Tag: interaction design

Playing with emergence is like gardening

It’s been a while since I fin­ished read­ing Steven Berlin John­son’s Emer­gence. I picked up the book because ever since I start­ed think­ing about what IxDs can learn from game design, the con­cept of emer­gence kept pop­ping up.

Johnson’s book is a pleas­ant read, an easy-going intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject. I start­ed and fin­ished it over the course of a week­end. There were a few pas­sages I marked as I went a long, and I’d like to quote them here and com­ment on them. In order, they are about:

  1. Prin­ci­ples that are required for emer­gence to happen
  2. How learn­ing can be unconscious
  3. Unique skills of game players
  4. Gar­den­ing as a metaphor for using (and mak­ing) emer­gent systems

A cheat sheet

Let’s start with the prin­ci­ples.1

“If you’re build­ing a sys­tem designed to learn from the ground lev­el, a sys­tem where macroin­tel­li­gence and adapt­abil­i­ty derive from local knowl­edge, there are five fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples you need to follow.”

These prin­ci­ples togeth­er form a use­ful crib sheet for design­ers work­ing on social soft­ware, MMOGs, etc. I’ll sum­marise each of Johnson’s prin­ci­ples here.

“More is different.”

You need to have a size­able amount of low-lev­el ele­ments inter­act­ing to get pat­terns emerg­ing. Also, there is a dif­fer­ence between the behav­iour you will observe on the microlev­el, and on the macrolev­el. You need to be aware of both.

“Igno­rance is useful.”

The sim­ple ele­ments don’t have to be aware of the high­er-lev­el order. In fact, it’s best if they aren’t. Oth­er­wise nasty feed­back-loops might come into being.

“Encour­age ran­dom encounters.”

You need chance hap­pen­ings for the sys­tem to be able to learn and adapt.2

“Look for pat­terns in the signs.”

Sim­ply put, the basic ele­ments can have a sim­ple vocab­u­lary, but should be able to recog­nise pat­terns. So although you might be work­ing with only one sig­nal, things such as fre­quen­cy and inten­si­ty should be used to make a range of meanings.

“Pay atten­tion to your neighbours.”

There must be as much inter­ac­tion between the com­po­nents as pos­si­ble. They should be made con­stant­ly aware of each other.

Now with these prin­ci­ples in mind look at sys­tems that suc­cess­ful­ly lever­age col­lec­tive intel­li­gence. Look at Flickr for instance. They are all present.

Chicken pox

I liked the fol­low­ing pas­sage because it seems to offer a nice metaphor for what I think is the unique kind of learn­ing that hap­pens while play­ing. In a way, games and toys are like chick­en pox.3

“[…] learn­ing is not always con­tin­gent on con­scious­ness. […] Most of us have devel­oped immu­ni­ty to the vari­cel­la-zoster virus—also known as chick­en pox—based on our expo­sure to it ear­ly in child­hood. The immu­ni­ty is a learn­ing process: the anti­bod­ies of our immune sys­tem learn to neu­tral­ize the anti­gens of the virus, and they remem­ber those neu­tral­iza­tion strate­gies for the rest of our lives. […] Those anti­bod­ies func­tion as a “recog­ni­tion sys­tem,” in Ger­ald Edelman’s phrase, suc­cess­ful­ly attack­ing the virus and stor­ing the infor­ma­tion about it, then recall­ing that infor­ma­tion the next time the virus comes across the radar. […] the recog­ni­tion unfolds pure­ly on a cel­lu­lar lev­el: we are not aware of the vari­cel­la-zoster virus in any sense of the word, […] The body learns with­out con­scious­ness, and so do cities, because learn­ing is not just about being aware of infor­ma­tion; it’s also about stor­ing infor­ma­tion and know­ing where to find it. […] It’s about alter­ing a system’s behav­iour in response to those pat­terns in ways that make the sys­tem more suc­cess­ful at what­ev­er goal it’s pur­su­ing. The sys­tem need not be con­scious to be capa­ble of that kind of learn­ing.”

Empha­sis on the last sen­tence mine, by the way.

Patience

John­son writes about his impres­sion of chil­dren play­ing video games:4

“[…] they are more tol­er­ant of being out of con­trol, more tol­er­ant of that explorato­ry phase where the rules don’t all make sense, and where few goals have been clear­ly defined.”

This atti­tude is very valu­able in today’s increas­ing­ly com­plex world. It should be fos­tered and lever­aged in areas besides gam­ing too, IMHO. This point was at the core of my Play­ing With Com­plex­i­ty talk.

Gardening

“Inter­act­ing with emer­gent soft­ware is already more like grow­ing a gar­den than dri­ving a car or read­ing a book.”5

Yet, we still tend to approach the design of sys­tems like this from a tra­di­tion of mak­ing tools (cars) or media (books). I not only believe that the use of sys­tems like this is like gar­den­ing, but also their cre­ation. Per­haps they lie in each other’s exten­sion, are part of one nev­er-end­ing cycle? In any case, when design­ing com­plex sys­tems, you need to work with it “live”. Plant some seeds, observe, prune, weed, plant some more, etc. 

I am going to keep a gar­den (on my bal­cony). I’m pret­ty sure that will teach me more about inter­ac­tion design than build­ing cars or writ­ing books.

  1. The fol­low­ing quotes are tak­en from pages 77–79. [↩]
  2. This reminds me of Nas­sim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, where­in he writes about max­imis­ing your chance of hav­ing serendip­i­tous encoun­ters. [↩]
  3. Tak­en from pages 103–104. [↩]
  4. Page 177. [↩]
  5. Page 207. [↩]

A day of playing around with multi-touch and RoomWare

Last Sat­ur­day I attend­ed a RoomWare work­shop. The peo­ple of Can­Touch were there too, and brought one of their pro­to­type mul­ti-touch tables. The aim for the day was to come up with appli­ca­tions of RoomWare (open source soft­ware that can sense pres­ence of peo­ple in spaces) and mul­ti-touch. I attend­ed pri­mar­i­ly because it was a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to spend a day mess­ing around with a table.

