Information Interaction Design – Shedroff, 1999

Date : March 24, 2011

Data management involves the classification, storability, retrievability, share-ability, and the generation of information across multiple platforms (print, web, mobile, etc.) that represent the gist or essence of “valuable, compelling, and empowering” physical and/or digital user experiences.

In 1999, Nathan Shedroff asked: “How do we as designers create meaningful experiences and interactions for others?” (Shedroff; 1999:288). He introduced the importance of Information Interaction Design as the design of information for contextual user-centric interaction. According to Shedroff, emerging trends in information processing of designed products and experiences include: “information overload, information anxiety, media literacy, media immersion, and technological overload.” (Shedroff; 1999:267) Those, in turn, define the focus of HCI and the practice of Information Interaction Design.

[W]hat most of us deal with everyday […] is not information. It is merely data.” (Shedroff; 1999:270)

The design of data must address the in-forming condition of information; that is, how it communicates in its form by turning data into meaningful and useful content with a servicing intent and contextually thoughtful point of view.

Shedroff maps 3 disciplines as comprised in the practice of Information Interaction Design: “information design, interaction design, and sensorial design.” (Shedroff; 1999:268) Information design makes information valuable and interaction meaningful by way of organizing and framing data for its appropriate audience. Interaction design represents storytelling through interactional platforms (performance, print, digital, etc.) that identify with target user requirements. Finally, sensorial design addresses the psychographic and cognitive needs of users by understanding how design affects the senses (vision, touch, smell, sound) and how it might enrich emotional aspects of user experiences. Information Interaction design, then, seeks to provide efficient and memorable experiences for users within the boundaries of information design, interaction design, and sensorial design according to predetermined or emerging user requirements (needs, abilities, desires, and expectations).

Because the design of data informs the creation of participatory, integrated, and resourceful experiences, Information Interaction Design provides active experiences of knowledge that are interactive, persuasive, efficient, and effective. Shedroff describes wisdom as a “metalanguage”; which is to say that wisdom is an exploration of knowledge and a continuous synthesis of acquired, preconceived and experiential knowledge. The knowledge of knowing reaffirms itself in one’s ongoing rewiring of his/her thought patterns in light of newly established perceptual understandings. Design of data encourages the discovery of new knowledge through meaningful patterns and experiences.

Wisdom is a kind of metaknowledge, a blending of all the processes and relationships understood through experience.” (Shedroff; 1999:273)

Successful interactive systems are first and foremost designed to allow users to discover and learn from information, as well as to interact and control data outcomes through visual feedback. Those systems may be described as engineered to adapt, evolve, and self-sustain overtime as they enable users to populate content and provides them with the virtual freedom to co-create. In a sense, users become producers of their own interactive experiences.

Some important points to consider when designing data-driven interactive experiences:
1) How design organizes and packages information to its audience determines how information is expressed and perceived and what types of values one might assign to the overall patterns or messages.
2) Metaphoric interpretations and explanations of data may render data inaccurate in its appeal to cognitive and structural understanding of its audience.
3) Interaction design helps transform data into an interactive storytelling.
4) Systems can be tailored to allow user input and provide partial user-control.

source:
Shedroff, Nathan. “Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design” Information Design. Jacobson, Robert (Ed.). MIT Press, Massachussets: 1999, pp. 267-292

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Designing for Perceptual Differentiation

Category : Design for Behavior, Information Architecture
[T]here are unique features of individual perception that have important implications for the design of information. […] designers must search for some areas of commonality.”  (Whitehouse, 1999:103)

Oliver Sacks’ accounts of visually impaired patients demonstrate the nature of perceptual experience as essentially idiosyncratic. This “perceptual fingerprint” is identified as the difference between seeing and understanding, between vision and cognition. Roger Whitehouse categorizes perceptual processes as follows: sensory mechanisms which are defined by individual sensory receptive capabilities (i.e., retinal and eardrum functions); cognitive processing of sensory inputs which depends on individual neural wiring; and ascribed meaning to perceived sensory inputs which results from individual experience and cultural background.

