Been quiet but not idle… UXPA Talk - "DYNAMIC SINSIGN" 21st May

Although the blog has been quiet I haven't. I've been busy with my students, proofing my new book and working hard on my PhD. Some of the results of that work will appear on this blog over the coming weeks and presented to the members of User Experience Professionals Association in Edinburgh on the 21st May.

The talk is called Dynamic sinsign: Sign-action communicating experiential themes. Check out the link here to book a place.
http://uxpa-scotland.org/events.php
The talk is free for UXPA members, £10 for non-members, and £5 for students. Pay at the door. [Payment is a UXPA thing - I'm speaking for no fee so I have nothing to do with the money!]  

Venue
Skyscanner: Quartermile One, 15 Lauriston Pl, Edinburgh EH3 9EN. LATECOMERS CAN NOT BE ADMITTED  

Information

DYNAMIC SINSIGN:SIGN-ACTION COMMUNICATING EXPERIENTIAL THEMES

About the event
This talk emerges out of Dave’s current research-in-progress into interaction design from a Visual Communication perspective. Through a clever synthesis of Peircean semiotics and Martin Heidegger, Dave will discuss how the user experience can be revealed in a new way that connects HCI and interaction design with Visual Communication. The 45 minute illustrated talk is for any UX designer who’d like to get into the mind of the user to see what they experience in a hermeneutically direct way that personas and mental models can’t communicate.

In the first section of Dave’s talk he’ll set out the context for how Visual Communication can inform user experience:

• Visual Communication as a facilitator in behavioural change 
• Interpreting the Hidden 
• Signified Inspirational Data 

In the second section, Dave will illustrate his proposition with some early research experimental graphic outcomes and methods:

• Experience probes - capturing experiences 
• Experiential themes and dynamic sinsigns - visual interpretation 
• Visual Hermeneutic Circle - analysing and reduction 

Dave will reveal some of the philosophy that structures the central idea and implications. He will end by discussing the development of an experimental qualitative methodology to explore this further. The nascent Visual Phenomenological Methodology will be developed over the next year as part of his PhD, and Dave would welcome conversations with industrial partners to develop a Knowledge Transfer Partnership.

More about the speaker 
Dave is author of Interface Design: An introduction to visual communication in UI design to be published by Bloomsbury (AVA) in October 2013. Originally an illustrator, in 1997 he made the transition into interaction design designing interfaces. In the last decade he has become more interested in the user experience and the re-positioning of the design discipline of Visual Communication over the design of future interactions. His interest now lies in understanding the user's experience in the interaction and exploring how this can be communicated to other designers.

He is a lecturer in digital design and design researcher at Glasgow Caledonian University, teaching on BA(Hons) Graphic Design for Digital Media. He teaches across all 4 years, and in the 3rd year he teaches a user experience module called Design and the User to design students.

A member of the Interaction Design Association, he has academically published his research and is currently in the practical phase of a practice-based Visual Communication PhD at Edinburgh College of Art. Check out his academic profile http://gcal.academia.edu/DaveWood/ and blog http://internalexternal-2010.blogspot.co.uk/.

Being in the World Documentary

maciasterence. (2012) Being in the World [online]. [Accessed 4th October 2012]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_18LfSA2Qs

Quotes:

"We're thoroughly conditioned by the world we are in, and that world is a world of customs, traditions, practices that we are so immersed in that we no longer see a way out of it. So the only way to do anything skillfully, with innovation, insight, sensitivity, and authentically is to be appropriating traditions, practices, customs that are all around us in the world that we just absorbed."

Taylor Carmen, Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College, Colombia University (37:10)

The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction… Ready-to-Hand and Present–at-Hand

O’Neill, S. (2008) Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction. London: Springer-Verlag.

