Participation

1
Participation Affordances

• LCC 2700 Intro to Computational Media

2
Borges Forking Paths

• A book that is a labyrinth
• An action that is a coded message
• A view of human life and the meaning of our
  choices

3
Borges Forking Paths

• Fictional exploration of philosophy
• A stable genre the detective stories
• - clues and puzzles gt solution
• Time branches into infinite futures
• Space - Time
• - conceptual space
• - time as space

4
A Novel that can be read in multiple ways

• The book/maze of Tsui Pen
• Everything is possible, and everything occurs in
  some reality

5
4 properties of the digital medium

• Procedural
• Participatory
• Spatial
• Encyclopedic

6
4 properties of the digital medium

• Procedural
• Participatory
• Spatial
• Encyclopedic

7
Agency

• What does it mean to be active in a
  computational environment or system?

8
Postmodernism / Poststructuralism

• Structuralism
• The study of fundamental elements that constitute
  higher order structures
• Humanistic movement of the 19th and 20th c.
• Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure)
• the system over the use of language
• Fundamental linguistic structures
• Semiotics
• Linguistic signs signifier/signified
• Anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
• Fundamental mental structures
• Cultural phenomena mythology, kinship
• Literary studies
• The structures or formulas for literary production

9
Postmodernism / Poststructuralism

• Poststructuralism
• A response to structuralism
• Intended to unseat the formers intention to
  craft absolutist, top-down understandings of
  cultural systems
• No generalizable meta-language is sufficient to
  understand human experience
• Poststructuralists believe such experiences are
  culturally situated and can only be understood in
  light of such contexts
• Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan)
• History (Michel Foucault)
• Literature (Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes,
  etc.)
• Philosophy, art (Gilles Deleuze, etc.)

10
The Rhizome

• Concept from Deleuze Félix Guattaris A
  Thousand Plateaus
• One of many poststructuralists models or
  analogies for artistic/literary production and
  consumption
• Rhizome from botany
• An underground stem or root system that extends
  new shoots from its nodes
• In contrast to the branching root system, the
  rhizome symbolizes arbitrary growth
• Deleuze and Guattari borrow this term for
  todescribe literary, artistic, and cultural
  practicesthat allow for non-hierarchical
  movement withinsystems of meaning
• Any point connects to any other a part of a
  muchlarger theoretical framework

11
Relationship to Literature and Art

• Free play in a signifying system engenders
  multiple meanings
• Notion of artifacts as texts to be read in a
  variety of contexts
• De-emphasis of the intention and role of the
  author
• Death of the Author by Roland Barthes
• New emphasis on the role of the
  reader/viewer/etc.
• Texts as co-produced by the author and the reader
• Rhizome as one way to characterize this free play
• Rhizome is borrowed heavily in hypertext
  theoryand practice
• Hypertext and new media as realizations of
  poststructuralism

12
Problems with the Rhizome

• Practically, the notion that anything is
  possible is not so productive, perhaps even
  impossible
• Texts can be read creatively
• Computational systems?
• Janet Murray, the rapture of the rhizome
• unheroic and solutionless
• Postmodernists privilege confusion over
  representation, liberation from the tyrrany of
  the author
• Solution A return to intentional experiences
  design for intended, but open effect

13
Can you really do anything you want?Would you
want to?
14
Participation as Structured Expereince

• Constraints structure the possibility space of
  experiences

15
Participation as Structured Expereince

• Constraints structure the possibility space of
  experiences

16
Constrained action

• Computational expressive artifacts as
  goal-directed works with constrained action
• Constraint produces and structures expression

17
Some examples
18
Some examples
Epi oinopa ponton the wine-dark sea
19
Some examples
20
Interplay of free play and structured rules
MUD examples from HoH Videogames Software as
media for work, play Interaction through fixed
input systems with Procedurally authored rules
21
Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

• Well-known computer scientist
• VP at Apple, Human-centered products
• Partner, Nielsen-Norman Group (with Jakob
  Nielsen)
• The Andy Rooney of design

22
Normans design principles

• Conceptual Models - the way human minds find
  meaning in things
• Affordances - appropriate actions are
  perceptible, inappropriate ones are invisible
• Jointly determined by environment and organism
• Constraints - limits to choices
• Feedback - showing the effects of an action

23
Normans design principles

• Mostly interested in physical and cognitive
  affordances
• And perceived affordances in particular
• Determinsm? Free-play? Expression?

24
Determinism? Free play? Expression?
25
Relationship between usability, interaction, and
expression
Gadgets and affordances The economy of use
efficiency