าเป็นความหมายทางด้านการบรรลุหรือความสำเร็จอะไรบางอย่าง
แต่จะพอกล้อมแกล้มกับ Requirement นี้ไปได้ในแง่ที่ทำให้ผู้หญิงมองโลกในแง่ดี รู้สึกดีกับตัวเอง
พี่เคนทำให้ผู้หญิงรู้สึกดีกับตัวเองอย่างไร
ถ้าลองคิดดูว่า ดาราผู้ชายส่วนใหญ่ก็เป็นแฟนกับคนที่สวยไฮโซปรี๊ดๆ
ทำให้ผู้หญิงคนอื่นได้แต่แหงนหน้ามองเป็นแมวมองเฮลิคอปเตอร์ ให้รู้สึกว่าเกินเอื้อม ปลงตกกับสารรูปตัวเอง
ในขณะที่การที่พี่เคน ครองคู่กับคุณหน่อย
ซึ่งไม่ได้มีภาพลักษณ์สาธารณะต่อสายตาผู้หญิงด้วยกันในแง่เป็นคนเพอร์เฟกต์ทุกอย่าง
ทำให้สาวๆได้มีความรู้สึกที่ดีกับตัวเองมากขึ้นว่า ไม่ต้องเริ่ด ก็สามารถมีแฟนที่ดีได้
ในชีวิตอาจจะได้เจอผู้ชายแบบพี่เคนได้ในซอยบ้านตัวเอง หรือที่ทำงาน
สามารถเอื้อมมือเอานิ้วไปเขี่ยๆได้อย่างมีความสุข
พี่เคนเขย่งก้าวกระโดดข้ามผ่านขั้นนี้ไปได้ง่ายๆ อีกนั่นแหละ
ด้วยการช่วยดึงจินตนาการของสาวๆ มาให้ใกล้ความจริงขึ้นอีกนิดนึง

ฟังดูเหมือนพี่เคนจะเพอร์เฟกต์
แต่ถ้าถามว่าพี่เคนดีเวอร์ๆในด้านไหนเป็นพิเศษหรือเปล่า เอาจริงๆก็เปล่า
แต่เป็นเพราะว่า พี่เคน “ดีพอ” และ “ตอบสนอง” Requirement ต่างๆของผู้หญิงจำนวนมากได้
ราวกับเซเว่นอีเลเว่น (@7_Eleven) หน้าปากซอย ที่จะเอาอะไรก็มี
ถามว่าของที่เซเว่นมี ไฮโซพรีเมี่ยมสุดๆไปหมดหรือไม่ ก็เปล่า
แต่ของในเซเว่นล้วนแล้วแต่ “ดีพอ” ให้ซื้อได้ทุกวัน

ด้วยเหตุนี้
พี่เคนจึงกลายเป็น OTOP เกรดเอ ของไทยทีวีสีช่องสาม และ GTH (@gthchannel) ไปโดยปริยาย

…

Christopher Langan เป็นบุคคลผู้หนึ่งที่ Malcolm Gladwell ได้กล่าวถึง
ในหนังสือขายดีเวอร์เล่มล่าสุดของเขาที่ชื่อว่า Outliers
เขาเป็นคนที่ได้ชื่อว่า ฉลาดที่สุดในอเมริกัน ด้วยไอคิว 195-210
ซึ่งสูงกว่า Albert Einstein ผู้ได้ชื่อว่าอัจฉริยะ อยู่หลายสิบหน่วย

ใครๆที่ได้ฟังแค่นี้ คงจะคิดว่า คนอัจฉริยะผิดมนุษย์มนาเช่นนี้
ต้องมีชีวิตที่เลิศหรูอลังการ และมีอิทธิพลที่จะเปลี่ยนแปลงอะไรบนโลกนี้อย่างแน่นอน
แต่ในความเป็นจริง กลับไม่ได้เป็นเช่นนั้น
Langan มีหนทางชีวิตที่ขรุขระ ตั้งแต่ความยากจน ครอบครัวมีปัญหา
ไปจนถึงครูบาอาจารย์มีปัญหาเพราะฉลาดน้อยกว่า Langan แต่นึกว่า Langan เป็นคนโง่
เป็นเหตุหนึ่งที่ทำให้เขาเรียนไม่จบมหาวิทยาลัย
และใช้ชีวิตอยู่เงียบๆในฟาร์มม้าของเขาในรัฐมิสซูรี่

จนกระทั่งเขามีอายุ 50 กว่าปี เขาจึงได้ประกาศให้โลกรู้ในวงกว้าง ถึงความเป็นอัจฉริยะของเขา
ในรายการ 1 vs 100 ที่ออกอากาศทาง NBC เมื่อปี 2008 ที่ผ่านมา
แต่มันก็ไม่ได้เปลี่ยนชีวิตเขามากมายนัก
เขาก็ยังอยู่ฟาร์มม้าเหมือนเดิม อ่านหนังสือฟิสิกส์และเขียนคอลัมน์บ้าง
แต่ไม่ได้มีอะไรที่ถูกตีพิมพ์เป็นเรื่องเป็นราว และไม่มีอะไรนอกจากนี้
Lewis Terman นักจิตวิทยาคนดัง ที่เป็นผู้นำในการค้นหาความเป็นอัจฉริยะด้วยการทดสอบ IQ
เขาเริ่มได้ทดสอบ IQ เด็กในปี 1928 และเลือกกลุ่มที่มี IQ เกินกว่า 140 ว่าเป็นอัจฉริยะ
ที่ Terman เรียกเด็กกลุ่มนี้ว่า “Termites” เป็นจำนวน 1,528 คนทั่วรัฐแคลิฟอร์เนีย
และเขาได้ติดตามศึกษาเหล่า termites ไปอีกหลายทศวรรษ
จนกระทั่งเขาเสียชีวิตไป การศึกษาติดตามกลุ่ม Termites ก็ยังไม่จบสิ้นมาจนถึงปัจจุบัน
ด้วยข้อสันนิษฐานว่า เด็กอัจฉริยะเหล่านี้ย่อมประสบความสำเร็จอย่างสูงเป็นพิเศษเมื่อโตขึ้นอย่างแน่นอน

ผลปรากฎว่า ส่วนหนึ่งของกลุ่ม Termites ประสบความสำเร็จในชีวิตตามที่คาด
มีผลงานและหน้าตาตีพิมพ์อยู่ในหนังสือ นิตยสารต่างๆของอเมริกา
ในจำนวน Termites ที่เป็นผู้ชายทั้งหมด 857 คน
70 คนได้มีชื่ออยู่ใน American Men of Science
3 คนในถูกรับเลือกเข้าไปอยู่ใน National Academy of Sceinces
10 คนอยู่ในรายชื่อ Directory of American Scholars
และ 31 คนปรากฏอยู่ในหนังสือ Who’s Who in America (http://www.marquiswhoswho.com/)
และมีส่วนหนึ่งที่มีชีวิตที่ไม่ต่างอะไรกับคนที่ไม่มีการศึกษา บางส่วนก็ตกงานอยู่บ้านเฉยๆ ก็มี

สิ่งที่น่าสนใจคือ
ไม่มีใครในกลุ่ม Termites ที่ประสบความสำเร็จแบบโดดเด่นจริงๆ
ในขณะที่ตัวอย่างหนึ่งที่ไม่ได้รับเลือกเป็นกลุ่ม Termites อย่าง William Shockley
เนื่องจากการผลทดสอบ IQ ของเขาต่ำกว่าระดับที่จะเข้ากลุ่ม Termites ได้
ได้เข้าศึกษาในมหาวิทยาลัยฮาร์วาร์ด และได้สำเร็จปริญญาเอก
ต่อมาได้ทำงานที่ Bell Telephone Laboratories
และได้ช่วยทางแล็บสร้างทรานซิสเตอร์รุ่นแรกขึ้น (point-contact transistor)
และต่อมาก็ได้รับรางวัลโนเบลสาขาฟิสิกส์ในปี 1970
ซึ่งเป็นรางวัลที่ไม่มีใครในกลุ่ม Termites ได้รับเลยสักคนเดียว

ถ้าพูดถึงตรงนี้ ก็อาจจะยังมีบางคนที่คิดว่า
โอ้โห จบฮาร์วาร์ดมา แล้วก็ได้โนเบล เป็นสูตรสำเร็จเลยนะ
เมื่อ Gladwell ไปดูรายชื่อสถาบันการศึกษา ที่เหล่าผู้ได้รับรางวัลโนเบลจบมา
ก็ปรากฎว่า ไม่ได้มีเพียงแค่ศิษย์เก่าสถาบันในกลุ่ม Ivy League เท่านั้น
ยังมีผู้ที่ได้รับรางวัลโนเบลอีกเยอะแยะตาแป๊ะไก่ ที่จบมาจากสถาบันเบๆ ทั่วอเมริกา
และไม่ได้มี IQ สูงปรี๊ดอะไรกันมากมาย