Atten­dance was mul­ti­fac­eted, so while pro­gram­mers were putting togeth­er a proof-of-con­cept, design­ers (such as Alexan­der Zeh, James Burke and I) came up with con­cepts for new inter­ac­tions. The proof-of-con­cept was up and run­ning at the end of then day: The table could sense who was in the room and dis­play his or her Flickr pho­tos, which you could then move around, scale, rotate, etc. in the typ­i­cal mul­ti-touch fashion.

The con­cepts design­ers came up with main­ly focused on pulling in Last.fm data (again using RoomWare’s sens­ing capa­bil­i­ties) and dis­play­ing it for group-based explo­ration. Here’s a sto­ry­board I quick­ly whipped up of one such application:

RoomWare + CanTouch + Last.fm

The sto­ry­board shows how you can add your­self from a list of peo­ple present in the room. Your top artists flock around you. When more peo­ple are added, lines are drawn between you. The thick­ness of the line rep­re­sents how sim­i­lar your tastes are, accord­ing to Last.fm’s taste-o-meter. Also, shared top artists flock in such a way as to be clos­est to all relat­ed peo­ple. Final­ly, artists can be act­ed on to lis­ten to music.

When I was sketch­ing this, it became appar­ent that ori­en­ta­tion of ele­ments should fol­low very dif­fer­ent rules from reg­u­lar screens. I chose to sketch things so that they all point out­wards, with the mid­dle of the table as the ori­en­ta­tion point.

By spend­ing a day immersed in mul­ti-touch stuff, some inter­est­ing design chal­lenges became apparent:

  • With table­top sur­faces, stuff is clos­er or fur­ther away phys­i­cal­ly. Prox­im­i­ty of ele­ments can be unin­ten­tion­al­ly inter­pret­ed as say­ing some­thing about aspects such as impor­tance, rel­e­vance, etc. Design­ers need to be even more aware of place­ment than before, plus con­ven­tions from ver­ti­cal­ly ori­ent­ed screens no longer apply. Top-of-screen becomes fur­thest away and there­fore least promi­nent in stead of most important. 
  • With group-based inter­ac­tions, it becomes tricky to deter­mine who to address and where to address him or her. Some­times the sys­tem should address the group as a whole. When 5 peo­ple are stand­ing around a table, text-based inter­faces become prob­lem­at­ic since what is leg­i­ble from one end of the table is unin­tel­li­gi­ble from the oth­er. New con­ven­tions need to be devel­oped for this as well. Alexan­der and I phi­los­o­phized about plac­ing text along cir­cles and ani­mat­ing them so that they cir­cu­late around the table, for instance.
  • Besides these, many oth­er inter­face chal­lenges present them­selves. One cru­cial piece of infor­ma­tion for solv­ing many of these is know­ing where peo­ple are locat­ed around the table. This issue can be approached from dif­fer­ent angles. By incor­po­rat­ing sen­sors in the table, detec­tion may be auto­mat­ed and inter­faces could me made to adapt auto­mat­i­cal­ly. This is the tech­no-cen­tric angle. I am not con­vinced this is the way to go, because it dimin­ish­es people’s con­trol over the expe­ri­ence. I would pre­fer to make the inter­face itself adjustable in nat­ur­al ways, so that peo­ple can mold the rep­re­sen­ta­tion to suit their con­text. With sit­u­at­ed tech­nolo­gies like this, auto-mag­i­cal adap­ta­tion is an “AI-hard” prob­lem, and the price of fail­ure is a severe­ly degrad­ed user expe­ri­ence from which peo­ple can­not recov­er because the sys­tem won’t let them.

All in all the work­shop was a won­der­ful day of tin­ker­ing with like-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als from rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent back­grounds. As a design­er, I think this is one of the best way be involved with open source projects. On a day like this, tech­nol­o­gists can be exposed to new inter­ac­tion con­cepts while they are hack­ing away. At the same time design­ers get that rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to play around with tech­nol­o­gy as it is shaped. Quick-and-dirty sketch­es like the ones Alexan­der and I came up with are def­i­nite­ly the way to com­mu­ni­cate ideas. The goal is to sug­gest, not to describe, after all. Tech­nol­o­gists should feel free to elab­o­rate and build on what design­ers come up with and vice-ver­sa. I am curi­ous to see which parts of what we came up with will find their way into future RoomWare projects.

Embodied interaction and improvised information displays

Recent­ly a good friend of mine became a dad. It made me feel real­ly old, but it also lead to an encounter with an impro­vised infor­ma­tion dis­play, which I’d like to tell you about, because it illus­trates some of the things I have learnt from read­ing Paul Dourish’s Where the Action Is.

My friend’s son was born a bit too ear­ly, so we went to see him (the son) at the neona­tol­ogy ward of the local hos­pi­tal. It was there that I saw this white­board with stick­ers, writ­ing and the famil­iar mag­nets on it:

Tracing of a photo of an improvised information display in a hospital neonatology ward consisting of a whiteboard, magnets, stickers and writing

(I decid­ed to trace the pho­to I took of it and replace the names with fic­tion­al ones.)

Now, at first I only noticed parts of what was there. I saw the patient names on the left-hand side, and recog­nised the name of my friend’s son. I also noticed that on the right-hand side, the names of all the nurs­es on duty were there. I did not think much more of it.

Before leav­ing, my friend walked up to the white­board and said some­thing along the lines of “yes, this is cor­rect,” and touched one of the green mag­nets that was in the mid­dle of the board as if to con­firm this. It was then that my curios­i­ty was piqued, and I asked my friend to explain what the board meant.

