It is my feeling that interface design theorists will increasingly follow this same path. The user of an interface is not a generic entity. Experience, aptitude, age, gender, operating system, culture, sensibility, interests, moods...the list of potential factors which could influence or bias response to an interface are huge. To isolate any one variable in a quantifiable valid experimental protocol ultimately involves stripping an interface down to an extremely simplistic representation. This reduction risks eradicating the living quality of an artwork. The reader may be faced with a situation that is formally rigorous yet aesthetically sterile. For this reason, I have chosen to take the notion of 'art-research' literally: art-research provokes irreducible qualitative responses on an individual basis that have validity as research results even if not intended by the artist or explicitly elucidated in any theoretical framing text.
Digital poetry art-works themselves create complex responses that emerge from the confluence of many features. I am not suggesting that quantifiable analysis is impossible, merely that it risks eviscerating the subtle essence of aesthetic experience; it would necessitate protracted and careful work which is beyond my scope as a solitary practitioner.
Multiple complex reader-specific interpretive analysis opens pathways to understanding the idiosyncratic effect of digital poetics. In this analysis, the confluence of variables is too complex to reduce without harming or destroying the actuality of the work. This form of analysis is generalist and seeks to understand through practice and design iteration how art can be made that has an effect locally on me, the artist. It is assumed that work that resonates and 'works' intuitively and visually for one being will invariably have some sort of audience (how ever marginal that might be). In this way, I cannot argue for any generalizable conclusions, but the ability to deal with complex multimedia interfaces is left open.
Labels: design, reading, response gui
[+/-] Poetry is the ancestor of design science. Language is a technology. It converts sound and symbol into informational machines. Poetics is a design science that developed on the technology of language as a set of rules and 'best practice' regulations designed to increase the informational capacity of the technology. Rhythm, rhyme, beats, metre, and other design rules established by poetry operate as guides for writers, the technicians and operators of language.
The relationship between poetics and design science can be traced by considering parallels in their definitions. Design science in modern discourse refers to generalizable rules that lead to superior design; it also refers to the application of scientific principles to the design of technological artifacts. Poetics for millennium has been a terrain of schools, cabals, and styles each espousing specific principles which contribute to superior poetry; poetics is also the systematic study of the affective impact of crafted language (both sound and word) on the human mind. Each discipline is a set of rules that converge on a practice.
In the 3rd century BC, Aristotle wrote his 'Poetics'. It was an attempt to formulate and understand the principles underlying concise literary communication. It is a document of approximately 10,000 words, truncated by intervening millenniums. George Whalley, a contemporary translator of Aristotle, emphasizes the etymological roots of the word poetics which supports an argument for considering it a design science:
"Greek is capable of providing a wide range of cognate words on a single root: this allows for great variety of self-expository compounds, and also adds to the range of participial nouns which by altering their terminations can refer the root to a person, a thing, a product, a process, an intention even. Poiein, prattein aran, and mimeisthai are crucial instances in the Poetics. From poiein (to do or make) we have poiema (a thing made roughly our 'poem'); poietes (a maker roughly our 'poet' but poietria is not poetry but a poetess); poiesis (the process or activity of making only very roughly our 'poetry', and unhappily the eighteenth century fumbled the ball in allowing 'poesy' to become an elegant variant of 'poetry' when we badly needed a word for poiesis). From the noun poiesis, the adjective poietikos is regularly formed (to do with making, capable of making); and, since we have allowed the word 'poetic' to become merely the adjective of 'poet' and 'poetry', I should like to be able to use both the 'poetic' (in our sense) and 'poietic' (in the Greek sense)."
[Whalley, George(CM). Aristotle's Poetics. Montreal, PQ, CAN: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997. p 11.]
At its root, poetics is concerned with making, more specifically, 'to do with making'. Design is the science concerned with making.
Poetry is the ancestor of design science.
"In 1965 [Buckminster] Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris. This was (in his own words) devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity."[wikipedia ]
Computational poetry exists at the interstice of poetics and design science, concerned with crafting technological artifacts (language, interface, concepts, affective energy) for the benefit of humanity.
Labels: design, language, poetry, science, technology
[+/-] Poetry is the ancestor of physics. [a few notes on an intriguing video about creative thinking....]
Murray Gell-Mann, renowned particle physicist, in a Google Tech Talk on March 14, 2007 in reference to his naming of the 'quark' particle: "People are always asking me why I chose that name? If you think about the sound, it's an obvious name for a fundamental constituent of atomic nuclei."
Poetry, and in particular transcendental or mystical poetry, is a research domain that embraced the relativity of time and space before Einstein.
"All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world."
Dhammapada
If universes are considered as clusters of orbital particles in intricate motion, arising and dissipating within an interconnected domain, then William Blake's infamous "universe in a grain of sand" suggests potential insight into the dark matter which supposedly composes 96% of our universe; if universes are in grains of sand,then they could easily be in the photinos that Gel-Mann used to satirically say to his astronomer colleagues comprised the majority of what they were studying.
Gel-Mann attributes Einstein's capacity to think of the Brownian motion equation (for which he won the Nobel Prize) as being due to his taking of the concept of molecules seriously. Simply put Brownian motion is randomized molecular collisions influencing the motion of particles larger than themselves. While this doesn't stretch as deep as William Blake's ideas, it is hoped in the poetry community that particle physicists will one day team up with astronomers to initiate a search for intelligent terrestrial intelligence using particle accelerators. Some poets, of course, concerned over the potential ethical implications of colliding universe's together at extreme velocity have already threatened to boycott the proceedings.
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A few other things Murray Gell-Mann said:
"We mustn't get the idea that any challenge to scientific orthodoxy is right."
"Keep asking: Why not? But realize there is generally a very good reason why not?"
"I believe that problem formulation is more difficult....What are the real requirements of this solution?" Only in school are problems formulated for you.
Book mentioned
James L Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas (Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Pub, 2001).
Labels: design, language, poetry, science, technology
[+/-] The problem of clarity The problem of clarity is how to simply represent complexity, without sacrificing ambiguity and detail. Some theorists in the HCI design community are exploring the potential for open interpretive systems which don't delineate a single specific purpose to interfaces. Influenced by the influx of hybrid designs emerging between art-science and social networks, it is now feasible to suggest that definitions, uses, and interpretations unanticipated by the designer will enter most interfaces.
In their 2006 proceedings paper, "Staying Open to Interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation" Sengers and Gaver state: "We document how design and evaluation strategies shift when we abandon the presumption that a specific, authoritative interpretation of the systems we build is necessary, possible or desirable."
This shift in the modality of the landscape seems analogous to Empson's modernist critical theory which foregrounded ambiguity as an inevitable aspect of all exegesis. Increased theoretical flexibility has implications for design practice: allowing intuitive pathways to emerge which might not be exactly specified within a UML, or simply free-climbing without any UML as most independent autonomous artist-designers do. Interfaces in this open-process emerge as cumulative accretions of ideas; functionalities aggregated around necessities that arise during the process. Designing in this way seems to my mind more organic, similar to the way we navigate corridors or landscapes, perhaps with a goal in mind, but perhaps simply meandering, coding for the sheer exploratory revelation of it.
Sengers, P. and Gaver, B. 2006. Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Designing interactive Systems (University Park, PA, USA, June 26 - 28, 2006). DIS '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 99-108.
Labels: ambiguity, design, hci, meaning