 
ข้อสรุปจากกรณีนี้ที่น่าเชื่อถือก็คือ
ถ้าคุณ “ฉลาดพอ” ที่จะเข้าเรียนในมหาวิทยาลัยได้
คุณก็มี”โอกาส”ที่จะได้รับรางวัลโนเบลในชีวิตนี้แล้ว
คนที่ฉลาดกว่านี้ จะไม่มีข้อได้เปรียบเหนือไปกว่าคุณแต่อย่างใด
(แน่นอน ต้องประกอบด้วย ฉันทะ วิริยะ จิตตะ วิมังสา มาให้หมดดังนี้ด้วย
ไม่มีใครนอนกระดิกเท้าปลูกผักเฉยๆแล้วรางวัลโนเบลจะลอยมาหาได้)

 
…

ที่ร่ายยาวเรื่องพี่เคน และเรื่องรางวัลโนเบลมานี้ เพื่ออะไร?
นอกจากความอยากเล่าเป็นส่วนตัวทั้งสองเรื่องแล้ว
มันยังเป็นสองเรื่องในอีกหลายร้อยเรื่อง
ที่บอกเราว่า ความพอดี ความดีพอ เป็นคำตอบให้ชีวิตในหลายๆด้าน
ความเป็นที่สุดในโลก ที่สุดในซอย
ไม่ได้รับประกันความสำเร็จเสมอไป

ลองสังเกตรอบตัวเราดีๆ เราจะพบว่า
ยิ่ง”ล้นเหลือ”มาก ส่วนที่ “ล้นเหลือ” นั้น จะยิ่งมีประโยชน์น้อยลงไปเรื่อยๆ
คนที่ฉลาดมากพอ มีโอกาสมีชีวิตดีเท่ากับคนที่ฉลาดเหนือไปกว่าตัวเอง
คนที่ฉลาดไปกว่าระดับ “มากพอ” มากๆ ก็มักไม่ค่อยได้ใช้ประโยชน์จากส่วนที่เกินนั้นเท่าไหร่
คนที่มีปัญญาสั่งอาหารดีๆได้เต็มโต๊ะทุกมื้อ ก็ทานได้เท่าที่กระเพาะจะรับได้เท่านั้น
ส่วนที่เหลือต่อให้เป็นของดีเลิศมาจากอลาสก้าอาบูดาบี้อย่างไร
ก็ไม่สามารถที่จะบรรจุของเลิศๆพวกนั้นลงท้องได้อีกแล้ว
นักบาสเก็ตบอลต้องมีคุณสมบัติด้านความสูงก็จริง
แต่เมื่อทุกคนในทีม “สูงพอ” แล้ว ส่วนสูงที่เป็นส่วนเกินจากนั้นที่ใครจะมี
ก็ไม่ได้เป็นข้อได้เปรียบกับคนอื่นๆในทีม และทีมคู่แข่งอีกต่อไป
คนที่เครื่องหน้าสวยเจิดจรัสไปหมดทุกส่วน หู ตา คอ จมูก ปาก หน้าผาก โหนกแก้ม
แต่พอมารวมกันอยู่บนใบหน้าเดียวกันแล้ว
อาจจะสวยซึ้งตรึงตาไม่เท่ากับคนที่เครื่องหน้าส่วนนั้นงั้นๆมั่ง ส่วนนี้สวยๆมั่ง
แต่มารวมกันแล้วเหมาะเจาะพอดีเด๊ะก็ได้

ด้านการออกแบบ วางแผน ก็เช่นกัน
การ “สนองตอบต่อ Requirements” เพื่อให้งาน “ดีพอ”
จึงเป็นสิ่งสำคัญ และเป็นตัวที่ตอบโจทย์อย่างแท้จริง
แน่นอน งานที่ดี ต้องตอบสนองความต้องการของผู้ใช้ได้ครบ
(บวกกับประสิทธิภาพและความงดงามที่สูงกว่าความคาดหวังของผู้ใช้ขึ้นไปอีกหน่อย)
แต่คำว่า “ดีพอ” ไม่ได้หมายความว่า มีสิทธิที่จะมักง่าย เอาแค่นี้แหละ
“ดีพอ” ในที่นี้ คือ ดีพอในมาตรฐานระดับสูง ไม่ใช่เถือกแถแค่ค่าเฉลี่ย
อย่างที่ยกตัวอย่างนักบาส คำว่า “สูงพอ” ของนักบาส
ก็ไม่ใช่สูงธรรมดาระดับคนทั่วไป แต่เป็นมาตรฐานความสูงของนักบาส
จะเป็นไฮโซสมัยนี้ได้ ก็ต้องรวย”มากพอ” ไม่ใช่เพียง”มีอิสรภาพทางการเงิน”
แต่ถ้าเกินไปจาก”รวยมากพอ” จะน้อยหรือจะมาก ก็ไม่มีตำแหน่งที่สูงไปกว่าความเป็นไฮโซ แล้ว
นอกจากจะใส่ adjective กันตามใจชอบเอง

 
งานออกแบบที่ดี ต้องตอบสนอง Heirachy of Needs ทางการออกแบบเหล่านี้ได้”ครบ”
และต้องพิจารณาแนวคิดเรื่อง “ดีพอ” ตลอดกระบวนการ

 
Utility
เป็นสิ่งพื้นฐานที่ทุกงานต้องมี มันคือโจทย์ระดับพื้นฐานที่สุดที่เราต้องสนองตอบ
ไม่เช่นนั้น งานของเราก็เป็นสิ่งที่ไร้ประโยชน์ใดๆ
ยกตัวอย่างเช่น เราต้องการทานข้าวสวย
หม้อหุงข้าวจึงได้กำเนิดมาพร้อมกับ Utility ในการหุงข้าว
เราต้องการฟังเพลงในที่ต่างๆ
Walkman และ iPod จึงได้กำเนิดมาเพื่อ Utility ในการฟังเพลง
เราต้องการสื่อสารทางอินเทอร์เน็ต
Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail, GMail, Twitter, MSN, Skype, Webboard
จึงได้กำเนิดมาเพื่อ Utility ในการสื่อสารทางอินเทอร์เน็ต
Utility มักไม่ได้เป็นจุดขายของงาน
นอกเสียจากว่า งานนั้นจะเป็นนวัตกรรมใหม่ล่าสุดไม่เคยมีมาในโลกนี้มาก่อน
เช่น โทรศัพท์เครื่องแรกในโลก ท่อส่งน้ำสายแรกในโลก เป็นต้น

 
Function
เป็นสิ่งพื้นฐานที่ทุกงานต้องมี ในแง่ของการใช้งาน
ตัวอย่างเช่น หม้อหุงข้าว ก็ต้องมีที่ให้ใส่ข้าวและสั่งหุงข้าว ถ้าไม่มีก็จบเห่กัน เป็นหม้อหุงข้าวไม่ได้
Walkman, iPod ก็ต้องมีที่ให้ใส่เพลง และเล่นเพลง
MSN, GMail ก็ต้องมีที่ให้ใส่ข้อความ ส่งข้อความ รับข้อความ
ตรงจุดนี้แหละ ที่เรื่อง Requirement จะมีบทบาทมาก
เนื่องจากบนโลกนี้มีผลิตภัณฑ์เป็นแสนเป็นล้านอย่าง จึงไม่แปลกที่งานแบบเดียวกันจะมี function แบบเดียวกัน
เช่น Gmail กับ Yahoo!Mail และ Hotmail ล้วนแล้วแต่มี Function พื้นฐานแบบเดียวกันทั้งนั้น
แต่ด้วยความที่ธุรกิจต้องแข่งขันกัน แม้ว่า Function จะตอบสนองความต้องการได้หมดแล้ว
แต่หลายๆครั้งนักการตลาดจึงเลือกมาเล่นกับ Function ต่อไป ซึ่งมักจะเป็นการเพิ่ม Function ใหม่ๆ
เช่น โทรศัพท์มือถือ ถ่ายรูปได้ ถ่ายวีดีโอได้ เข้าเน็ตได้ ต่อGPS ก็ได้ด้วย แถมใส่ได้สองซิมอีกต่างหาก
จริงอยู่ ที่ความต้องการที่ลูกค้ามีต่องานนั้นๆ มันเปลี่ยนแปลงกันได้
เดี๋ยวนี้โทรศัพท์ก็ต้องมีกล้องมือถือแล้วเป็น Requirement หลัก จากเมื่อก่อน ขอแค่โทรเข้าโทรออกก็พอ
อย่างไรก็ตาม จากหลักฐานธรรมชาติเรื่อง “ดีพอ” เราก็จะเห็นได้ว่า ยิ่งมาก ก็ไม่ได้แปลว่ายิ่งดี เสมอไป
ถ้าว่าด้วยเรื่องของกฏ 80/20 และ Parkinson Law ที่เคยเขียนไปแล้วที่
http://iamia.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/8020-rule-and-parkinson-law/
และ ความขัดแย้งระหว่าง Feature กับ Usability ที่เขียนไว้ที่
http://iamia.wordpress.com/2008/03/18/features-vs-usability/
เมื่อเราตอบโจทย์เกินความต้องการของผู้ใช้ ผู้ใช้อาจจะรู้สึกดีที่ได้ของแถม
แต่นั่นไม่ได้เป็นการรับประกันว่า งานของเราจะประสบความสำเร็จ
ดังเช่นที่เราเห็นหลายๆงานที่ function เยอะเวอร์ๆในท้องตลาด แต่ขายไม่ค่อยออก
เนื่องจากความต้องการด้านอื่นๆยัง”ไม่ดีพอ”