It turns out it was a won­der­ful thing, some­thing I’ll call an impro­vised infor­ma­tion dis­play, for lack of a bet­ter word. What I had not seen the first time around, but were point­ed out by my friend:

  1. There is a time axis along the top of the board. By plac­ing a green mag­net at the height of a child’s name some­where along this axis, par­ents can let the staff know when they intend to vis­it. This is impor­tant for many rea­sons. One being that it helps the nurs­es time the moment a child will be fed so that the par­ents can be present. So in the exam­ple, the par­ents of ‘Fara­mond’ will be vis­it­ing around 21:00 hours.
  2. There are dif­fer­ent colour mag­nets behind the children’s names, and behind the nurs­es’ names. This shows which nurse is respon­si­ble for which child. For instance, ‘Char­lotte’ is in charge of ‘Once’s’ care.

Dourish’s book has influ­enced the way I look at things like this. It has made me more aware of their unique val­ue. Where­as before I would think that some­thing like this could be done bet­ter by a prop­er design­er, with dig­i­tal means, I now think the grasp-able aspect of such a dis­play is vital. I also now believe that the promi­nent role of users in shap­ing the dis­play is vital. Dour­ish writes:1

“What embod­ied inter­ac­tion adds to exist­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al prac­tice is the under­stand­ing that rep­re­sen­ta­tions are also them­selves arte­facts. Not only do they allow users to “reach through” and act upon the enti­ty being rep­re­sent­ed, but they can also them­selves be act­ed upon—picked up, exam­ined, manip­u­lat­ed and rearranged.”

Par­ents and nurs­es reach through the dis­play I saw in the neona­tol­ogy ward to act upon the infor­ma­tion about vis­it­ing times and respon­si­bil­i­ty of care. But they also act on the com­po­nents of the dis­play itself to manip­u­late the mean­ing they have. 

In fact, this is how the dis­play was con­struct­ed in the first place! The role of the design­er in this dis­play was lim­it­ed to the com­po­nents them­selves. Design­ers were respon­si­ble for the affor­dances of the white­board, the mag­nets, the erasable mark­ers and stick­ers, which enabled users to pro­duce the infor­ma­tion dis­play they need­ed. In the words of Dour­ish:2

“Prin­ci­ple: Users, not design­ers, cre­ate and com­mu­ni­cate meaning.”

“Prin­ci­ple: Users, not design­ers, man­age coupling.”

It is the nurs­es and the par­ents and the social prac­tice they togeth­er con­sti­tute that gives rise to the mean­ing of the dis­play. What the board means is obvi­ous to them, because they have ‘work’ that needs to be done togeth­er. It was not obvi­ous to me, because I am not part of that group. It was not a design­er that decid­ed what the mean­ing of the dif­fer­ent colours of the mag­nets were. It was a group of users who cou­pled mean­ing to the com­po­nents they had avail­able to them.

It might be a rad­i­cal exam­ple, but I think this does demon­strate what peo­ple can do if the right com­po­nents are made avail­able to them, and they are allowed to make their own mean­ing with them. I think it is impor­tant for design­ers to realise this, and allow for this kind of manip­u­la­tion of the prod­ucts and ser­vices they shape. Clear­ly, Dourish’s notion of embod­ied inter­ac­tion is a key to design­ing for adap­ta­tion and hack­ing. When it comes to this, today’s white­boards, mag­nets and mark­ers seem to do a bet­ter job than many of our cur­rent dig­i­tal technologies.

  1. Page 169 [↩]
  2. Page 170 [↩]

Playing With Complexity — slides and notes for my NLGD Festival of Games talk

When the NLGD Foun­da­tion invit­ed me to speak at their anu­al Fes­ti­val of Games I asked them what they would like me to dis­cuss. “Any­thing you like,” was what they said, essen­tial­ly. I decid­ed to sub­mit an abstract deal­ing with data visu­al­iza­tion. I had been pay­ing more and more atten­tion to this field, but was unsuc­cess­ful in relat­ing it the oth­er themes run­ning through my work, most notably play. So I thought I’d force myself to tack­le this issue by promis­ing to speak about it. Often a good strat­e­gy, I’ve found. If it worked out this time I leave for you to judge.

In brief, in the pre­sen­ta­tion I argue two things: one — that the more sophis­ti­cat­ed appli­ca­tions of inter­ac­tive data visu­al­iza­tion resem­ble games and toys in many ways, and two — that game design can con­tribute to the solu­tions to sev­er­al design issues I have detect­ed in the field of data visualization.

Below are the notes for the talk, slight­ly edit­ed, and with ref­er­ences includ­ed. The full deck of slides, which includes cred­its for all the images used, is up on SlideShare.

Hel­lo every­one, my name is Kars Alfrink. I am a Dutch inter­ac­tion design­er and I work free­lance. At the moment I work in Copen­hagen, but pret­ty soon I will be back here in Utrecht, my love­ly hometown. 

In my work I focus on three areas: mobil­i­ty, social inter­ac­tions, and play. Here is an exam­ple of my work: These are sto­ry­boards that explore pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions of mul­ti­touch tech­nol­o­gy in a gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty. Using these tech­nolo­gies I tried to com­pen­sate for the neg­a­tive effects a gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty has on the build-up of social cap­i­tal. I also tried to bal­ance ‘being-in-the-screen’ with ‘being-in-the-world’ — mul­ti­touch tech­nolo­gies tend to be very atten­tion-absorb­ing, but in built envi­ron­ments this is often not desir­able.1

I am not going to talk about mul­ti­touch though. Today’s top­ic is data visu­al­iza­tion and what oppor­tu­ni­ties there are for game design­ers in that field. My talk is rough­ly divid­ed in three parts. First, I will briefly describe what I think data visu­al­iza­tion is. Next, I will look at some appli­ca­tions beyond the very obvi­ous. Third and last, I will dis­cuss some design issues involved with data visu­al­iza­tion. For each of these issues, I will show how game design can contribute.