“Heidegger essentially posits two different ways of being-in-the-world in relation to stuff or equipment, to use Heidegger’s term, that one finds there (physical entities, such as tools and technologies that for our purposes, we shall identify as media); these are ready-to-hand and present–at-hand. (…) Heidegger claims that our everyday encounters with the phenomena of our world are the ‘first’ way in which we come to understand them. (…) Through this process of interaction we develop skilful use of the material of the world and we in turn develop tacit, embodied knowledge or ‘know-how’ that allows us to cope smoothly with the world around us, enabling our immediate survival. (…) Present-at-hand is an essentially different ‘disclosure’ of being, whereby we are no longer engaged in using the equipment of the world, but we instead are thinking about it. Our activities are internal and mental rather physical and active. This type of being-in-the-world provides us with a second kind of knowledge, ‘know-that’ rather than ‘know-how’.” (p35)

Annotation
When discussing Heideggerian phenomenology in the context of interaction design then there are two ways to frame how we approach an interactive artefact: it may be either ready-to-hand or present–at-hand. The former is focused more on a physically active state of imminent use, but in the latter our activities are internal and cognitive, thinking about when to engage in active use. In both conditions we are aware of the interactive artefact without actually using it, but once we are ready we can begin interacting from these polar positions. 

The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction… Phenomenological Relationships

O’Neill, S. (2008) Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction. London: Springer-Verlag.

“Heidegger makes explicit the idea that the nature of our being-in-the-world is not only related to the world we inhabit, but to the fact that we are aware that we exist in that world. In short, a fundamental aspect of our being-in-the-world is that we are concerned about (aware of) ourselves being-in-the-world. Furthermore, another aspect of Heidegger’s conception of ‘Being’ is that our being-in-the-world is a being-with-other-beings (being as people, things or entities that exist in the world around us). Those other beings may or may not have a concern for being with us, but we most definitely have a concern for being-with them as they have an effect on how we exist. Our consciousness and our knowledge of the world are deeply entwined with our phenomenological relationship to it.” (pp34-35)

Annotation
O’Neil in building his case for the semiotics of embodied interaction naturally takes a Heideggerian perspective seeing “our consciousness and our knowledge of the world [as being] deeply entwined with our phenomenological relationship to it” (p35). Our interconnectivity with others shapes how we see and interact with the world we perceive as our reality. 
 

Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory… Toward Accepted Knowledge

PALMER, R.E. (1969) Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

“in Being and Time Heidegger finds a kind of access in the fact that one has with his existence, along with it, a certain understanding of what fullness of being is. It is not a fixed understanding but historically formed, accumulated in the very experience of encountering phenomena. (…) Ontology must turn to the processes of understanding and interpretation through which things appear; it must lay open the mood and direction of human existence; it must render visible the invisible structure of being-in-the-world. How does this relate to hermeneutics? It means that ontology must, as phenomenology of being, become a ‘hermeneutic’ of existence. (…) It lays open what was hidden; it constitutes not an interpretation of an interpretation but the primary act of interpretation which brings a thing from concealment.” (p129)

Annotation:

Through hermeneutic interpretation from a Heideggerian phenomenology understanding needs to be seen as more than an interpretation-of-an-interpretation. It is a primary act that brings those internal aspects of being into the external world through discussion toward accepted knowledge. The hermeneutic, intuitive circle of inquiry, counter to being invalid, is a powerful tool to bring those things from concealment that logic alone cannot.

Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory… Horizonal

PALMER, R.E. (1969) Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

“Explanatory interpretation makes us aware that explanation is contextual, is ‘horizonal.’ It must be made within a horizon of already granted meanings and intentions. In hermeneutics, this area of assumed understanding is called preunderstanding.” (p24)

Annotation:

Interpretation for explanatory purposes works in a context of established meanings with granted intentions. In phenomenology this is defined as horizonal. In the Husserlian transcendental school this allows for bracketing of experience to be set, and in Heideggerian phenomenology this horizonality focuses on the pre-understanding that interpreters bring to what they are analysing. “Heidegger’s analysis indicated that ‘understanding’ and ‘interpretation’ are foundational modes of man’s being” (p42).

