Invitations and Becomings

Just home from day one of the conference, and slowly processing the various stimuli.

Some highlights of the day were:

1. August de los Reyes on Emotional Design (more below...)
2. Grant Young's talk about Social Media gave me heaps of ideas for a charity campaign I'm working on, and articulated a question that's been plaguing me for months (in a vague and uncomfortable way). When it comes to engaging with social media, will it be my place or yours? And in general, it seems, your place is the place to be!

August de los Reyes's talk was a heady blend of philosophy, psychology, design theory and some slick presentation delivery, and was really very inspiring. He managed to include not only Marvin Minsky and William James, but even John Locke and a grand narrative of the history science in one talk! The key concept he wanted to explain (despite the title) was Emotional Design, but unfortunately, I thought it had little to do with the product he was flogging (Microsoft Surface), unless you think that touch and haptic spaces generally are the only emotional triggers. 

The other thing is, the more I thought about Emotional Design, the more it sounds like a genre that has already been well-developed in literature and film. Reyes' best example of Emotional Design came from the development of Halo, which was the first 1st person shoot-up game to really succeed in the market. Halo succeeded, according to Reyes, because the designers coded the mechanics of the game to match the aesthetics of the experience, rather than the other way around. 1st person shoot-ups didn't work originally because the gunsight was much too responsive to joystick movements to aim it at anything. The solution to the problem, create a gunsight that would stick to potential target, however, made the task of aiming too easy. The Halo developers looked for a sweet spot in between. Reyes argues that the result is a kind of super-realistic experience, and this super-realistic quality brings a magical and emotional element to the game which explains its success.

What Reyes was describing seems to me to be another manifestation of the genre of magical realism - developed in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the films of Ang Lee - to the domain of design. Seems to me it's more the case that this particular meme is being picked up by design theorists like Reyes at the same moment that haptic technologies, and by extension ubiquitous computing, are coming to fruiting. After all, magical experiences have to be valued for the inflection point that Reyes is describing to have this kind of shape (assuming he's right that it does have that shape), and there are many complex social, and especially political, conditions that contribute to magical realism to be seen as an advance on realism. Bertholt Brecht, for example, wouldn't have had a bar of it.

That said, as a design philosophy the 8 principles that Reyes spelled out (I assume you can find them in his book), and the comparison of command line and graphical user interfaces with the idea of a natural user interface that Surface is based on were really stimulating. If I get a chance I might blog some more about them down the track.

One more thing...  a little serendipity. Reyes brought up Donald Norman's book Emotion Design on a slide, and I mistook it for a book recommended to me by a colleague a few weeks ago. Turns out I mistook it for Norman's original classic The Design of Everyday Things. Anyway, it's convinced me to start reading this literature, and I'll probably start with one of these (and thanks for the tip, Fiona).