Right, let’s get started.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Play­ing With Com­plex­i­ty — slides and notes for my NLGD Fes­ti­val of Games talk

  1. For more back­ground on this project please see this old­er blog post. More exam­ples of my recent work can be found in my port­fo­lio. [↩]

Slides and summary for ‘More Than Useful’

Update: The video and slides are now avail­able on the con­fer­ence site.

The con­fer­ence From Busi­ness to But­tons 2008 aimed to bring togeth­er the worlds of busi­ness and inter­ac­tion design. I was there to share my thoughts on the applic­a­bil­i­ty of game design con­cepts to inter­ac­tion design. You’ll find my slides and a sum­ma­ry of my argu­ment below. 

I real­ly enjoyed attend­ing this con­fer­ence. I met a bunch of new and inter­est­ing peo­ple and got to hang out with some ‘old’ friends. Many thanks to InUse for invit­ing me.

Diagram summarizing my FBTB 2008 talk

The top­ic is pret­ty broad so I decid­ed to nar­row things down to a class of prod­uct that is oth­er-than-every­day — mean­ing both wide and deep in scope. Using Norman’s The Design of Every­day Things as a start­ing point, I want­ed to show that these prod­ucts require a high lev­el of explorabil­i­ty that is remark­ably sim­i­lar to play. After briefly exam­in­ing the phe­nom­e­non of play itself I moved on to show appli­ca­tions of this under­stand­ing to two types of prod­uct: cus­tomiz­able & per­son­al­iz­able ones, and adap­tive ones. 

For the for­mer, I dis­cussed how game design frame­works such as MDA can help with sculpt­ing the para­me­ter space, using ‘expe­ri­ence’ as the start­ing point. I also looked at how games sup­port play­ers in shar­ing sto­ries and spec­u­lat­ed about ways this can be trans­lat­ed to both dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal products. 

For the lat­ter — adap­tive prod­ucts — I focussed on the ways in which they induce flow and how they can rec­om­mend stuff to peo­ple. With adap­ta­tion, design­ers need to for­mu­late rules. This can be done using tech­niques from game design, such as Daniel Cook’s skill chains. Suc­cess­ful rules-based design can only hap­pen in an iter­a­tive envi­ron­ment using lots of sketching. 

The pre­sen­ta­tion was framed by a slight­ly philo­soph­i­cal look at how cer­tain games sub­lim­i­nal­ly acti­vate cog­ni­tive process­es and could thus be used to allow for new insights. I used Break­out and Por­tal as exam­ples of this. I am con­vinced there is an emerg­ing field of play­ful prod­ucts that inter­ac­tion design­ers should get involved with.

Sources ref­er­enced in this pre­sen­ta­tion:1

As usu­al, many thanks to all the Flickr pho­tog­ra­phers who’ve shared their images under a CC license. I’ve linked to the orig­i­nals from the slides. Any image not linked to is prob­a­bly mine.

  1. Most of these are offline books or papers, those that aren’t have been hyper­linked to their source. [↩]

Urban procedural rhetorics — transcript of my TWAB 2008 talk

This is a tran­script of my pre­sen­ta­tion at The Web and Beyond 2008: Mobil­i­ty in Ams­ter­dam on 22 May. Since the major­i­ty of pay­ing atten­dees were local I pre­sent­ed in Dutch. How­ev­er, Eng­lish appears to be the lin­gua fran­ca of the inter­net, so here I offer a trans­la­tion. I have uploaded the slides to SlideShare and hope to be able to share a video record­ing of the whole thing soon.

Update: I have uploaded a video of the pre­sen­ta­tion to Vimeo. Many thanks to Almar van der Krogt for record­ing this.

In 1966 a num­ber of mem­bers of Pro­vo took to the streets of Ams­ter­dam car­ry­ing blank ban­ners. Pro­vo was a non­vi­o­lent anar­chist move­ment. They pri­mar­i­ly occu­pied them­selves with pro­vok­ing the author­i­ties in a “ludic” man­ner. Noth­ing was writ­ten on their ban­ners because the may­or of Ams­ter­dam had banned the slo­gans “free­dom of speech”, “democ­ra­cy” and “right to demon­strate”. Regard­less, the mem­bers were arrest­ed by police, show­ing that the author­i­ties did not respect their right to demon­strate.1

Good after­noon every­one, my name is Kars Alfrink, I’m a free­lance inter­ac­tion design­er. Today I’d like to talk about play in pub­lic space. I believe that with the arrival of ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing in the city new forms of play will be made pos­si­ble. The tech­nolo­gies we shape will be used for play wether we want to or not. As William Gib­son writes in Burn­ing Chrome:

“…the street finds its own uses for things”

For exam­ple: Skate­board­ing as we now know it — with its empha­sis on aer­i­al acro­bat­ics — start­ed in emp­ty pools like this one. That was done with­out per­mis­sion, of course…

Only lat­er half-pipes, ramps, verts (which by the way is derived from ‘ver­ti­cal’) and skateparks arrived — areas where skate­board­ing is tol­er­at­ed. Skate­board­ing would not be what it is today with­out those first few emp­ty pools.2

Con­tin­ue read­ing Urban pro­ce­dur­al rhetorics — tran­script of my TWAB 2008 talk

  1. The web­site of Gram­schap con­tains a chronol­o­gy of the Pro­vo move­ment in Dutch. [↩]
  2. For a vivid account of the emer­gence of the ver­ti­cal style of skate­board­ing see the doc­u­men­tary film Dog­town and Z‑Boys. [↩]

Sketching the experience of toys

A frame from the Sketch-A-Move video

“Play is the high­est form of research.”

—Albert Ein­stein1

That’s what I always say when I’m play­ing games, too. 