 
Affordance
เทียบ Function เป็นนามธรรม Affordance คือรูปธรรมของ Function
เช่น หม้อหุงข้าวมี function ในการสั่งหุงข้าว Affordance คือสิ่งที่จะทำให้ผู้ใช้สั่งหุงข้าวได้
เช่น ปุ่มกด ลูกบิด สวิทช์
GMail มี Function ในการใส่ข้อความ ส่งข้อความ รับข้อความ
Affordance ของ Function เหล่านี้ก็เช่น ช่องกรอกข้อความ ปุ่มส่งข้อความ กล่องรับจดหมาย
ใน Requirement ของผู้ใช้ ในหลายๆครั้ง Affordance ก็จะถูกกำหนดมาเลย
และในหลายๆครั้ง เราก็ต้องตีโจทย์จาก Requirement ทางด้าน Function
ซึ่งถ้าเรากำหนด Affordance ผิด ก็จะทำให้ประสิทธิภาพในการใช้งานลดลงด้วย
เช่น ทำประตูบานเลื่อน แต่ Affordance ดันเป็นลูกบิด แทนที่จะเป็นมือจับ
ใช้ Radio Button กับตัวเลือกที่สามารถเลือกได้มากกว่าหนึ่ง
ซึ่งในประเด็นนี้ เป็นเรื่องที่เกี่ยวเนื่องกับ Usability เต็มๆ
Affordance ที่”ดีพอ” จะต้องตอบสนองระหว่าง Function กับ Usability ได้ดี

Usability
Function เป็นนามธรรม Affordance เป็นรูปธรรมของ Function
Usability จะเป็นคุณภาพของ Affordance ซึ่งสะท้อนไปถึง Function
ถ้า Usability ดี ก็คือ Function หรือการใช้งาน ผ่าน Affordance ก็จะดีไปด้วย
เรียกง่ายๆก็คือ ใช้งานง่าย ใช้งานได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ ปลอดภัย พลาดยาก
Usability ไม่ดี ก็คือความหมายตรงกันข้าม
แล้วถ้า Usability ดี ผู้ใช้ก็จะพึงพอใจในการใช้งาน และก้าวผ่านประตูขั้นแรกสู่การเป็นผู้ใช้ประจำ
และเนื่องจากในโลกนี้สินค้าบริการงานมีมากมายมหาศาล
นักธุรกิจ การตลาด ก็เริ่มหันมาให้ความสำคัญกับ Usability เพื่อสร้างความแตกต่าง
ยกตัวอย่างเช่น ขวดยาที่ออกแบบใหม่ โดย SVA เพื่อห้าง Target
เพื่อให้คนอ่านฉลากยาได้ง่ายขึ้น อ่านได้ง่ายทุกมิติ มีสีฝาขวดที่แตกต่างไปตามสมาชิกในบ้าน

หรือสร้าง Affordance แบบที่ไม่เคยมีมาก่อน เพื่อ Usability ที่ดีขึ้น
แม้ว่า การใช้งานที่”ง่ายพอ” จะทำให้งานขายได้ง่ายในปัจจัยหนึ่งแล้ว
ก็ใช้ว่า ต้องทำ Affordance แบบเดิมๆเพื่อตอบโจทย์เดิมๆเสมอไป
ในตลาดโลกที่ของเดิมๆ Utility เดิมๆ Funciton เดิมๆ ก็ “ดีพอ” อยู่แล้ว
การนำเสนอ User Experience หรือประสบการณ์การใช้งานแบบใหม่ๆ
ก็เป็นส่วนหนึ่งที่จะสร้างความแตกต่าง โดดเด่นให้กับงานเราอย่างไม่น้อย
เช่น Click-Wheel ของ iPod ซึ่งเป็น Affordance ที่ช่วยด้าน Navigate เพลงได้
อย่างที่ Affordance แบบอื่นๆที่เคยมีมาก่อนไม่สามารถทำได้ในรูปแบบนี้

ในปัจจุบันเราจะเริ่มเห็นวิวัฒนาการทาง Usability/User Experience
ที่นักธุรกิจ/การตลาด นำมาใช้เป็นจุดขายแบบ Blue Ocean Strategy เพิ่มขึ้นเรื่อยๆ
ในสมรภูมิที่ Utility/Function ถึงจุดอิ่มตัวเป็นสีแดงฉาน

 
Aesthetic
ข้อนี้ดูเหมือนจะไม่เกี่ยว แต่จริงๆแล้วเกี่ยวอย่างที่สุด
ความน่าดึงดูด ความสวยงาม ที่ “มากพอ” จะเป็นส่วนช่วยให้ผู้ใช้รู้สึกดีๆกับงานเรา และยินยอมที่จะใช้งานเรา
ถ้า Utility/Function/Affordance/Usability ตอบสนองความต้องการได้ “มากพอ” แล้ว
เราจะพบว่า ผู้ใช้หรือลูกค้า จะเสาะแสวงหาความสุขทางความสวยงามมากขึ้น
ในปัจจุบัน เราเห็นได้ทั่วไปว่า
นาฬิกาเป็นเรื่องของความสวยงามมานานมากแล้วเพราะ Function ของมันอิ่มตัวตั้งแต่ร้อยปีก่อน
ปัจจุบันผู้บริโภคทั่วไปเลือกโทรศัพท์มือถือ โทรทัศน์ รถยนต์ ที่รูปลักษณ์ ความสวยงาม เป็นหลักแทบทั้งนั้น
แบบไหนที่ถูกใจ แบบไหนที่สะท้อนตัวตน ล้วนแล้วแต่เป็น Requirement ด้านจิตใจ
เมื่องานไหนที่ผ่าน Requirement ด้านจิตใจนี้ “มากพอ” ก็ย่อมเข้าสู่รอบชิงชนะเลิศอย่างไม่ต้องสงสัย

 
จะเห็นได้ว่า ความ “ดีพอ” มันไม่ทำให้การทำงานของเราลดลงเลย
แต่มันจะยิ่งทำให้เรารอบคอบในการคิดออกแบบ แก้ปัญหา มากขึ้น
โดยการที่ต้องออกแบบไป ทบทวนไปว่า มัน “ครบ” หรือยัง “ดีพอ” หรือยัง
และการที่ “ครบ” และ “ดีพอ” ก็ไม่ได้ปิดกั้นความคิดสร้างสรรค์ นวัตกรรมใหม่ๆ แต่อย่างใด

สุดท้าย
การที่คุณผู้อ่านทั้งหลาย “อดทนพอ” ที่จะอ่านได้จนจบบรรทัดนี้
ก็แสดงได้ว่า รักกันจริง นะเนี่ย
(ตู่เอางี้เลยนะ)

 
(
ป.ล.
มีไอเดียจะคัดเลือกและรวมเล่มบทความในบล็อกนี้แจกจ่ายภายในต้นปีหน้าค่ะ
ตอนนี้คิดว่าคงเป็นในรูปแบบ CD มากกว่า
เพราะคนสั่งไม่น่าจะเยอะ ซึ่งทำให้ต้นทุนในการพิมพ์ออกมาเป็นหนังสือจะสูงมากเกินไป
ใครสนใจติดต่อได้ที่อีเมลด้านขวาบนของหน้าเว็บนะคะ
)

รูปพี่เคนจาก
http://hilight.kapook.com/view/14797

รูปคุณ Christopher Langan จาก
http://hubpages.com/hub/Christopher-Langan

รูปคุณ William Shockley จาก
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200909/the-truth-about-the-termites

รูปขวดยาร้าน Target จาก
http://nymag.com/nymetro/health/features/11700/index1.html

รูป iPod จาก
http://www.ipod.com/

อ้างอิงข้อมูลจาก
หนังสือ Outliers ของ Malcolm Gladwell
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/01-20-things-you-didnt-know-about-genius
http://giftedexchange.blogspot.com/2009/02/is-genius-born-or-learned.html
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lewis_Terman
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200909/the-truth-about-the-termites
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/articles/terman.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
http://hubpages.com/hub/Christopher-Langan
http://www.businessweek.com/careers/workingparents/blog/archives/2008/12/malcolm_gladwel.html

Just like any other over practiced and studied field design world has its own unique language of definitions and terms. In the article “Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept” written by Joanna McGrenere and Wayne Ho, the design term Affordance is analyzed and re-established as a concept. The actual concept of a product or thing allowing an affordance to its user was first talked about by the author Donald Norman, who write the very popular ID book “The Psychology of Everyday Things.” However, according to McGrenere and Ho Norman was not the originator, “It is not widely known that the word affordance was first coined by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in his seminal book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.”

First, I think that it is very interesting that the design theory of affordance was first abstracted by mental health professionals and not some super chic designer. Norman and Gibson might have both used the term affordances but there is one fundamental difference that comes up between these two authors. As explained on page 3 in the article Gibson understands affordances as being independent of ones “experiences, knowledge, culture, or ability to perceive.” While Norman definition is dependent on a user abilities.