As babies, we leave a womb where we receive little sensory stimulation and, with all our sensory input devices in full working order, emerge into an explosion of light, color, sound, smell, noise, movement, touch–sensations that have absolutely no meaning for us.” (Whitehouse, 1999:108)

Because we possess the ability to adapt and change in accordance to changed environments, we are in a position to perfect our physical and mental competencies. This is due in part to the fact that behavioral interventions are also metaphysical; they affect specific areas of the brain and produce physical changes. In fact, the neuroscientist Micheal Merzenich (2004) described the brain’s evolution as twofold: in childhood, the brain learns to adapt to its environment as it absorbs information directly. He calls this the ‘critical period.’ In the second period, the ‘adult plasticity,’ the brain is able not only to adapt, but also to control its behavior and change at will. The brain is then a volitional entity. By presenting the areas of the brain in the form of a geographical map, he demonstrated how the brain remodels itself in ways that are skill-specific (such as posture, movement, etc.). This also confirms Sacks’ (2009) hypothesis that there may be specific fractions in the brain responsible for specific sensorial activities such as pattern recognition. Sacks’ findings showed that patients under certain medical conditions had experienced geometrical, musical, mobile and psychotic hallucinations involving all their senses in coherent ways. Hence, every brain has its idiosyncratic geography. Merzenich noted that “the embodiment of You” is the greatest determinant of how one’s brain might look. Physical change that occurs in your performance with the world, then, occurs as well in the physical configuration and remodeling of your brain structure.

The contextual scale of information matters; that is, to design at the human scale with considerations for accessibility, readability, and reachability, that correspond to user-centric demographic and psychographic requirements. To design for user-centric perceptual processing is to coherently integrate a belief system. Whitehouse explains how belief may contribute to the ways in which information is assimilated and interpreted, thus affecting the understanding of what one sees.

Shifts in perception are borne out of our ability to adapt, learn, and change unique perceptual beliefs. Change abounds when new skills are achieved and hidden skills are discovered in the course of adapting to contextual circumstances whereby newly-made associations and patterns are established in the mental realm and henceforth shed light onto and transform every preconception and belief one might have had –often referred to as “paradigm shifts”: when one’s whole world is reconsidered and tailored again to fit a new reality. To understand and respond to users’ unique perceptual belief, design needs to shift priorities to meet user-centric design goals that allow for the generation of friction-free solutions that facilitate behavioral, sensorial, and cognitive information consumption.

To achieve effectiveness and efficiency, the design process involves: preliminary user research and observation, defining the problem that requires a design intervention, providing multiple solutions or proposals that address the problem in question, usability testing protocols (determining number of participants, duration of test, types of tests, collect responses, debriefing with users), redesigning according to test results or user responses, etc. Designing for usability methodologies lead to a comprehensive, effective and efficient design solution that responds to users’ perceptual processing needs and expectations.

By simple testing and observation, […] we became aware of some of the practical implications of individual perceptual differences. Most importantly, we began to understand how easy it is to disenfranchise individuals simply by not perceiving and correctly interpreting the most basic facts about their needs.” (Whitehouse, 1999:128)

Whitehouse encourages designers to actively include user cognitive differences by engaging in “the extraordinary value of” user research and usability testing to understanding users’ needs as well as cognitive and cultural requirements.

source:

Merzenich, Micheal. “Exploring the Rewiring of the Brain.” Filmed February 2004.
Source: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html
(Access Date: December 3, 2009)

Sacks, Oliver. “Hallucinations.” The Robert B. Silvers Lecture, The New York Public Library.
Date: September 21, 2009. Source: http://www.nypl.org (Access Date: December 3, 2009)

Whitehouse, Roger. “The Uniqueness of Individual Perception” Information Design. Jacobson, Robert (Ed.). MIT Press, Massachussets: 1999, pp. 103-129

The Theories of Christopher Alexander

Category : Information Architecture

In 1977, architect and researcher, Christopher Alexander published A Pattern Language: a guide to designing environments to enable the creation of a collectively made and more living structure or environment. Comprised of rules and guidelines that have resulted from extensive research, observation, and testing of patterns in towns, buildings, and construction, A Pattern Language addresses the unsustainable built environment we live in and encourages a bottom-up approach to architecture wherein a nurturing environment can emerge through the common understanding of patterns and the development of pattern languages (“a genetic code” to best describe their core structural properties or requirements that make the world more livable). Observation of built environments helps identify patterns that have particular impacts on the wellbeing of people. Pattern languages are, then, aggregate elements (or parts) of given systems that enable the generation of convivial physical structures that respond to humane values and a systemic conception of the global (whole) structural scale of spaces and places. The language is developed as a tool for generating coherent and whole environments (buildings, rooms, streets, parks, etc.): “more living structures.”