I real­ly liked Bill Bux­ton’s book Sketch­ing User Expe­ri­ences. I like it because Bux­ton defends design as a legit­i­mate pro­fes­sion sep­a­rate from oth­er disciplines—such as engineering—while at the same time show­ing that design­ers (no mat­ter how bril­liant) can only suc­ceed in the right ecosys­tem. I also like the fact that he iden­ti­fies sketch­ing (in its many forms) as a defin­ing activ­i­ty of the design pro­fes­sion. The many exam­ples he shows are very inspiring.

One in par­tic­u­lar stood out for me, which is the project Sketch-A-Move by Anab Jain and Louise Klink­er done in 2004 at the RCA in Lon­don. The image above is tak­en from the video they cre­at­ed to illus­trate their con­cept. It’s about cars auto-mag­i­cal­ly dri­ving along tra­jec­to­ries that you draw on their roof. You can watch the video over at the book’s com­pan­ion web­site. It’s a very good exam­ple of visu­al­iz­ing an inter­ac­tive prod­uct in a very com­pelling way with­out actu­al­ly build­ing it. This was all faked, if you want to find out how, buy the book.2

The great thing about the video is not only does it illus­trate how the con­cept works, it also gives you a sense of what the expe­ri­ence of using it would be like. As Bux­ton writes:3

“You see, toys are not about toys. Toys are about play and the expe­ri­ence of fun that they help fos­ter. And that is what this video real­ly shows. That, and the pow­er of video to go beyond sim­ply doc­u­ment­ing a con­cept to com­mu­ni­cat­ing some­thing about expe­ri­ence in a very vis­cer­al way.”

Not only does it com­mu­ni­cate the fun you would have play­ing with it, I think this way of sketch­ing actu­al­ly helped the design­ers get a sense them­selves of wether what they had come up with was fun. You can tell they are actu­al­ly play­ing, being sur­prised by unex­pect­ed out­comes, etc.

The role of play in design is dis­cussed by Bux­ton as well, although he admits he need­ed to be prompt­ed by a friend of his: Alex Manu, a teacher at OCAD in Toron­to writes in an email to Bux­ton:4

“With­out play imag­i­na­tion dies.”

“Chal­lenges to imag­i­na­tion are the keys to cre­ativ­i­ty. The skill of retriev­ing imag­i­na­tion resides in the mas­tery of play. The ecol­o­gy of play is the ecol­o­gy of the pos­si­ble. Pos­si­bil­i­ty incu­bates creativity.”

Which Bux­ton rephras­es in one of his own per­son­al mantras:5

“These things are far too impor­tant to take seriously.”

All of which has made me real­ize that if I’m not hav­ing some sort of fun while design­ing, I’m doing some­thing wrong. It might be worth con­sid­er­ing switch­ing from one sketch­ing tech­nique to anoth­er. It might help me get a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the prob­lem, and yield new pos­si­ble solu­tions. Bux­ton’s book is a trea­sure trove of sketch­ing tech­niques. There is no excuse for being bored while design­ing anymore.

  1. Sketch­ing User Expe­ri­ences p.349 [↩]
  2. No, I’m not get­ting a com­mis­sion to say that. [↩]
  3. Ibid. 1, at 325 [↩]
  4. Ibid., at 263 [↩]
  5. Ibid. [↩]

Where social software should go next — Habitat’s lessons

MMOGs have not pro­gressed since 1990. Nei­ther has social software.

Well maybe a lit­tle, but not much. At least that’s what I’m lead to believe after read­ing anoth­er won­der­ful essay in The Game Design Read­er—a book I like to dip into once in a while to read what­ev­er catch­es my fancy.

In The Lessons of Lucas­film’s Habi­tat1 Messrs Farmer and Morn­ingstar share their expe­ri­ences build­ing pos­si­bly one of the first graph­i­cal MMOGs ever. The game’s front-end ran on a Com­modore 64 and looked some­thing like this:

Screenshot of Lucasfilm's Habitat

It’s strik­ing how many of the lessons summed up by the authors have not been (ful­ly) tak­en to heart by MMOG design­ers. Bitch­ing aside, their arti­cle offers as much use­ful advice to game design­ers as to design­ers of any piece of social soft­ware. Since this post has grown unex­pect­ed­ly long (again). I’ll sum them up here:

  • “The imple­men­ta­tion plat­form is rel­a­tive­ly unim­por­tant.” — on loose­ly cou­pling a world’s con­cep­tu­al mod­el and its representation
  • “Detailed cen­tral plan­ning is impos­si­ble; don’t even try.” — on relin­quish­ing con­trol as design­ers, co-design and evo­lu­tion­ary systems
  • “Work with­in the sys­tem.” — on facil­i­tat­ing world cre­ation by play­ers and mod­er­a­tion from with­in the world

Let’s look at each in more detail:

Loosely coupled

“The imple­men­ta­tion plat­form is rel­a­tive­ly unimportant.”

Mean­ing that how you describe the world and how you present it can or should be loose­ly cou­pled. The advan­tage of this is that with one world mod­el you can serve clients with a wide range of (graph­i­cal) capa­bil­i­ties and scale into the future with­out hav­ing to change mod­el. Their exam­ple is of a tree, which can be ren­dered to one user as a string of text: “There is a tree here.” And to anoth­er user as a rich high res­o­lu­tion 3D ani­mat­ed image accom­pa­nied by sound.

“And these two users might be look­ing at the same tree in the same place in the same world and talk­ing to each oth­er as they do so.”

When I read this I instant­ly thought of Raph Koster’s Meta­place and won­dered if the essay I was read­ing served as some sort of design guide­line for it. What I under­stood from Raph’s GDC 2008 pre­sen­ta­tion2 was that they are try­ing to achieve exact­ly this, by apply­ing the archi­tec­tur­al mod­el of the inter­net to the design of MMOGs.