As an industrial design student the A term comes up often during discussions and crits. To me this word is basic but complex at the same time. A product has to give the user means to understand how to use it correctly but this can sometimes lead to more difficult questions. As an example, if you have developed a product which runs off of a user cranking a crank attached to the back you might want to make this crank hand friendly. But if you make the crank loudly colored or large to be noticed first this might take away from aesthetic integrity or create manufacturing problems. Obviously affordances are a huge part of design, one of the foundations, but I also think that it is a step in the design process that opens the door to all of the more complex and sophisticated problems.

Today i found that the special number of Journal of Educational Technology & Society “Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners” has been published. There are two articles from Tallinn workgroup of Educational Technology.

Mine is about Modelling spaces for self-organized learners

http://www.ifets.info/journals/12_3/4.pdf

Terje Väljataga and Sebastian Fiedler write about the course that we did in iCamp project “Supporting students to self-direct intentional learning projects with social media”

http://www.ifets.info/journals/12_3/6.pdf

a wonderful piece by the multi-talented momus. using the play button as both symbol and pattern, momus pondered on the play button’s role of transitioning from present-to-future and all its disparate implementations.

I’ve been thinking about the play button. More specifically, the distinction between status display indicators and play buttons; the way they correspond with different tenses of verb (present and future), different states of action (actual and conditional), different forms of speech (telling and asking), and the way that lots of software today mixes status indicators and play buttons.

A very common example on unconscious behavior. This kind of a cup on a small pillar could be found in any country. How about designing a plilar-typed-trashcan?

A start button of an automatic hand dryer, like an emergency button to make alert sound. In fact, I didn’t use the hand dryer because I was afraid of ringing.

Recent month i have been trying to write together with Mauri Kaipainen about the “Narrative ecology” course results. In principle, we come up with some theoretical baseline how writing narratives happens in new hybrid ecosystems, and how it may be represented ontologically and used for detecting more about the new standards of writing stories in Web 2.0.
Finally it has to be a book chapter, but since it is not ready it is about a time to show some of it.

Swarming to write narratives in hybrid ecosystem
by
Kai Pata
Mauri Kaipainen

1. Hybrid narrative ecosystem

1.1. Defining hybrid ecosystems

For describing what we mean by storytelling with participatory media, the concept of hybrid ecosystem is useful. The term conveys two ideas. First, hybrid refers to the property of the world that is achieved by active hybridization of physical spaces with digital media spaces (eg. blogs, microblogs, wikis, social repositories and -networks). These borders can be blurred or eliminated whenever purposeful, allowing embedding artifacts across borders for creating an augmented and more interactive reality. The second key term is that of an ecosystem with its explanatory subconcepts ontoplace and niche.
Individuals develop places when they add various artifacts such as images, impressions, historical content, marketing information to augment certain geographical locations, and increase their ability to perceive places as meaningful spots individually. Place is assumed to have not only geographical coordinates but also ontocoordinates, that is other defining characteristics for a place (Kaipainen, et al., 2008). Ontocoordinates enable to identify ontoplaces that are unique for each individual. The concept of ontoplace refers to the context of events, objects, emotions and actions of an individual in the place, and includes both natural, e,g, geographical elements as well as conceptual constructions. Individuals with similar cultural background form communities that may have a similar perception of ontoplaces because they are involved in similar activities or share common meaning making principles. We use niche concept for determining such shared ontoplaces and -spaces.
Niche concept is used in biology for describing an abstract space in which certain species has optimal living conditions for performing all actions related to their life. Hutchinson (1957) defined niche as a region (n-dimensional hypervolume) in a multi-dimensional space of environmental factors that affect the welfare of a species. These environmental factors (eg. optimal temperature amplitude or daylight period) may be related with geographical aspects (eg. latitude, altitude) or may be determined by other non-geographical aspects (eg. chemical components of the soil, specific prey objects of other species in the area etc.). Niches appear as generalizations, they become evident if many similar individuals live, interact and evolve in certain conditions. Each individual is constantly adapting itself to the niche of the species.
In our discourse we look individuals who share certain joint activities as a community. We determine a community as an equivalent of the species. This community is influenced by the various environmental factors in hybrid environment. Different artifacts, perceived action possibilities or people available in the physical or virtual places create environmental factors for the communities that determine their possibility of taking community-specific actions. Environmental factors influence individuals physically as well as emotionally or cognitively. The determination of ontocoordinates of ontoplaces individually by community members creates conditions for the emergence of niches with shared ontocoordinates that facilitate taking certain community-specific actions. For example, Hoffmeyer (1995) coined the term of semiotic niche to signify the semiotic spaces that are actualized by certain organisms in species’ specific semiotic processes when interacting with their environment. Magnani (2008), and Magnani and Bardone (2008) use the term cognitive niche to mark the distributed space that people create by interrelating individual cognition and the environment through the continuous interplay through abductive processes in which they alter and modify the environment. Niches represent generalized ontoplaces and -spaces for communities – groups of individuals with similar cultural background and perception. It must be noticed that niches may have but do not necessarily have geographical coordinates in real world.
An ecosystem is a unit of interdependent species, which share the same habitat. Another view to the ecosystem is niche based – one habitat may provide various partially overlapping or separate niches for species to coexist. In our case hybrid environments form a particular habitat in which various communities create and alter their activity niches. The niches for writing hybrid narratives appear if individuals who share some common Web 2.0 storytelling culture determine for themselves ontoplaces in the hybrid ecosystem and use them as triggers of their narratives. It must be noted that such facilitating niches for storytelling appear in hybrid environments when several people find, use or embed digital contents for perception and action as part of their daily interaction with the hybrid ecosystem. On one hand, narratives created in this ecosystem may have geocoordinates connecting them with physical world. On the other, in the virtual environment, narratives possess ontocoordinates, thus determining optimal abstract niches for storytelling. By adding their contents to the environments, participants create the evolutionary feedback loop to the niche (Magnani & Bardone, 2008; Pata, 2009; 2010). Participatory media environments together with real places can be conceptualized as a hybrid ecosystem, provided that participants of social media have ecological dependence of the particular set of “tools” that they use as their niche for taking action. The concept of tool here should be interpreted as it is used in an activity theory (see Leontjev, 1978), which considers various artifacts (eg. digital narratives, images), software (eg. social software tools) and language (eg. user-created ontologies, tags) as mediators of action. Ongoing narrative activity by many individuals in hybrid environment influences and shapes the characteristics of available niches in the ecosystem and allows a habitat for communities.

1.2. Representing hybrid ecosystems

Next, we will discuss some methods of representing various coordinates of hybrid ecosystems. The initial idea of bringing place-information to the active use in participatory media environments was to associate contextually meaningful information and metadata with the geo-coordinates of the places. For capturing, storing, retrieval, analysis and display of spatial data GIS as a computer-based system was developed. It was discovered soon that the methods of mapping geographical space by GIS geo-coordinates do not match the way people think about their world. For this reason, Jourdam Raubal, Gartrell and Egenhofer (1998) suggested that integrating a model of how people conceptualize and perceive places into GIS would enable to use GIS to make important decisions about places. They suggested that physical features of objects in places, actions that people take at places, narratives that are related to the places, symbolic references of the places (eg. names, metaphors), cultural factors of the place and the typologies of places given by people could be used for advancing GIS. They presented a methodology to model places with affordances that they saw as user-centred perspectives of the place. However, this technical innovation did not get much attention because for every person places contain different action and emotion potentialities, and manually annotation of this action- and meaning-specific metadata directly with places would have reduced the community-based applications of hybrid places.
The recent emergence of different participatory media has brought in ways of describing the conceptual nature of content collectively. One of the most popular methods is so called tagging, that is, adding descriptive terms associated with content by members of the community, and the complementary addition of geographical position information. Tags are related with meaning and activity dimensions of the communities. Using tag-based search, certain dimensions of the virtual places could be discovered and brought to the active use. Some social software environments (eg. Flickr.com) now enable the simultaneous use of tags and GIS information for mapping digital contents location-based to real world. Yet, many commonly used software types (eg. blogs, wikis) still lack this possibility. Using tags and GIS concurrently has opened another, more flexible way how communities can mark their meaningful places with artefacts independently of other communities, and interact at the physical locations with the virtual contents left by other communities. Geotagging systems make it possible to create locative content by mobile devices, situated both in real and virtual environment (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006). Locative content is media content applied to geographical places, any kind of link to additional information set up in space together with the information that a specific place supplies, which is triggering real social interactions with a place and with mobile technology (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Hanzl, 2007, Kaipainen & Pata, 2007). With positioning technologies e.g GPS-chips built in telephones, or by searching locations on digital maps (eg. Flickr.com, Google.maps.com, Brightkite.com), people can gain access to of the place-related digital artefacts. They can use them for learning, playful activities, marketing and other ways.
As to our approach, we take that the proper model of hybrid narrative ecosystems consists of a hybrid geo-conceptual-temporal ontospace. Hybrid ecosystem functioning at individual and community level causes the emergence of an ontospace. To ground this concept, on a general level we adopt the concept of ontology from IT systems, in the broad sense referring to specification of conceptualization (Gruber 1993) of the content dealt with, or to the manner of existence of the content, pointing at the old philosophical traditions related to ontotology. However, we find it difficult to apply the standard ontologies of IT, e.g. OWL, to the purposes of hybrid ecosystems, because their hierarchical and rigid nature does not support the emergence of new narrative tracks (we need to define tracks first) as we propose. Assuming that tagging involves the actual conceptual structure of the metadata, as with the activity of storytelling, the resulting ontology needs to be ‘soft’, that is, not fixed a priori but evolving in the course of the activity. Moreover, we assume that the created patterns or tracks are ontologically fundamental, that is, we want to allow that they can constitute new ontological categories.
As a consequence, we rather choose to apply in hybrid ecosystems the ontospatial approach of Kaipainen et al. (2008). This approach describes the domain of inquiry in terms of descriptive feature dimensions (ontodimensions) that altogether constitute an ontological space (ontospace), also referred to as soft ontology. In this model, the number of ontodimensions is not fixed, but can vary dynamically, allowing new defining features to emerge in the process.

