Sketching a Creative Experience

In Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experience, his chapters, “The Anatomy of Sketching,” and “Clarity is Not Always the Path to Enlightment,” provided me with a great way to conceptualize a ‘creative user experience’. I was first introduced to the possibility of a creative user experience through Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design. From Kolko’s text I realized that in order to prevent the design from reinforcing a stereotype about the user or the world they live in, there must be an element of challenge or impetus for creativity: “in order to realize the state of awareness…. an element of challenge must be present” (Kolko 110). And as I have stated before I think Kolko presents us with a very useful question: “Can our Interaction Design solutions encourage users to be creative?” (Kolko 110).

As Buxton notes, sketches, “suggest and explore rather than confirm,” they “don’t ‘tell,’ they ‘suggest’” (Buxton 113). Therefore, I think I think Buxton’s notion of sketching can serve as a possible solution, allowing an open conversation between the user, design, and designer, over time. This open conversation is allowed because the sketch does not present itself as a solution, closing off opportunities outside its orbital pull: “the physical sketch is critical to the process, but it is the vehicle, not the destination, and ironically, it is the ambiguity in the drawing that is the key mechanism that helps us find our way” (Buxton 117). In this ambiguity the designer is able to “leave big enough holes” (Buxton 115), that allow “room for improvement and refinement” (Buxton 113).

How can the finished product maintain the status of a sketch, providing a “catalyst to stimulate new and different interpretations” (Buxton 115)? I ask this question because I am not suggesting that we should abandon finished projects or that our designs should only be half-baked, but I am interested in discovering a way to transmit the create process inherent in a sketch, to the user. I think this should be an important part of the finished product because the designer cannot know everything. In the sketching stage, the realizations of one’s short comings are brought forward, as seen in this quote from Suwa and Tversky: “by examining the externalizations, designers can spot problems they may not have anticipated. More than that, they can see new features and relations among elements that they have drawn, ones not intended in the original sketch. These unintended discoveries promote new ideas and refine current ones” (Buxton 117). Therefore if this stage helps the designer “reperceive” (Buxton 117) their intentions, can it do the same for the user; help them reperceive their relationship with the medium, the designers intentions, and then their creative intentions for the design?

I think the sketch is an important moment before the design becomes a finished product, because it is at this time, “in the product pipeline when one can actually afford to play, explore, learn, and really try and gain a deep understanding of the undertaking” (Buxton 139). But again, the sketch must move towards a finished product; it must adhere to a common language that the user can understand. The design cannot remain in the obscurity of the sketch stage, because it might be completely inaccessible to the user. So through my own projects I want to attempt to discover how parts of the sketching experience can be communicated to the user, in order to encourage creativity and expose my own assumptions. I want to discover how to allow for holes and ambiguities that the user can fill-in and solve on their own, creating something better from my design, something that I myself could not see. I think all this helps lead to a better understanding of the design, because “understanding the rationale for a decision is… a wonderful remedy to being a prisoner of your own decisions” (Buxton 149).

Technology as Pharmakon

In Nancy Kaplan’s piece “Ideology, Technology and the Future of Writing Instruction” she address a reoccurring problem that I keeps coming up for me: how does one use technology (or language), and not become wrapped up in the power structures that it has been perpetuating and reinforcing for over thousands of years? How does one do anything? How is one able to move outside the limitations in order to bring in new insights? Although she states the problem clearly, I think it has far reaching implications: “Tools or technologies enable, but also disable: they expand conceptions of what exists and what is possible, but also contract the field of potentialities. Tools or technologies validate some practices as natural and right, but proscribe others as deviant, impractical, or simply unthinkable” (Kaplan 14). 

Therefore I think an interesting entry point into the implications of technology can be found in Kaplan’s discussion of print technology: “its formations and empowerments seem simply natural and right” (Kaplan 14-5). However, I think that print technology is not the only technology guilty of this, and books are not the only medium that are guilty of this. I think films and websites can be just as limiting to their viewers. I think part of the problem, at least on a very basic level of language, is that one has to believe in the language in order to use it. Therefore, it has to be naturalized and normalized. So it is not only a problem with a medium or a technology that transmits meaning, but it is also there in language itself. So this problem comes up all over the place. I think that this relates to what Shirky addresses in the problem of professionalizing information, when “professionals become gatekeepers” who enforce norms, and then “equate provisional solutions to particular problems with deep truths about the world” (Shirky 59).