A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person… Not Functionalist or Deterministic

LEONARD, V.W. (1994) A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person. In: P. BENNER (Ed.), Interpretive Phenomenology: Embodiment, Caring, and Ethics in Heath and Illness. Sage Publications, Inc. pp43-64

“Disputes in hermeneutic interpretation resolve based on the plausibility of alternative interpretations, and the plausibility of an interpretation, cannot be reduced to a-priori-derived, cut-and-dried criteria.” (p61)

Annotation:
Ihde (2009) states that a criticism of phenomenology is that it is perceived as antiscientific and “locked into idealism or solipsism” (p23). Hirsch (1967, p166) criticises the hermeneutic circle’s circularity of thinking as an imprisonment of thought that can lead to self-confirming hypotheses in the interpreter. The nature of interpretation as understood within a holistic and phenomenological perspective acknowledges that a ‘correct’ interpretation cannot be produced by functionalist or deterministic hard science, as science is not suited to the explaining how humans process and experience the world. From a functionalist and deterministic perspective the hermeneutic methods are viewed at best with scepticism and at worst academic hostility.

A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person… Interpretive Analysis

LEONARD, V.W. (1994) A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person. In: P. BENNER (Ed.), Interpretive Phenomenology: Embodiment, Caring, and Ethics in Heath and Illness. Sage Publications, Inc. pp43-64

“Interpretive Analysis

Transcribed interviews, observational notes, diaries, and samples of human action are treated as text analogues for interpretive analysis. The data analysis in a hermeneutic study is carried out in three interrelated processes: thematic analysis, analysis of exemplars, and the search for paradigm cases. In the thematic analysis, each case (all interviews, field notes, etc.) is read several times in order to arrive at a global analysis. (…) From this, an interpretive plan emerges. Each interview is then read from the perspective of the interpretive plan. As this microanalysis is carried out, additional lines of inquiry may emerge from the data and are added to the interpretive plan. (…) From this analysis come ‘exemplars:’ stories or vignettes that capture the meaning in a situation in such a way that the meaning can then be recognized in another situation that might have very different objective circumstances. (…) The last aspect of the interpretive analysis involves the identification of paradigm cases: strong instances of particular patterns of meaning. Paradigm cases embody the rich descriptive information necessary for understanding how an individual’s actions and understandings emerge from his or her situational context: their concerns, practices and background meanings. They are not reducible to formal theory – to abstract variables used to predict and control. Rather, what are recognized are ‘family resemblances’ between a paradigm case and a particular clinical situation that one is trying to understand and explain.” (p59)

Annotation:
Through the use of a hermeneutic interpretative analysis of what the observed describe in their experiences as a microanalysis of the themes that are revealed from it. Leonard describes a three-part interrelated process comprising of the thematic analysis [internal], followed by analysis of exemplars [external] and a paradigm case search [imaginative variation]. This interpretative analysis models to Moustakas’ (1994) phenomenological research methodology. The exemplars in this case are external as they are dependent on other studies and are part of the researcher’s analysis rather than what the researcher is revealing in the subject. The looking for exemplars is an act of external validation. The paradigm case search appears to be health practice specific, and therefore not in its entirety useful beyond healthcare. What the paradigm case search does suggest though is a way to examine the interpretations made by the researcher to ensure that there are no additional explanations. This appears to be what the imaginative variation phase of a phenomenological research methodology seeks to do.

A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person… Criticism: No Clear Termination

LEONARD, V.W. (1994) A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person. In: P. BENNER (Ed.), Interpretive Phenomenology: Embodiment, Caring, and Ethics in Heath and Illness. Sage Publications, Inc. pp43-64

“The interpretive process is necessarily circular, moving back and forth between part and whole, and between the initial forestructure and what is being revealed in the data of the inquiry. (…) The interpretive process follows this part-whole strategy until the researcher is satisfied with the depth of his or her understanding. Thus the interpretive process has no clear termination.” (p57)

Annotation:
‘No clear termination’ is a point of criticism that hermeneutics encounters frequently. As the act of interpretation continues until the interpreter “is satisfied with the depth of his or her understanding” (p57), it is indeed dependent on the background that the interpreter has. 