Not only has it made a huge impact on the ways in which architects and novel practitioners approach architecture and their environments as wholes, but it has also caused the emergent appropriation of its patterns in the world of computer science in general and software programming in particular.

In a 1996 presentation at the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications, in San Jose, California, Alexander reflected on the use of his ideas in the software community that transformed object-oriented computing and how the pattern discipline brought back the systems thinking and humane perspective into the design and architecture of software.

It is Alexander’s understanding that patterns are used as “vehicles of communication” in computer science for discussing, sharing, and modifying data structures, but they are not, however, used as he originally conceived of them. For him, the uses of patterns in software science differ from those in architecture (in the 1970s) whose patterns have a moral quest, a coherent evolution, and aims at a generative whole. The architectural goal is to build a good environment and an objective and living structure “to make human life better.”

Will it actually make life better as a result of its injection into a software system?” (Alexander, 1996)

It seems, to me, that A Pattern Language helps inform the design of self-generating and adaptive computer programs. The most striking correlation between Alexander’s pattern languages and computer science is the works in what computer science often refers to as decentralized or complex adaptive systems, and its parallels to what Alexander describes as “centers” when he talks of “shared pattern languages which [enable people] to generate a complete living structure.”

If we look at systems behavior and the similarities and particularities found within decentralized systems, we see how the conception of an environment built around rules or patterns might generate parallel effects wherein environments are created at the human scale and with the equal consideration of functional and experiential coherence, while yet remaining distinct and separate entities in their particularities.

Alexander’s A Pattern Language promotes a bottom-up approach, which places users of buildings as builders of their environments through the process of co-creating a common ground with the collective consensus of a “shared pattern language”; to give users better control over the spaces they dwell in.

Prior to The Nature of Order (2003-2004), Alexander presented some ideas explored in the extension of his work on patterns: such as, to distinguish between living and non-living structures and to include both technical and experiential fluidity; that is, the integration of both functional and interactive/human behavioral relationships (hardware and software). He defined fifteen geometric properties as essential nodes to architecture that would respond to what he posited as “Do I feel myself to be more whole?” –a certain quest for self-actualization through the generative creation of livable structures. Those recursive geometric properties revealed in the emergence of buildings include the boundaries and gray areas around them as parts of the pattern language itself.

Alexander uses the term “wholeness” to mean: entities of the environment borne out of interactions existing amongst parts (or what he calls centers). He describes “wholeness” as a “field-like” center within which other centers would be interlaced or interdependent, and those in turn would hold centers within centers and so on and so forth –as closely related to self-similarity in chaos theory (Mandelbrot’s study of fractal geometry in nature) and in the behavior of natural systems in the science of fields (e.g., flock of birds). Each center represents a pattern, in theory because it has reoccurred at different times and locations and at most of those has been successful at making one feel more whole.

Essentially, Alexander attempts to identify hubs around which systems occur in the most living structures of which he extracts a pattern language (or a geometric lexicon) for architects and lay people to rely on.

According to a 2002 review in the Harvard Design Magazine, A Pattern Language seems to impose rules that are conceptually important and useful to consider as drivers of a well-informed practice, but which when combined (all 253 rules) create a chaotic and hard-to-conceive structure. In those terms, a bottom-up approach conflicts with the extensive rule set provided by Alexander’s patterns. William Saunders interprets A Pattern Language as “utopist,” “dreamy,” “fragmentary,” “additive,” “structuralist,” “authoritarian,” and even “tyrannical,” despite his respect for the “lively […] and informed intuitions” introduced in the book.

Alexander’s best ideas about town making […]: the promotion of mixed use, pedestrian convenience and zones, ample public transportation, non-exclusive zoning, cluster development, workplaces near and in homes, limited automobile access, small architectural scale, “activity nodes,” town greens, small public squares, street cafes, and so on.’ (Saunders, 2002)

source:

Alexander, Christopher. (1996) “The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World.” www.patternlanguage.com (last visited: Feb.21, 2011)

Saunders, William S. (2002) “Book Reviews: A Pattern Language.” Harvard Design Magazine, Winter/Spring 2002, Number 16. http//ebookbrowse.com (last visited: Feb.18, 2011)

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