Ontodimension is one dimension in ontospace that can be perceived and followed when collecting and storing artifacts in hybrid ecosystem. Such dimensions may be perceived only by one individual or by many individuals. The more strong ontodimensions are perceived the more probable is that they are followed and used in new narratives.

Note. It is the way how we can later connect it to the swarming behaviour (making and following the signal trace means basically that people notice ontodimensions and start accumulating/monitoring these ontodimensions).

As another crucially important feature for modeling hybrid ecosystems is that the model does not assume any a priori hierarchical structure, but considers all descriptive features to be of equal ontological importance. It is the observer’s perspective that priorizes the ontodimensions and determines the perceived order.

The ontodimensions that a person has previously noticed as meaningful, and used in his/her actions, will narrow his/her perception and help to focus only on certain ontodimensions of the ontospace. If noticing such dimensions is common for more than one individual, these ontodimensions become community-specific. Ecologically, certain ontodimensions start to facilitate some community specific actions more than the others, and enable to form an abstract community specific niche. Niche is a community specific and community determined part of an ontospace. Niche is a meaningful place for the community, and we may call it an abstract ontoplace of the community. Ontoplace for a community is optimal for certain activity, beyond a mere geographical place.
The niche as a community place in hybrid ecosystem is never stabile and static but is always in the stage of evolvement as the community members perceive and use various ontodimensions.

An ontospace is a means to relate the existence of entities of a domain to each other and to the domain to which they belong in terms of similarity, in turn defined as proximity in the ontospace. Formally, coordinate system O=(x1,x2,…xm) defines m-dimensional ontospace A of domain D. Each entity i of domain D, for example §, is represented by an m-tuple Ai=(ai1, ai2,…aim) , were aij stands for the salience value of property j that can be determined or specified for entity I in the data collection process. Altogether, Ai constitutes the ontocoordinates of entity i and expresses the position of i in ontospace A.

The virtue of this formalism is that aij§ can represent any type of description, be it a tag, or the geoposition, or a time stamp of an event, and they can be blended and referred to in various hybrid ways.

In addition, it allows the description of stories as a trajectories across the ontospace.

Furthermore, we can represent an ontodimension as an affordance, which enables to give another, ecologically interpreted explanation of how people perceive and interact with the hybrid ecosystems.

1.3. Embodiment of hybrid ecosystems

The ways people interact with the hybrid ecosystem – augmenting artifacts and accessing virtual information associated with places – extend the human capabilities of action and perception. Perception in hybrid ecosystem involves expectations and meanings (Gibson, 1979) and is a continuous, active and embodied process (Gibson, 1979; Michaels, 2003; Zhang & Patel, 2006). Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991, p. 149) associate the capacities of understanding with biological embodiment, but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history. They coined the term embodied action to point at the idea that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that originate from having a body with various sensory-motor capacities. They also emphasized that that these individual sensory-motor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. The authors assumed that sensory and motor processes, perception and action are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition (p. 172-173). Using the term enaction they focused on two points: 1) perception consists of perceptually guided action, and 2) cognitive structures emerge from recurrent sensory-motor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided (Varela et al., 1991, p. 173). The enactive cognition framework (e.g. Maturana & Varela, 1987; Varela, et al., 1991) emphasizes cognition and knowledge as active construction of a subject, rather than passive representation of an external reality. From the viewpoint of writing stories in hybrid environment this assumption is important. The narratives of the hybrid space are not representations of events that are described by digital means. The stories emerge as part of the places and are constantly enacted in various ways, depending of the ‘reader’ of the story. Communities may compose locative narratives, which will perceptually guide this community, but also the other communities.
Ecological psychology (eg. Gibson, 1979) can be applied as a theoretical framework to explain how people conceptualize and perceive hybrid places. Ecologically oriented approach regards perception more as a direct process of translating environmental action potentialities into action. Information processing according to this view states that when a given stimulus from the environment is frequently coupled with a given response, the information derived from that stimulus will become associatively enriched with response produced cues that then will help to discriminate this stimulus from other ones coupled with other responses (Hommel et al., 2001). The most important claim of the ecological perception theory is that neither the properties of the place nor the physical properties, action goals, memories, or emotions that people have beforehand, would alone suffice to provide the interaction potentialities for the place.
Gibson (1979) originally coined the term affordances for marking this complementarity of the environment and organisms (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). He (1979, p. 129) wrote: “An affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to observer.” Affordances are not properties, resources nor features of the environment. Instead they are “relations between particular aspects of animals and particular aspects of situations” (Chemero, 2003, p. 184). Coupling happens between the place-related and culturally defined affordances, and internal personally relevant goals, emotions and memories of previous interaction. It is the very mutuality between actor and environment that constitutes the basis for the actor’s perception and action (Albrechtsen, Andersen, Bodker, & Pejtersen, 2001). Barab and Roth (2006) assume that in the perception-action cycle of coupling each new action potentially expands or contracts affordances as active interaction possibilities of the place. Magnani (2008), and Magnani and Bardone (2008) note that human and non-human animals “modify” or “create” affordances by manipulating their cognitive niches. According to Heft (2001): “we engage a meaningful environment of affordances and refashion some aspects of them… These latter constructed embodiments of what is known – which include tools, artifacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions – can be called ecological knowledge. Ecological knowledge through its various structural, material culture, human setting manifestations becomes an integral social and cultural part of ‘the environment’, with these social and cultural affordances constituting effective, largely material, forms of knowledge with their own functional significance, cultural transmission, and adaptation implications.”
Affordances emerge when people use social software tools, collecting stories in the geographical places, developing and embedding digital artifacts or interacting with the augmented space. The term of affordance marks the dynamic process by which people in the course of action accommodate themselves with their surroundings and simultaneously shape these surroundings. For example Bruner (1996) refers to such an accommodation process when cultural identity is found by meaning making and writing narratives. Affordances appear for every individual differently, but as long as individuals are part of certain communities and cultures, they evoke similar sets of affordances (Pata, 2009). In the present context we may consider affordances as abstract dimensions of the space by which activity and meaning niches of the communities may be described (Pata, 2009; 2010). Affordances of the hybrid narrative ecosystem emerge in the course of storytelling. The sets of affordances that many individuals perceive and use in storytelling will reveal the potential storytelling niches of the hybrid ecosystem.

2. Writing narratives in hybrid ecosystem

2. 1. Appearing new storytelling standards in Web

New technology, such as microblogging (eg. Smallplaces in Twitter http://twitter.com/smallplaces; Twiller http://twiller.tcrouzet.com/), mobile text-messaging (eg. Novel Idea http://www.mobfest.co.za/novelidea/default.html) or blogs has been used to write stories. A typical application is segmenting and serializing the story into small tweets and making it available to broad audience. Jay Bushman has been experimenting in developing re-imaginings of famous authors’ stories into the microblogging format (eg. The Good Captain http://www.loose-fish.com/waifpole/the-good-captain/) aiming to create embedded fiction between the streams of nonfiction that is constantly arriving to our daily lives. His goal is to blur the line between the real world and the story world (reference). The common “space” characteristic of the stories and human geography is reused in hybrid ecosystems. On one hand, human geography is filled with emotions about places, on the other, stories contain a set of geographical data and play a key role in shaping people’s geographical imaginations (Crang, 1998). Using this characteristic extensively, some authors (eg. Carlos Ruiz Zafon, “The Shadow of the Wind” http://www.carlosruizzafon.co.uk/shadow-walk.html) have embedded their novels into the real geographical locations and provide itineraries for exploring the novels parallel in real and virtual world to enable for the readers embodiment of the fictional story as part of city reality.
All these are examples of reintroducing old formats of fiction in the new hybrid ecosystem. In our experiment, instead of bending old novel format into the hybrid ecosystem, we wanted to explore the new evolving narrative formats of this hybrid space. For example, Crang (1998) has noted that different modes of writing may express different relationships to space and mobility. Kurland (2000) provides the following general characteristics of traditional stories. They have plot, a geographical setting, where and when story takes place, and characters who are involved into the plot by taking actions. The plot of the story usually involves conflicts and its resolution. Stories are generally read and appreciated only in their entirety, to understand the story we must follow the complete unfolding and resolution of the plot. The structure of the story may be linear progressing from unfolding the conflict, rising action, climax and resolution. Alternatively, the patterns of actions and interrelationship of characters may occur throughout the story. The author of a story plays often an active role in the story either as the first person narrator who participates in the story as an observer, minor character or even the major participant or the third person narrator who stands outside the story itself and can be all-knowing and might describe action from many character’s viewpoint, evaluating people and actions in the story. These characteristics of novels are culturally deeply rooted in our minds and may reappear in the transformed shape if different modes of writing are used in hybrid ecosystem. In the experiment we aimed at collecting evidence of new standards how narratives appear in hybrid ecosystem.