Look­ing at social soft­ware in gen­er­al, how many exam­ples can you give of the cur­rent wave of social web apps that apply this prin­ci­ple? I’m remind­ed of Tom Coates’s Native to a Web of Data pre­sen­ta­tion—in which he argues that a ser­vice’s data should ide­al­ly be acces­si­ble through any num­ber of chan­nels.3

Sim­i­lar­ly, web 2.0 poster child Dopplr is designed to be “a beau­ti­ful part of the web”, “a fea­ture of a larg­er ser­vice, called the inter­net”.4 And they want to be every­where, adding a lit­tle bit of val­ue where it is most need­ed. Per­haps not exact­ly the same thing as what Farmer and Morn­ingstar are allud­ing to, but based on sim­i­lar principles.

As an aside, in MMOG land, there is one oth­er major con­cern with this:

“Mak­ing the sys­tem ful­ly dis­trib­uted […] requires solv­ing a num­ber of dif­fi­cult prob­lems. The most sig­nif­i­cant of these is the pre­ven­tion of cheating.”

Cheat­ing might be of less con­cern to social soft­ware than to games (although there are excep­tions, take Digg for exam­ple). For those inter­est­ed in more about this, Raph Koster recent­ly post­ed an elab­o­rate exam­i­na­tion of hack­ing and cheat­ing in MMOGs.

Control, co-design, evolution

Cheat­ing aside, there is more use­ful (albeit famil­iar) advice for social soft­ware design­ers in the piece. For instance on the need to hand over (part of) the con­trol over the sys­tem’s design to its users:

“Again and again we found that activ­i­ties based on often uncon­scious assump­tions about play­er behav­iour had com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed out­comes (when they were not sim­ply out­right failures). ”

They go on to say that they found it was more pro­duc­tive to work with the community:

“We could influ­ence things, we could set up inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tions, we could pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties for things to hap­pen, but we could not dic­tate the out­come. Social engi­neer­ing is, at best, an inex­act sci­ence […] we shift­ed into a style of oper­a­tions in which we let the play­ers them­selves dri­ve the direc­tion of the design.”

Again, famil­iar advice per­haps, but they describe in some detail how they actu­al­ly went about this, which makes for enlight­en­ing read­ing. That this prac­tice of co-design goes against ‘com­mon’ soft­ware devel­op­ment prac­tices is not left unad­dressed either:

“[…] the chal­lenge posed by large sys­tems are prompt­ing some researchers to ques­tion the cen­tral­ized, plan­ning dom­i­nat­ed atti­tude that we have crit­i­cized here, and to pro­pose alter­na­tive approach­es based on evo­lu­tion­ary and mar­ket prin­ci­ples. These prin­ci­ples appear applic­a­ble to com­plex sys­tems of all types […]”

(Empha­sis mine.) I am intrigued by this evo­lu­tion­ary mod­el of web devel­op­ment. In the abstract for Move­ment, Matt Webb writes:

“the Web in 2008 has some entire­ly new qual­i­ties: more than ever it’s an ecol­o­gy of sep­a­rate but high­ly inter­con­nect­ed ser­vices. Its fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive, rapid devel­op­ment means dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing inno­va­tions are quick­ly copied and spread. Atten­tion from users is scarce. The fittest web­sites sur­vive.”

(Again, empha­sis mine.) I think the chal­lenge that now lies before us is to not only as design­ers prac­tice co-design with our users, but to go one step fur­ther, and encode rules for autonomous evo­lu­tion into our sys­tems. These are the adap­tive sys­tems I’ve been blog­ging about recent­ly. An impor­tant note is that sys­tems can adapt to indi­vid­ual users, but also—in the case of social software—to aggre­gate behav­iour of user groups.5

This can be extend­ed to a world’s gov­er­nance. Here is one of the ideas I find most excit­ing in the con­text of social soft­ware, one I have seen very few exam­ples of so far. 

“[…] our view is that a vir­tu­al world need not be set up with a “default” gov­ern­ment, but can instead evolve as needed.”

I can­not think of one MMOG that is designed to allow for a mod­el of gov­er­nance to emerge from play­er inter­ac­tions. The best exam­ple I can think of from the world of social soft­ware is this arti­cle by Tom Coates at the Bar­be­lith wiki. Bar­be­lith is a some­what ‘old school’ online com­mu­ni­ty com­prised of mes­sage boards (remem­ber those?). In the piece (titled TriPo­lit­i­ca) he writes:

“Imag­ine a mes­sage board with three clear iden­ti­ties, colour-schemes and names. Each has a gener­ic set of basic ini­tial forums on a clear­ly defined range of sub­jects (say — Pol­i­tics / Sci­ence / Enter­tain­ment). Each forum starts with a cer­tain struc­ture — one Monar­chic, one Par­lia­men­tary Democ­ra­cy and one Dis­trib­uted Anar­chy. All the rules that it takes to run each com­mu­ni­ty have been suf­fi­cient­ly abstract­ed so that they can be turned on or off at will BY the com­mu­ni­ty con­cerned. More­over, the rules are self-reflex­ive — ie. the com­mu­ni­ty can also cre­ate struc­tures to gov­ern how those rules are changed. This would oper­ate by a bill-like struc­ture where an indi­vid­ual can pro­pose a new rule or a change to an exist­ing rule that then may or may not require one or more forms of rat­i­fi­ca­tion. There would be the abil­i­ty to cre­ate a rule gov­ern­ing who could pro­pose a new bill, how often and what areas it might be able to change or influence.”

He goes on to give exam­ples of how this would work—what user types you’d need and what actions would need to be avail­able to those users. I’m pret­ty sure this was nev­er imple­ment­ed at Bar­be­lith (which, by the way, is a fun com­mu­ni­ty to browse through if you’re into counter cul­tur­al geek­ery). Actu­al­ly, I’m pret­ty sure I know of no online space that has a sys­tem like this in place. Any inter­ac­tion design­ers out there who are will­ing to take up the gauntlet?

