Hi Nehal/Vicky & IxDAers,
(I decided to post this to list in the end - in the hope it's useful
to others)
My (nearly finished) PhD thesis is titled "Developing a language of
interactivity through the theory of play." Among other things, it
tries to answer the seemingly simple question of why one interactive
experience is more engaging that another. It seems like a simple
question to answer, but as you start to unpick it it becomes very
complicated. The cleverest pieces of interaction design sometimes fail
to engage and the roughest things knocked in an afternoon have
everyone gathered around the computer (or going to the web site)
wanting to play with it. It's usually quite an unconscious response
and internal experience and that makes it hard to get a grip on.
There's obviously a much longer version of the lead up to this
argument in my PhD, but one of the key aspects to it is understanding
the embodied nature of interaction, even if it is just a press of a
button or moving a mouse. Some of that is then understood through a
phenomenological account of the world, backed up by the cognitive
science that Lakoff and Johnson have been involved in. There is a long
journey through psychology and cognition through artificial
intelligence and into the understanding of the embodied mind that
Lakoff and Johnson are involved with. All that stuff is pretty
interesting, but I would suggest Philosophy in the Flesh as the key
text by Lakoff & Johnson. It's more up-to-date than Metaphors We Live
By and they go into some of their research projects at the end and had
a big influence on my research and theory development.
I'm assuming you've already looked into Don Norman's books and the
design side of things, so I'll point to some books and papers from
other fields.
You should probably take a look at some Csikszentmihalyi work too on
flow. The classic book is this 1990 one, but there is a recent edition
now:
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow : the psychology of optimal
experience (First ed.). New York: Harper and Row.
There is also a book he co-wrote about museums and gallery
experiences, which I have looked at but can't remember too well (I
read about four of his books back to back and they're a bit muddled in
my notes and mind). I think it is this one:
Robinson Rick, E. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). The art of seeing :
an interpretation of the aesthetic encounter. Malibu, Calif.: J.P.
Getty Museum : Getty Center for Education
You might want to check out Gaston Bachelard too, given the space
nature of what you are looking into: Bachelard, G. (1992). The Poetics
of Space. Beacon Press.
The reason I chose play as the central lens through which to view
interactivity was because of my background in interaction design using
both a playful approach to design and having found playful
interactions to be the most successful. The other aspect of play that
makes it such an interesting line of enquiry is that we still don't
know why we or any animal plays. There are lots of competing rhetorics
about this, but none of them fix it down - see Brian Sutton-Smith
(1997). The ambiguity of play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press for the main text on this.
Yet at the same time we all understand what play is, when we're doing
it or when someone else is doing it – it's much like love in that
respect and equally difficult to define. A lot of it has to do with a
subtle understanding of rules and spaces and I think that might be
useful to you too. I ended up going into a lot of play and games
literature for this, including video/computer games of course.
The best place to start here would be on some of the video games
literature and, fortunately, there is great reader for this, which has
all the key texts in it:
Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2005). The Game Design Reader: A Rules of
Play Anthology. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
But you should perhaps check out the original volume they wrote too:
Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of play : game design
fundamentals. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
I can also recommend my ex-Antirom colleague, Andy Cameron, edited,
which has some interesting approaches to interactivity (and have a
Google for some of his essays too):
Cameron, A. (Ed.). (2004). The Art of Experimental Interaction Design.
Hong Kong: Systems Design Ltd.
You might want to check out a few papers by friends of mine, though
these are more the exploration of interactive artworks in public spaces:
Cornock, S. & Edmonds, E. (1973). The Creative Process Where the
Artist Is Amplified or Superseded by the Computer. Leonardo, 6(1),
11-16.
Costello, B., Muller, L., Amitani, S., & Edmonds, E. (2005).
Understanding the experience of interactive art: Iamascope in
Beta_space. Sydney, Australia Sydney, Australia, Australia.
Muller, L., Edmonds, E., & Connell, M. (2006). Living laboratories for
interactive art. CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in
Design and the Arts, 2(4), 195-207.
Muller, L., Turner, G., Khut, G., & Edmonds, E. (2006). Creating
Affective Visualisations for a Physiologically Interactive Artwork.
Information Visualization, 651-657.
I know it sounds like a massive tangent (and it might be), but the
work and writings of Rodney Brooks, Head of MIT's robotics department
will also give you some insights into experiencing spaces. His
approach to AI and teaching robots to experience spaces and insight
that AI had to be embodied completely shook up the field: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/
and if you're trying to nail down some kind of formula to experience
spaces, that's about as close as you will get.
I noticed you already had Lucy Bullivant's book in your references,
but for anyone else on the list here, it's this one:
Bullivant, L. (2006). Responsive environments : architecture, art and
design. London: V&A.
I think the work of Lonzano Rafael-Hemmer are some of the best
examples of understanding that mix of play, interaction, physical and
public space.
Dag Svanæs wrote a PhD on the whole phenomenological angle back in 2000"
Svanæs, D. (2000). Understanding Interactivity: Steps to a
Phenomenology of Human-Computer Interaction. Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, Trondheim.
He did quite a lot of "grunt work" that the rest of us can benefit
from in terms of really boiling down interaction to basics and
researching people's responses and it’s a good summary of the various
philosophical theories that lead to the Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
explanations. You can get a PDF of it online here: http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~dags/
Lastly there's the work of Sherry Turkle, Paul Dourish and also
Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics (1998) that you might want to check
out - they all deal with the experience of interaction with computers,
screens, interfaces, art and the world in some shape or form.
I think I should stop there....
Best,
Andy
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Andy Polaine
Interaction & Experience Design
Research | Writing | Education
Twitter: apolaine
Skype: apolaine
http://playpen.polaine.com
http://www.designersreviewofbooks.com
http://www.omnium.net.au
http://www.antirom.com
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