2.2. Swarming as a bio-metaphor for writing narratives

While looking for the models to depict the nature of storytelling in hybrid ecosystems we arrived to another biological phenomenon – swarming (Bonabeau, et al., 1999; Kennedy, Eberhardt & Shi, 2001). Many activities in hybrid ecosystems can be characterized as swarming phenomena. Swarming refers to self-organizing behavior in populations such in which local interactions between simple decentralized agents can create complex organized behavior. A swarm is a community in which every agent is only responsible for its individual actions, but the actions altogether cause shared intelligence to emerge. Such swarming systems can accomplish global tasks and form complex patterns through simple local interactions of autonomous agents. Individuals in swarms have ecological relations to the collective. They maintain their individuality and viability in case if the collective swarm intelligence and viability emerges (Sauter et al., 2005). Swarming relies on using the environment as a shared memory, and on reading information both from the environment and from the swarm members’s signals to maintain individual wellbeing. Thus, swarming is one of the main mechanisms how hybrid ecosystems function and evolve. In other ways swarming mechanisms can be viewed as the creation of an ontospace, and extracting certain signal ontodimensions from this space.

The particular activity that is focused on as an example of swarming in this study is writing narratives in a hybrid ecosystem. A hybrid narrative ecosystem can be described like viewing foraging ants through a prism. The foraging example was taken because it provided a generalized model for the various behaviors that have been observed in social software environments when people create and use textual and visual artifacts. “A central place food foraging” is a swarming behavior that consists of two main phases: an initial exploration for food, followed by carrying it back to the nest (Sudd & Franks, 1987). The foraging ant is randomly searching to explore new area. If an ant collides with some food it picks it up and leaves a certain pheromone on the trail. If foraging, each ant is alert for this pheromone as a food marker that may have been left by other ants in the trail for finding food. They are always moving towards the direction where there is a greater concentration of that pheromone.

Note! This may be related to the trajectory and gradient in ontospace)

However, the pheromone dissipates over time. If there are not enough ants collecting food and dropping pheromone on the way home, the trail may disappear. The system of diffusion and evaporation leads of a competition among food sources for available ants, because the number of ants is limited and the trails need a steady walking of ants along them to stay stable. The shorter the distance of a feeding place to the nest, the shorter is the trail, the more often ants walk from nest to feeder and back per time unit. This leads to a stronger positive feedback loop and race conditions among the feeders, selecting for the nearest one.

Note! This may be related to the trajectory and gradient in ontospace, why movig towards gradient is more effective behaviour.

The pheromones similar to those signaling about food may also be used to allure ants from the track. An enemy trying to conceal the search target, may spread false signals to attract the ants to a location of little interest. To avoid this trap, the signal is responded only if it reaches to certain threshold value (Marshall, 2005).

Note! Can ontodimensions reinforce each other? In niches it is possible that niche dimensions may reinforce each other if they appear together. So if some ontodimensions appear simultaneously they provide a stronger signal to the narrator to add some content, to do action)

writing narratives as a swarm

Figure 1. Swarming: Foraging behavior of ants and writing narratives in hybrid ecosystem.

As an analogue to ants’ foraging behavior, human storytellers in their hybrid ecosystem search for and are influenced by the attractor objects (eg. interesting aspects of the environment). When finding something of interest, the objects are captured in textual or digital image format using microblogging programs (Brightkite.com, Zannel.com) in mobile phones. Alternatively, digital cameras could be used and artifacts would be uploaded later. Microblogging environments enable to pull digital contents automatically also to the social repositories (Flickr.com) or social networks (Facebook.com). Stories uploaded from microblogging environment can be mashed using special tags, and pulled as RSS feeds to the other social software environments for monitoring. This may be done for extracting various stories from the collected artifacts individually or for the community. The artefacts can be locatively geotagged in microblogging systems (eg. Brightkite.com, Zannel.com), and connected to stories either by simple linking, tagging with keywords or merging them and providing longer explanations in personal blogs. The attention of emerging story is caught by various trace-leaving techniques like mashing, pulling and aggregating, tagging for social retrieval, social awareness technologies or hybrid maps etc. These collected and personally meaningful artifacts with tags serve as signal trails for the narrators themselves to continue with certain story aspects, and also for other storytellers to contribute for this story or to trigger their own stories. The application of microblogging environments and social mashups with tags enables for other people an immediate access to the new signals of potential attractors, causing selective noticing in the hybrid ecosystem. Following the signal trail opens the possibility of accumulating more content for a particular story, especially if several individuals start to strengthen the signal. The more similar content is accumulated, the more attractive and visible the story trail becomes as a trace in the narrative ecosystem. This trace attracts other individuals and thereby reinforces itself. Strong signal trails may also be attacked and reused, for example by alluring the crowds away from the original trail with various similar signal baits. The initial story may thus become modified into many paths.

Adopting traces of other individuals of the swarm depends on analogy or closeness of the attractor narratives to one’s own. Various forms of collaboration may appear. One is agglomerating stories in the manner comparable to how termites build the nest (Kennedy et al., 2001). Termites build high dome-like termite nets following the swarming behavior. They take some dirt in their mouth moistening it and then start to move in direction of the strongest pheromone concentration. They deposit dirt when the smell is strongest. After some random movements searching for a relatively strong pheromone field, the termites will have started a number of small pillars. The pillars signify places where a greater number of termites have recently passed, and thus the pheromone concentration is high there. The pheromone dissipates with time, so in order for it to accumulate, the number of termites must exceed some threshold; they must leave pheromones faster than the chemicals evaporate. This prevents the formation of a great number of pillars. As termite pillars ascend and termites become increasingly involved in depositing their loads, the pheromone concentration near that pillars increases. The termites are attracted to let the dirt between the pillars that attract them from several sides.

Note! Can ontodimensions reinforce each other? In niches it is possible that niche dimensions may reinforce each other if they appear together. So if some ontodimensions appear simultaneously they provide a stronger signal to the narrator to add some content, to do action)

Termite arch-building contains two kinds of behaviors: cue-based and sign-based. In the cue-based case the change in the environment provides a cue for the behavior of other actors (eg. growing pillars provide such cues). In the sign-based swarming the pheromones are used as signals.
In the hybrid narrative ecosystem the tags (like pheromones) are glued to the soil material (geotagged content of the narrative pieres, text, images). This provides signals and makes story elements attractive. The artifacts that are marked with same tags or artifacts that contain certain significant elements for the storytellers will be noticed and integrated into stories. However, these stories are not linear, but can be viewed rather as story dimensions.

Note! Here we must write about moving along perceived ontodimension trajectory when they write or monor other people stories. Aso moving alog the gradient is interesting here?

Secondly, such artifacts from certain story dimensions that are available in the geographical locations will become gateways to other geographical locations where artifacts with similar tags have been embedded. Such geo-locative story dimensions form an ecological knowledge of the hybrid narrative ecosystems, influencing how people will interact with the environment.
New geo-locative stories are granular and consisting of little content portions. The story may become evident and appear as a result of accumulation of these portions. Popular social software tools often lack sufficient interoperability to provide automatic pingbacks between different software platforms that would enable to trace the story elements across the hybrid ecosystem.
The emergent story may not have a start and end. It is a flow of impressions that may eventually obtain a storyline, or even several story lines for different people. Yet, providing the visibility of stories as linear sequences and composing story plots is technologically unaided.

Note! Again place for ontodiemnsion trajectory?

Individuals tend to mutate their narratives as a result of ecological perception. Sometimes these may initially be mere errors that take place if individuals try to repeat an existing narrative in another virtual environment (for example if adding descriptions and tags to the Flickr images uploaded by means of Brightkite mobile microblogging). Also deliberate reinterpretation of artifacts takes place. Most often if the narrative is transformed from one environment to another (eg. from microblogging environment to the blog) authors tend to elaborate it. If artifacts are borrowed from one individual to another, the new person and different context will cause different perception of this digital entity. This kind of evolution of stories may eventually change the attractor tag concentration to the extent that the original story trace will be lost and the individuals would need to start the search for new narrative resources as new attractors.

Note! Moving from one trajectory to another, can we elaborate this

It is important to note that swarm-like collaboration does not assume an initially decided goal, but suffices for collaborative patterns to emerge. Cloning narrative pieces by analogy may also make the trace of the narrative more visible, similarly like pheromone traces are agglomerated due to the swarm activity. Thus cloning will “hype up” some stories.