Creativity, moderation

“Work with­in the system.”

This is the final les­son offered in the essay I’d like to look at, one that is mul­ti­fac­eted. On the one hand, Messrs Farmer and Morn­ingstar pro­pose that world build­ing should be part of the sys­tem itself (and there­fore acces­si­ble to reg­u­lar players):

“One of the goals of a next gen­er­a­tion Habi­tat-like sys­tem ought to be to per­mit far greater cre­ative involve­ment by the par­tic­i­pants with­out requir­ing them to ascend to full-fledged guru-hood to do so.”

And, fur­ther on:

“This requires find­ing ways to rep­re­sent design and cre­ation of regions and objects as part of the under­ly­ing fantasy.”

I do not think a MMOG has achieved this in any mean­ing­ful sense so far. Sec­ond Life may offer world cre­ation tools to users, but they are far from acces­si­ble, and cer­tain­ly not part of the “under­ly­ing fan­ta­sy”. In web based social soft­ware, sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief is of less con­cern. It can be argued that Flickr for instance suc­cess­ful­ly offers world cre­ation at an acces­si­ble lev­el. Each Flickr user con­tributes to the pho­to­graph­ic tapes­try that is the Flickr ‘pho­to­verse’. Wikipedia, too offers rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple tools for con­tri­bu­tion, albeit text based. In the gam­ing sphere, there are exam­ples such as SFZe­ro, a Col­lab­o­ra­tive Pro­duc­tion Game, in which play­ers add tasks for oth­ers to com­plete, essen­tial­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly cre­at­ing the game with the designers.

Like I said, the les­son “work with­in the sys­tem” applies to more than one aspect. The oth­er being mod­er­a­tion. The authors share an amus­ing anec­dote about play­ers exploit­ing a loop hole intro­duced by new char­ac­ters and objects (the play­ers gained access to an unusu­al­ly pow­er­ful weapon). The anec­dote shows that it is always bet­ter to mod­er­ate dis­putes with­in the shared fan­ta­sy of the world, in stead of mak­ing use of exter­nal mea­sures that break the play­er’s sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Play­ers will con­sid­er the lat­ter cheat­ing on the part of administrators:

“Oper­at­ing with­in the par­tic­i­pants’ world mod­el pro­duced a very sat­is­fac­to­ry result. On the oth­er hand, what seemed like the expe­di­ent course, which involved vio­lat­ing this mod­el, pro­voked upset and dismay.”

Design­ers should play with users, not against them. This applies to social soft­ware on the web equal­ly. It is this atti­tude that sets Flickr apart from many oth­er online com­mu­ni­ties. Flickr’s design­ers under­stand the prin­ci­ple of “oper­at­ing with­in the par­tic­i­pants’ world mod­el”. For exam­ple, look at how they han­dled con­fu­sion and irri­ta­tion around the last Talk Like A Pirate Day gag.6

Summary

In sum­ma­ry, dear read­er, if you got this far, I would love to see exam­ples of social soft­ware that:

  • Are acces­si­ble in a num­ber of ‘rep­re­sen­ta­tions’
  • Are co-designed with users, or bet­ter yet, apply evo­lu­tion­ary prin­ci­ples to its design
  • Allow users to devel­op their own mod­el of governance
  • Allow users to eas­i­ly add to the sys­tem, in an inte­grat­ed way
  • Are mod­er­at­ed from with­in the system

If you—like me—can’t think of any, per­haps it’s time to build some?

Image cred­its: © 1986 LucasArts Enter­tain­ment Com­pa­ny.

  1. The essay can be read online over here. [↩]
  2. More about my GDC 2008 expe­ri­ences. [↩]
  3. This prin­ci­ple is now being applied to the extreme in Yahoo!‘s Fire Eagle. [↩]
  4. The for­mer quote I first encoun­tered in Matt Jones’s pre­sen­ta­tion Rule­Space, the lat­ter is from this BBC arti­cle on Reboot 9.0. [↩]
  5. For more on aggre­gat­ing user behav­iour in social soft­ware also see Greater than the sum of its parts by Tom Coates (yes him again). [↩]
  6. Tom Armitage has some good thoughts on the Talk Like A Pirate Day deba­cle. [↩]

Notes on play, exploration, challenge and learning

(My read­ing notes are pil­ing up so here’s an attempt to clear out at least a few of them.) 

Part of the play expe­ri­ence of many dig­i­tal games is fig­ur­ing out how the damn thing works in the first place. In Rules of Play on page 210:

“[…] as the play­er plays with FLUID, inter­ac­tion and obser­va­tion reveals the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples of the sys­tem. In this case the hid­den infor­ma­tion grad­u­al­ly revealed through play is the rules of the sim­u­la­tion itself. Part of the play of FLUID is the dis­cov­ery of the game rules as information.”

(Sad­ly, I could not find a link to the game mentioned.)

I did not give Don­ald Nor­man all the cred­it he was due in my ear­li­er post. He does­n’t have a blind spot for games. Quite the con­trary. For instance, he explains how to make sys­tems eas­i­er to learn and points to games in the process. On page 183 of The Design of Every­day Things:

“One impor­tant method of mak­ing sys­tems eas­i­er to learn and to use is to make them explorable, to encour­age the user to exper­i­ment and learn the pos­si­bil­i­ties through active exploration.”

The way to do this is through direct manip­u­la­tion, writes Nor­man. He also reminds us that it’s not nec­es­sary to make any sys­tem explorable.1 But (on page 184):

“[…] if the job is crit­i­cal, nov­el, or ill-spec­i­fied, or if you do not yet know exact­ly what is to be done, then you need direct, first-per­son interaction.”

So much writ­ten after DOET seems to have added lit­tle to the con­ver­sa­tion. I’m sur­prised how use­ful this clas­sic still is.