Therefore, I think that these problems can occur in any communication where the artists/writer/speaker/rhetorician has attempted to close off interaction by ignoring Kolko’s concept of a dialogue over time between user, product, and designer (or in the rhetorical situation: audience, text, and author). I think this view is a way out of the narrow debate between technological determinism and social determinism that Kaplan addresses at the end of her piece. I think the problem is deeper than this debate; it has to do with how we view ourselves and how we communicate meaning of any kind. So I think this is important for me to keep in mind when dealing with creative projects in the course, such as the cyber poem and the video. How do I offer entry points for the viewer? How do I allow them the ability to see how I am constructing meaning? How am I allowing for a creative experience that doesn’t simply end with my own creation? How do I create a sustained conversation with my work?

Hypermediacy

A reoccurring motive in my writing and my art is to show how a particular medium is working. Therefore, I find Bolter and Grusin’s terms “immediacy” and “hypermediacy,” in their work Remediation, very useful. I am particularly interested in hypermediacy which, “makes us aware of the medium or media (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (Bolter and Grusin 35). An example that I found useful was that of seeing the desktop interface as hypermediacy, where, “unlike perspective painting or three-dimensional computer graphic, this windowed interface does not attempt to unify the space around any one point of view… and unlike the painting or computer graphic, the desktop interface dose not erase itself” (Bolter and Grusin 33). 

On some level I see immediacy as a necessary component in understanding the world around us: we need to be allowed entry into an image or word in order to make sense of them. So we need the oscillation between “transparency and opacity” (Bolter and Grusin 33). That said, I think that the transparency (and therefore the immediacy) in representations that take advantage of “linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity” have had a much more powerful influence on our perceptions of reality, than hypermediacy has. Therefore, in my opinion the oscillation between transparency and opacity does not occur enough. In a very obvious example, I feel like companies spend much more time and money getting audiences to watch films, as opposed to getting audiences to understand films.

Taking all of this into consideration, I hope to apply these concerns to my cyber poem. Although I am not sure exactly how or what I am going to do, I know I want to work within the realm of hypermediacy in some way. I want to bring out how the medium I am using is relating to what I am saying, in order to educate my audience not just on what I am saying, but on how I am saying it. This way the audience can apply these findings to other instances where the medium is used, even if the content of what others have to say is different. In this way I want to provide them with an entry point into, not just understanding what I want them to understand, but understanding their world in a way that I will not be able to anticipate.  In this way I will hopefully try to bring in the aspects of a good user experience as described by Kolko; being mindful that situations change over time.

As Much as I Admire What Jenkins is Trying to Do...

Is Convergence Culture a self-help book for marketing? My irritations with Jenkins’ book were really brought in this week’s readings. The main problem I have is that fact that he takes something like “advertising” as a given, as a necessary component to entertainment. It is from this foundation that he attempts to merge “cultural studies” and “the new marketing discourse” (Jenkins 62). Why do we need to merge the two? Who does this benefit more, cultural studies, or the new marketing discourse? The other authors we have read for this class, deal with Industry, yet acknowledge that business as usual is problematic. This does not come up enough in this week’s readings.

I don’t care if something is considered a “‘lovemark’” or a “traditional ‘brand’” (Jenkins 70). If I wanted to, I could come up with terms like these (probably better ones), but it wouldn’t help us understand our situation any better. This is one of the many instances where Jenkins uncritically recycles terms and drops them haphazardly in his book. Throughout the reading I felt like I was wandering around in Jenkins’ web of corporate-marketing-jargon. Yes it is important, if not essential to understand what is going on in Industry so that we (academics) can work in it, and deal with it in a critical manner. However, Jenkins is asking too much, without providing any benefits for those of us outside (at the moment) of Industry.

Jenkins’ “paradox” only provides us with a false dichotomy: “to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes commodified” (Jenkins 62). However, there is a very simple way out of this: if one views the networks as problematic, they will stop wanting to be desired by them, and therefore their tastes will not be commodified. Why do we need networks to make meaning for us? If we are going to attempt to create good user experiences, I think we shouldn’t be limited to Jenkins’ narrow constraints. If users are repeatedly telling us that their lawn mower, “Is not working,” why would we ask them if putting a bow on it would change their mind?  

Maybe the fact that people are purchasing TiVos (Jenkins 66) and changing the channel during commercials, isn’t that the commercials are poorly done (how can they be when so much time and money goes into making them?) but that PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE ADVERTISING! Why isn’t Jenkins allowing us to arrive at this conclusion? The idea of a world without advertising is NOT radical. The fact that people think it IS radical, is itself a very telling sign. As Tim Wu finds in his work The Master Switch, there is no “natural” link between advertising and entertainment.  Although advertising has been a popular practice in our RECNET past (how long have humans lived without it?), it does not mean it is inevitable. There were certain instances (corporate entities sleeping with the government) in the past that made advertising, entertainment, and new technologies come together. The fact that we now see people wanting to separate them for good, is in no way strange: there were reasons/people/new technologies that made the two come together, and there will be reasons/people/new technologies that will attempt to break the two apart.