2.3. Narrative swarming from ontospace perspective

If we talk about writing narratives in a community of an hybrid ecosystem, the niche ontodimensions are determined by the most frequently selected ontodimensions that people perceive (eg. food, buildings, graffitti, emotions, contrasts, happyness, particular software beyond others, particular geographical locations beyond others). Within this niche certain ontoplaces are more preferred than the others, and start triggering collaboration.

When writing hybrid narratives, each person moves along personal trajectory in the ontospace, creating particular ontoplaces. This trajectory is not predetermined with the story plot. This trajectory is currently observable for the others only by means of participatory surveyllance in social software, and not as a detectable path in ontospace.
Often the trajectory as a storyline is determined by and combines from a limited set of ontodimensions that the person highlights, and a small number of hybrid locations where the person walks in daily life. It usually fluctuates between the limited number of closely situated ontolaces in the ontospace.

The triggers of perceiving new ontodimensions and discovering new ontoplaces are received from monitoring the hybrid ecosystem where other people write narratives in the same niche. Such use of same sets of ontodimensions in the community causes narrative swarming phenomena that are observable as the emergence of closely situated ontoplaces in ontoplace.

NB! Evidences of the activity may be seen from the previous posts.

Here is just a table to compare how narrative swarming in hybrid ecosystem differs from writing a traditional story.

Comparison of traditional stories and narratives written in hybrid ecosystem by swarms

Ecological Design

Tuesday morning Jerry had mentioned to me about the term “social affordance” and it is really ticking to me. I love Gibbon’s idea for more than a decade. I am interested in design especially involving audience/user’s perception & cognition integration. And I read 3 Japanese scholar & designers’ book: 《不為設計而設計=最好的設計》（日文原名：《生態學的設計論》，The Ecological Approach to Design）. I then checked the wikipedia entry of “social affordance”:

Social affordance is a specialization of the term affordance, and refers to the properties of an object or environment that permit social actions. Social affordance is most often used in the context of a social technology such as wiki and chat applications.

Using my own terms, I think “social affordance” is when you using the concept “affordance” to mention about web 2.0 application and services. I had been thinking about similar issues for years and now here is such better term to name it. I believe my current Second Life design challenge should also be demonstrating how is it possible to connect all.

After another work-week with a dizzying amount of overtime, its a good opportunity to think back to a weekend trip not so long ago. There, I discovered this nice little table lamp which provided some illumination to the room I was staying in.

How to turn on or off?

The obvious main question I had about the lamp was how to actually turn it on or off. In North America such lamps typically possess some sort of knob or small bolt near the socket of the light bulb which has to be either rotated or pushed in order to turn a lamp on or off. Most of the time this means you will have to fumble around for a while because your view is blocked by the lamp’s shade, therefore always making you fear that you might touch the light bulb and burn yourself or that the entire lamp might fall off the table.

This lamp however had no apparent knob and while I was continuing my search for it, the lamp suddenly turned on. It turned out that the only thing I had to do in order to turn on the lamp was to simply touch the lamp’s base anywhere on its shiny green surface. Touch the base a second time and it would turn off again. This design might not provide for the best discoverability or affordance but pretty much anyone – people with motor impairments included – should be able to perform the task. So, overall, I find it a great example of good usability in a commodity object.

Now if only more lamps in North America would be made this way, I could finally stop fearing to tip over lamps when searching for the switch in the middle of the night…

Random Icons – The Making Of
EPVS exposition in Roma
Spoliaculture
Spazio Bloomsbury
Vernissage feb. 27 2009 h. 19
Video Installation “Bubbling 4 you”
Open till March 9 2009

Dolls and Puppets

The making of an Icon might be explained in relativistic, chronotopical terms as subtraction of space and time a person is previously immersed into. In such terms, puppets and dolls have to be assumed as atemporal and atopic entities, deguisable in any possible fashion, since they do not belong to any specific here and now. Accordingly, the same dolls may be showing onstage as timeless princesses or nurses or whoever, as placeless puppets might be sitting on dinosaurs, into a train or wherever. So defined Icons are not limited to chronologically or locatively specific roles or behaviors. They fit any context, your next tv show, an advertising from the fifties, the seat next to yours on the subway, a horse riding in the far west.

The Ecology of Icons

As myths are deeply rooted in history, Icons were once people, more or less popular gals, ladies, cool guys or random blokes. That’s why a more radical approach may argue that in order to emerge as Icons, the individuals they once were have been deprived of opportunities for action that were initially provided by their original environment. Afterwards, the ecosystem of an Icon looks like a typical prison, an environment in which segregated subjects adopt random behavior on the basis of new circumstances over which they lack even the slightest control.

Actions and Gestures

Accordingly, Icons perform gestures not actions. Indeed, their ecology is not defined by purposeful interaction with their own very narrow and deserted environment. Icons eventually move, but is that dancing? Icons eventually prowl sinuously, but is that seducing? Icons eventually move between balloons but why? Icons bump balloons on the floor; still, to what purpose? Icons are actually living somewhere on this planet, but they are confined to a locatively meaningless nowhere, places that may be anywhere on Google maps or, more likely, on the ‘Map of the Strange’. Just as in time, Icons are eventually now, or tomorrow, let’s say yesterday, but who cares? They don’t.

The Artist as an Icon

It is common sense that artists love to be famous and recognized everywhere, as they are eager to outlive their human experience as people. That’s why they might be very concerned by processes of self-iconization. Common sense is wrong, however, at least when it comes to real artists. Indeed, they are more likely to aim at joining their Icons in the very same prisons to which they themselves confined them. That’s what a self-portrait tries to be: an artist’s desperate, tentative attempt to feel the same way his own victims feel after he ‘treated’ them, ‘worked them out’, in short iconized them. Indeed, in order to iconize his victims in the most effective way, the artist has to experience first-hand how it feels to be deprived of opportunities for action that once defined the extent of the nostalgically neglected belonging to mankind.

Don’t fight the operating system.

While they continue to offer more than just a starting point for our applications, such as customizable applets and desktop widgets, operating systems like Windows and Mac OS have developed fairly steady, systematic guidelines by which most programs happily abide. These systems include color-coded, iconic navigation tools and affordance-specific hints that, when used appropriately, allow for easier usability and less confusion.

For example, programs in the Windows environment generally follow a consistent color scheme. In Windows XP, for example, title bars are by default given a blue gradient (which I’ve replaced with solid blue), and inactive title bars are grayed out to show the user that the focus is on another application. As only one program may be in focus at any given time, this is the most obvious hint as to which application will respond to a user’s input.

Adobe Photoshop used to adhere to these standards. Here we see blue title bars showing that Photoshop is the current active application, and which of the three open documents is active within Photoshop. Also, the toolbar to the left shows where a user can click to move the toolbar, or double-click to hide it.

Here is Photoshop’s newest incarnation. Notice there are no blue bars to be found, and the difference between the active and inactive documents is much more difficult to notice at first glance. And switching to another application changes nothing in Photoshop’s title bar, which can lead to confusion for the user.

This new Adobe color scheme, found in most CS4 applications, seems to echo Windows Vista’s default settings, rounding corners around documents and losing the blue headers for a less saturated color scheme. And it could be argued that more neutral surroundings will allow images to be seen with less distraction, but going so far as to eliminate even the option to replace the familiar, ever helpful blue bars that help discern active from inactive elements only takes control away from the user.

Overriding the established scheme also takes an unnecessary toll on the processor. Moving documents around in Photoshop 7 is much smoother and faster than in CS4, and the new layout scheme–really just a Vista/Mac-inspired skin–doesn’t always do its job:

The top part of this image shows Windows XP’s default scheme, and in the middle is Photoshop CS4’s own layout. Quite often, especially after minimizing and restoring the application, Photoshop will forget to refresh its skin properly, allowing a bit of the original format to show through, resulting in a choppy overlapping mess, as shown in the bottom of the image. Because the two don’t have identical buttons size or placement, the user might not know exactly where to click. Fixing this will likely take a couple minutes of coding, and will probably be improved in the near future with an update, but if Adobe had stuck to the rules, they wouldn’t need to come up with workarounds for problems like this.

Another example of ignoring common operating system guidelines is when a program doesn’t place a corresponding button in the Windows taskbar–that horizontal strip along the bottom of the screen. I understand the desire to free up space on the taskbar, but some applications–such as Trillian, my chat program–will often get buried underneath others, or minimized when I want to see my desktop. Without offering a button along the taskbar, it makes locating the application a lot more difficult than if it had just stuck to the rules.

Operating systems don’t always make things easy, but one thing that human-computer interaction benefits greatly from is conformity. With certain exceptions–full-screen games, for one–developers and designers should work together to create experiences that work within these limitations, or at least give users the choice to set their own. For the most part, computer applications like Photoshop are tools we use to achieve a specific end; they aren’t expected to be an experience in themselves.

Navigation layout should reflect the movement it represents.

When the blueprints for information architecture are laid out, developers have a clear understanding of the relationship between each option and its ensuing result. This is because the elementary structure of an experience, such as a website or presentation, is a visual series of options branching out to other options, like the outline to a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In the later stages of development, navigation is added to give the project functionality, usually in the form of buttons that serve as design metaphors.

