The reading, The Coming of Calm Technology by Mark Weiser, was intersting because it once again brought to the forefront issues that tend to crop up in the periphery of our work at ITP. Much of interaction design, whether as a chosen focus of our work, or as a bi-product of some other goal, is focused on nurturing a “smooth” experience without glitches and preferably with the ability to ignore much of the inner workings of the technology that the user must interface with. The field of interaction design seems to rest on the assumption that we don’t want to hassle the user. If applied universally without context, this could be a very limiting assumption.
To conjure up the ghosts of psychoanalysts past (which seems helpful from time to time), Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s disciples, developed the theory of compensation – that people tend to excel in fields at which they feel they are inherently inadequate. Whether or not it’s trendy today to dispute psychoanalysis and Adler in particular, there is some truism in the basics of this idea. If everything was great just the way it is, why would anyone ever do anything? From there, you can imagine that the more challenging something is, the more you want to do something until some limit of “challenging-ness” is reached at which you feel the challenge is insurmountable and therefore you do nothing. Of course, the scale of measurement, and the levels of your threshold for quitting are subjective things.
To transfer this psychology to interfaces, I think it’s reasonable to assume that an interface must have an inherent challenge. Interaction designers, like Donald Norman, have used the psychologist J.J. Gibson’s related concept of “affordance” to describe the natural relationship between user and object. Psychologists are continually rehashing and renaming old ideas with their own labels. (Tangentially, Stuart Kauffman, the theoretical biologist at the Sante Fe Institute, has developed a theory of the origin of life based upon biological instances of natural tendencies to interact. His suggested fourth law of thermodynamics is the tendency for organisms to develop co-evolving complex interactions.) The modern development on the compensation question seems to be the issue of whether the challenge is something intended for conscious attention, or something that would ideally enter from the periphery and guide the user in a “calm” transparent way. Interaction designers like Donald Norman tend to suggest that challenges should be calm.
The seperation between transparent and attention-requiring content is regarded by designers as similar to the Church and State division in the US. There is general agreement that the calm affordances should be kept seperate from the real message of the interface – the inner-workings of the technology should not show through to the interface. But like church and state, the one keeps on popping its head up in the other, and it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to absolutely seperate the two. Marshall McLuhan’s doctrine that the “media is the message” must surely fit in here somewhere. This doesn’t mean that the media should necessarily be constructed in a way that obviously contains a message, only that there is an inextricable link between the two that will never fully be dissolved into the periphery.
Should the design for these two seemingly seperate things – calm and not calm, conscious and unconscious, attention-centered and peripheral – be best kept seperate? Most of the time we do not want to have to pay conscious attention to something meant for the periphery – like the air-conditioning in the room. But if we dogmatically state that peripheral elements should stay in the periphery, we totally discount the complexity of human behavior and will perpetually avoid including interesting aspects of pleasurable experience, such as surprise and unexpected discoveries, in our designs. Our innate mammalian psychology, and cultural habits are designed and founded on the assumption that things don’t always work as expected. Design must evolve in tandem.