Jonas Löwgren
www.animationen
shus.eksjo.se/jonas.lowgren
First, a definition. Interaction design is to shape the use qualities of interactive systems. (The term »use qualities« is chosen to indicate something much broader than »usability«; more on this below.)
In an email some time ago, Paul introduced the categories of synthesis/analysis. I consider myself more of a designer than an analyst. Much of my scientific research has been performed by designing something in order to study aspects of it. My teaching is focused on supporting others in developing their design abilities. And so on. However, I find that I need analysis in order to do my job well. For teaching as well as for design practice, the most urgent analytical task for me right now is to develop a set of transferable concepts for talking about the use qualities of interactive artifacts/media.
The reason is simple. We need to understand good and bad interaction design. Transferable concepts are necessary to communicate and jointly develop that understanding (including, of course, revising and extending the concepts themselves).
The difference between use qualities and usability is one of scope. Usability is essentially about minimizing the amount of interference between the user and her task (yes, she is almost always assumed to have one, well-defined task). The user interface shall be made transparent, the interaction shall be made as error-free and efficient as possible. Historically, the usability concept emerged from the study of productivity applications in task-oriented contexts. This demarcation is still very much built into the concept and the scientific usability/HCI community. (Cf. an extended discussion in my review of a recent HCI textbook.)
Use qualities can, of course, comprise usability. But what are the use qualities of a computer game? It is safe to say that a typical usability perspective on a game yields no significant understanding of what makes the game good or bad. We need other quality concepts, the most essential one in this case being playability.
For other genres, other use qualities become the crucial ones. A few examples of possible genres and their essential qualities might include
I am not sure about the labels of the genres, partly because there is as yet no systematic discipline of IT criticism to help me draw the lines. But that is not important for the moment. My point is that the use qualities mentioned above are to a great extent aesthetic. In other words, they refer to the user's sensual impressions and experiences. This is precisely the reason I wanted to get involved in the aesthetic computing group. My goal is to produce better interaction design by better understanding the qualities of interaction; I hope that this group will prove a good place for developing and sharing that understanding.
Which finally leads me back to the scope of the group. The examples Paul provides and the student work he indicates all concern what computer scientists would call formal structures (finite state machines, entity-relationship diagrams, and so on). From my point of view, this is a very narrow category. In my experience, users' understanding of information technology varies a lot in depth. For some people, the whole Internet is a formal structure even though the underlying model is not executable and unambiguous in the CS sense. For most people, a desktop PC as a whole is a formal structure.
It seems quite feasible to interpret aesthetic computing as the aesthetics of computing. If computing is understood in the everyman's sense of the word (information technology embedded in everyday life), then the aesthetics of computing refers to the sensual/perceptual qualities of experiencing information technology. Part of this information technology is the formal structures of computer science and mathematics; other parts comprise the rest of the software, hardware and »peopleware«. The implication is that we should apply aesthetic perspectives to information technology as a whole, not only to the domain of formal computer science.