In terms of human-computer interaction, a metaphor draws a parallel to something we know in the real world. We refer to directories as folders because we’re used to a folder holding papers full of information, or files. When first opening a web browser, a user starts off at a default page, specified by an icon of a little house. This home page is supposedly a more familiar place than the rest of the internet, and can be returned to at any time when things get out of hand. And when was the last time you used a cassette tape to take messages? Chances are your cell phone still uses the images of a cassette to represent the voicemail feature. Chances are probably just as great that we’ll see the same obsolete icon as long as voicemail exists, despite the fact that, thankfully, you’ll never have to wait for your machine to rewind your messages ever again.

This is an image of the minimal but essential navigation I have on my browser. I don’t use these buttons a lot–I prefer holding Alt and using my arrow keys to navigate, and F5 to refresh–but the metaphor is abundantly clear: pressing left will move back and right will move forward. This hinges on the assumption that our brains perceive progression from left to right, and being raised on the English language, that works out perfectly for me.

Another simple and effective example is audio and video controls, with applications like WaveLab, Audition and Media Player Classic, which emulate the buttons on a stereo. Here, the back and forward buttons represent not only the direction, but the relative scope of the movement: the button just left of the center will move back a little each second, while the one further to the left will jump all the way to the beginning of a song, or, when multiple tracks are used, skip to the previous track, which is visualized as being positioned to the left of the current track.

Interactive presentations, such as PowerPoint and HyperCard, utilize buttons to move forward and back along a series of pages (also called slides, frames, cards and so on, depending on the application). These buttons can be placed anywhere by the designer, so instead of progressing to the right, a presentation can move down, up or left–but it’s important to stick to a scheme and be consistent with it.

And then there’s Microsoft.

Thankfully I seldom have to resort to using Windows Help, but when I do, this button layout gets me every time. The Next button, used to move to the next step in the process, is on the left, then the Back button, followed by Start Over, the button that shares its behavior with the Skip Back button on a stereo. Why is this button on the very right when it brings the user back to the beginning? The layout of this menu is not only a little off, it’s exactly backwards.

Not only would I suggest reversing the order of the buttons, but because two of them move back and the other moves forward, I’d put a little distance between the Next button and the other two, giving a bit more indication that the Next button navigates to the right, while the other two, grouped closer together, will both take the user back, just with varying distance. Even better, icons to accompany the text would give a more easily recognizable hint as to what these buttons do. People only come here when something goes wrong with Windows. The last thing they need is another headache on top of what they’re already trying to deal with.

Users are accustomed to common interaction metaphors such as this, and there’s likely nothing you can do to break the presumptions they’ve built up over years of subconscious use. As long as a system is built with these established presumptions in mind, users will find it more intuitive and easy to navigate with no extra training–years of real-life experience will provide the training no tutorial ever can.

Door handles should look like door handles.

I used to work at a bar and music venue in Seattle called The Triple Door. I only mention the name here because the three doors after which the place is named have some pretty obvious design flaws–dangerously obvious–and I urge anyone interested in interaction to visit and take a look at the doors in question.

After a short flight of steps down to the lower level, the first obstruction is a set of three large, black doors, which remain closed and locked to keep out those who haven’t been admitted to the theater area. Employees, armed with magnetic keys, always open one of these three doors for the guest, which only further adds to the big problem later on.

Once past the first door, the guest is in a small room with three more doors in front and a large, floor-to-ceiling window to the right, kept impeccably clean. The lights in this room are kept low, and the doors painted black, so not much is visible save for the performance through the window.

The main problem here is the design of the door handles: long, skinny poles connected to the side of each door, also painted black, with no markings to imply their affordance as door handles. Furthermore, as the doors must be pulled to open them, the hinges are on the inside–large, bulky, almost handle-shaped hinges, silver in color, to set them apart from everything else in the room. What’s more, the hinges are placed at the same height one would expect a door handle to be. So guests would frequently attempt to pull or twist these large hinges, obviously to no avail.

Because the first door had been opened for them by an employee, customers would have no idea how these doors should function. Pushing on them does no good, as they open in the other direction. Every night I worked there, frustrated customers would come back through the first set of doors (which do open outward, and can easily be pushed open) and ask for assistance, expressing embarrassment or claiming we forgot to unlock the second set of doors (which have no locks).

Another scenario, which I unfortunately witnessed several times in my short time there, was customers assuming the squeaky clean, floor-to-ceiling pane of glass was merely a walkway–it does face the dining area and theater after all–and would run face-first into the window, often causing bruises, fat lips and, at least once, a pretty big gash on a guest’s forehead.

The problem with the door handles in this cramped, nearly unlit space could be easily fixed, if the poles were fashioned to resemble handles. I made the suggestion of painting thin white lines on the poles, one above and one below where the average hand would reach for a door handle. This would easily imply the affordance of a pullable object. Nobody went for it, which is understandable. I wasn’t there to change anything, just greet guests and show them their seats.

I also suggested putting a vinyl sticker on the window–maybe the restaurant’s logo or a dinner menu–to make it clear just how solid this large piece of glass was. Nothing changed during my time there, but one day I found they’d put an event calendar in the window. I hope no more injuries had to happen to spur the change, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.

Good design turns bad pretty fast when aesthetics intrude on functionality. This establishment was designed with a certain look and feel that sets it apart from all others in Seattle, but at a cost. Along with the door issue, there were no signs pointing guests toward the restrooms–I guess they thought signs detract from the beauty of a bar with a fish tank and mood lighting–and employees must constantly point out what should be obvious to everyone in the room.

During my time there, nobody else seemed to like my suggestions–the guests were more often than not ridiculed for being too drunk or stupid to operate a simple door or find the restroom. No matter how much I explained the problems everyone knew about, how they occurred or how easily they could be fixed, I just wasn’t in the position to be listened to. Aesthetics were the first and foremost priority, and it takes a lot to spur change in such an established system, especially when design flaws instantly become labeled as human error–which is at once overestimating your market’s understanding of the system and underestimating their intelligence.

Respect the Hand Cursor.

In the early days of UI development, the mouse cursor transformed from a full gray ASCII block to the more easily recognizable arrow we know and love today. Soon after, designers came up with a few added icons to give users hints as to what was going on in that beige box of theirs: an hourglass to suggest the computer was busy thinking, an I-bar to show where text could be entered, and double-ended arrows telling us how we could stretch and resize our windows.

Then HyperCard technology gave us a different kind of navigation, and pretty much changed everything. One important visual cue it offered was the obvious and incredibly effective hand cursor, which we now use to inform users of navigation options within a website. Simply put, when you see the pointing hand, you know you can click.

The hand cursor’s been around a long time, and has become an established visual metaphor for interactivity all over the world. It’s been used in Myst, a game initially created in HyperCard, and in a later sequel rendered in 3D, still maintaining its general behavior of pointing to indicate where a user can click.

Many applications, Adobe’s among them, use an open hand cursor that shows a document can be clicked and dragged to change the user’s view. This draws on the same design metaphor, and I’d guess they even found the same guy to model it for them.

The pointing hand cursor works the same way in Flash sites and presentations. However, there exist simple lines of ActionScript that allow developers to override the cursor’s behaviors: disabling the hand cursor when a user rolls over a button, for example, involves a single line of code applied to the button itself.

Without going into too much detail about Flash and its language, this can come in handy when a developer decides to use a rollover action to trigger an event, but doesn’t want to mislead the user into thinking the button should be clicked on. While there are better ways of going about it, this is a great example of understanding the user’s expectations regarding cursor cues and developing accordingly.

The problem arises when a button that is meant to be clicked on doesn’t display the hand cursor, and doesn’t give sufficient clues that it’s meant to be clicked on. The hand cursor is the easiest, fastest way to offer navigation cues to a user.

On the other hand, there are sites that improperly use buttons solely for their rollover behaviors without disabling the hand cursor feature, thereby telling users they should be clicking on elements that do absolutely nothing. Some sites even employ the hand cursor for the duration of the experience across the entire stage of the presentation, nullifying the purpose of its existence. It’s difficult to determine where we are to click when we aren’t told where we are not to click.

One area where it gets tricky is when form buttons are used. Form buttons are those capsule-shaped, gray buttons that seem to pup up out of the screen, and push down into the screen when you click on them. These are used in technical sites used by banks, auto dealers, and sites involving numbers and money. Offline, the shape and behavior of these buttons are used to confirm and close dialog boxes, minimize and maximize windows, and navigate through installation wizards. Online, users know that clicking on them gets something done, like calculating a chart or submitting personal information. But they don’t necessarily inform us as to whether or not they’ll be navigating us away from the current page, resulting in hesitation when dealing with large forms full of numbers that may or may not disappear once the button is pressed. On a good note, websites such as Amazon.com and Washington Mutual’s site have done away with form buttons in exchange for standard image buttons, complete with the hand cursor that instills that much more confidence in every user click.

As more and more developers understand the reasoning behind the cursor’s visual cues and utilize them appropriately, they will gain more users’ trust and acceptance, subconscious as it may be.