I’m remind­ed of a sec­tion of Matt Jones’s Inter­ac­tion 08 talk—which I watched yes­ter­day. He went through a num­ber of infor­ma­tion visu­al­i­sa­tions and said he’d like to add more stuff like that into Dopplr, to allow peo­ple to play with their data. He even com­pared this act of play to Will Wright’s con­cept of pos­si­bil­i­ty space.2 He also briefly men­tioned that eas­i­ly acces­si­ble tools for cre­at­ing infor­ma­tion visu­al­i­sa­tions might become a valu­able tool for design­ers work­ing with com­plex sets of data. 

Nor­man actu­al­ly points to games for inspi­ra­tion, by the way. On page 184 just before the pre­vi­ous quote:

“Some com­put­er sys­tems offer direct manip­u­la­tion, first-per­son inter­ac­tions, good exam­ples being the dri­ving, fly­ing, and sports games that are com­mon­place in arcades and on home machines. In these games, the feel­ing of direct con­trol over the actions is an essen­tial part of the task.”

And so on.

One of the most use­ful parts of Dan Saf­fer­’s book on inter­ac­tion design is where he explains the dif­fer­ences between cus­tomi­sa­tion, per­son­al­i­sa­tion, adap­ta­tion and hack­ing. He notes that an adap­tive sys­tem can be designed to induce flow—balancing chal­lenge with the skill of the user. In games, there is some­thing called dynam­ic dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ment (DDA) which has very sim­i­lar aims. 

Salen and Zim­mer­man have their doubts about DDA though. In Rules of Play on page 223 they write:

“Play­ing a game becomes less like learn­ing an expres­sive lan­guage and more like being the sole audi­ence mem­ber for a par­tic­i­pa­to­ry, impro­vi­sa­tion­al per­for­mance, where the per­form­ers adjust their actions to how you inter­act with them. Are you then play­ing the game, or is it play­ing you?”

Per­haps, but it all depends on what DDA actu­al­ly adjusts. The tech­nique might be objec­tion­able in a game (where a large part of the point is over­com­ing chal­lenge) but in oth­er sys­tems many of these objec­tions do not apply.

“With a suc­cess­ful adap­tive design, the prod­uct fits the user’s life and envi­ron­ment as though it were cus­tom made.”

(Design­ing for Inter­ac­tion, page 162.)

Adap­tive sys­tems explic­it­ly antic­i­pate trans­for­ma­tive play. They allow them­selves to be changed through a per­son­’s inter­ac­tions with it.3

A char­ac­ter­is­tic of good inter­ac­tion design is play­ful­ness, writes Mr. Saf­fer in his book on page 67:

“Through seri­ous play, we seek out new prod­ucts, ser­vices and fea­tures and then try them to see how they work. How many times have you pushed a but­ton just to see what it did?”

The fun­ny thing is, the con­di­tions for play accord­ing to Saf­fer are very sim­i­lar to some of the basic guide­lines Nor­man offers: Make users feel com­fort­able, reduce the chance for errors and if errors do occur, make sure the con­se­quences are small—by allow­ing users to undo, for instance. 

Mr. Nor­man writes that in games “design­ers delib­er­ate­ly flout the laws of under­stand­abil­i­ty and usabil­i­ty” (p.205). Although even in games: “[the] rules [of usabil­i­ty] must be applied intel­li­gent­ly, for ease of use or dif­fi­cul­ty of use” (p.208).

By now, it should be clear mak­ing inter­ac­tions play­ful is very dif­fer­ent from mak­ing them game-like.

  1. Appar­ent­ly, “explorable” isn’t a prop­er Eng­lish word, but if it’s good enough for Mr. Nor­man it’s good enough for me. [↩]
  2. I blogged about pos­si­bil­i­ty space before here. [↩]
  3. Yes, I know I blogged about adap­tive design before. Also about flow and adap­ta­tion, it seems. [↩]

Blank banners — see me speak at TWAB 2008

Provo protesting with blank banner

In 1966 Pro­vo took to the streets of Ams­ter­dam with blank protest ban­ners.1 The use of rous­ing slo­gans had been out­lawed by the city’s may­or. The ‘pro­test­ers’ were arrest­ed. Pro­vo achieved their goal of mak­ing the author­i­ties look sil­ly by play­ing at protesting. 

They took exist­ing rules and decid­ed to play with­in them, to see how far they could push the lim­its of those rules. They were not allowed to use actu­al slo­gans, so they decid­ed to use unwrit­ten ban­ners. They made use of the ambigu­ous nature of play: They were protest­ing, but at the same time not protest­ing. There were no for­bid­den slo­gans on their ban­ners, but at the same time, the slo­gans were ever so present through their absence.

The police were not will­ing to take on Provo’s ludic atti­tude. They refused to step into their mag­ic cir­cle and play at oppos­ing them. In stead they broke the rules, arrest­ed them for real, and by doing so, lost—at least in the pub­lic’s eye.

This example—and hope­ful­ly a few others—I will dis­cuss at The Web and Beyond 2008: Mobil­i­ty. In 20 min­utes or so, I hope to inspire design­ers to think about what the near future’s blank ban­ners could be. My ses­sion is titled ‘Mobile com­po­nents for play­ful cul­tur­al resis­tance’ (an unwieldy title in des­per­ate need of improve­ment) and will prob­a­bly be in Dutch.

The con­fer­ence is organ­ised by Chi Ned­er­land and will take place May 22 in the beau­ti­ful Beurs van Berlage in Ams­ter­dam. Keynote speak­ers include Ben Cer­ve­ny, Jyri Engeström and Adam Green­field. It looks like this will be a very spe­cial con­fer­ence indeed.

Image source: Gram­schap.

  1. Pro­vo was a Dutch coun­ter­cul­ture move­ment in the mid-1960s that focused on pro­vok­ing vio­lent respons­es from author­i­ties using non-vio­lent bait. Read more about them at Wikipedia. [↩]