Andy,
I think you're spot on and what you say about moving beyond the page
totally resonates with the approach I'm trying to take on social
interaction design. There are of course constraints on what can be
done within a framed space, but you're right that present and future
applications will require thinking "outside the box," so to speak. The
interface will in some cases be a window onto a space, that space
being a visual space, an information "space" (misnomer I think), may
even be video/televisual.
In the case of social media, where user interaction is often
communication, and is social, meaning that it is as much about how a
user relates to other users as it is about how she relates to the
screen, I use the concept of a "social interface." I break the screen
into three modes: mirror, surface, and window, where the mirroring
mode is involved when users see themselves reflected in the social
"space," the surface is a filmic, print, web app or other
representational design of content and activity, and the window mode
is involved when users communicate directly to one another.
Ascribing modalities seems to liberate, at least for me, the screen
constraints (including layout, nav, visual design) from the user's
mode of interaction. As I see it, the user mode of interaction is very
different when he's engaged in a self-reflective relation to his own
profile (e.g. on facebook) than when he's viewing a friend's profile.
In the former, the user reflects on his own self as presented back to
him; in the latter he projects into the friend's profile and brings to
it the history of their relationship. (The user "experience" of
viewing that profile pag differs for a good friend vs a new friend).
This stuff transcends what's on the page, so it's seemed to me that we
need design language for the modality of the user's engagement -- what
each user brings to the personal and social representations framed in
the page.
Where you say action>reaction>interaction -- which is great -- I'd
then add, for social media:
action>reflection
reaction>interaction
action>communication
communication>reciprocation
and so on. Not worked out, but the gist of it would be to formulate
action systems for mediated social environments. I take a stab at this
in some of my slideshare presentations http://www.slideshare.net/gravity7
(originals are at: http://gravity7.com/slides.html).
Actions in social systems are not limited to the interaction with
what's on the screen -- social actions such as in facebook social
games are better understood through the framing and handling of social
interaction as covered by Erving Goffman, for example. Other
communicative actions, which are those that solicit a response, again
are governed by social convention, linguistics (questions vs promises
vs gifts vs greetings etc etc), and so on.
It's immensely complicated but I think a three part framework for
social interaction can be designed around a few insights provided by
sociology and psychology:
self (self reflecting on self)
other (self interested in other, or paired)
relation (self interested in social action, requiring three + people)
which gives us:
monadic (one person)
dyadic (a pair)
triadic (a group)
This works out nicely too in that it's reflected in social network
analysis, where networks are understood in terms of an individual
node, a pair, and triads. The triad is significant in that it forms
the basis of social, as opposed to inter-personal, interaction. Triads
mean that if A, B, and C are in a relation, then an interaction
between A+B affects C. You can build all of society on 1, 2, and 3. A
group of 4 can be two pairs, or a triad and an isolate. And so on...
Social action then forms the basis of the interaction end of social
interaction design; and screen modalities of mirror, surface, and
window form the basis of the visual design.
Or something like that!
;-)
adrian
On Oct 29, 2008, at 4:49 PM, Andy Polaine wrote:
I suppose I'm thinking of the pure action>reaction>interaction of
interactivity and interaction design when I think about trying to
think beyond the page. It's often a case of moving beyond thinking
of the screen (or browser window) as a framed space where things can
be placed and more thinking of it as a window on a space where
things can happen and that window can move over the space (as we're
now seeing with things like the iPhone UI).
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