A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person… Reception Theory

LEONARD, V.W. (1994) A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person. In: P. BENNER (Ed.), Interpretive Phenomenology: Embodiment, Caring, and Ethics in Heath and Illness. Sage Publications, Inc. pp43-64

“Heidegger claims that these interpretations are not generated in individual consciousness as subjects related to objects but rather are given in our linguistic and cultural traditions and make sense only against a background of significance. (…) Nothing can be encountered independent of our basic understanding. Every encounter is an interpretation based on our background.” (p52)

Annotation:
Barbatsis (2005) has used reception theory to arrive at a similar point as Leonard does referencing instead Heidegger. The context in which the experience is held only begins to make sense within the background of the person experiencing it. As Barbatsis states the meaning comes from understanding and interpreting the parts and whole of an experience from within the self. It is not in the object being experienced as Heidegger states. What Leonard adds to this is to give a concise appraisal, “Every encounter is an interpretation based on our background.” (p52) 

A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person… Fundamental Reason

LEONARD, V.W. (1994) A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person. In: P. BENNER (Ed.), Interpretive Phenomenology: Embodiment, Caring, and Ethics in Heath and Illness. Sage Publications, Inc. pp43-64

“Thus to understand a person’s behaviour or expressions one has to study the person in context. For it is only in context that what a person values and finds significant shows up.” (p51)

Annotation:
The fundamental reason for choosing to develop a phenomenological methodology is expressed by Leonard, “to understand a person’s behaviour or expressions one has to study the person in context. For it is only in context that what a person values and finds significant shows up” (p51). The context of an experience gives the parameters of how the experience can be understood and interpreted to visualise the studied experience. 

Postphenomenology and Technoscience… Synthesising Pragmatism

IHDE, D. (2009) Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. New York: State University of New York Press.

“The enrichment of pragmatism includes its recognition that ‘consciousness’ is an abstraction, that experience in its deeper and broader sense entails its embeddedness in both the physical or material world and its cultural-social dimensions. Rather than a philosophy of consciousness, pragmatism views experience in a more organism/environment model. The reverse enrichment from phenomenology includes its more rigorous style of analysis that develops variational theory, recognizes the role of embodiment, and situates this in a lifeworld particular to different epochs and locations.” (p19)

Annotation:
Pragmatism as a philosophy is enriched by seeing human ‘consciousness’ as a deeper embedment situated in a life-world within a socio-cultural context. This merges with phenomenology in order to analyses how to reveal this. Ihde’s postphenomenology makes connections more with Husserl’s transcendant version of phenomenology than it does with Heidegger’s existentialist version. As my study is Heideggerian I need to be careful what and who I synthesise postphenomenological ideas. What is important though is how pragmatism can be synthesised, which will be useful to ensure pragmatic aesthetics is synthesised into my thesis securely. 

The Aims of Interpretation… Preunderstanding Parallels

HIRSCH, E.D. (1976) The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

“Hence, I think Heidegger was right to extend the range of hermeneutics beyond the limited domain of man-made representations, since the fundamental character of interpretation is the same in all our cognitive processes. What Heidegger called the priority of pre-understanding is described by developmental psychologists as the primacy of the genre; by cognitive theorists (particularly those concerned with scientific knowledge) as the primacy of the hypothesis. On this theory, all cognition is analogous to interpretation in being based upon corrigible schemata, a useful phrase I take from Piaget. The model of a corrigible schemata, which was exemplified in the description of Piaget’s experiments, is, I think, a more useful and accurate model than that of the so-called hermeneutic circle. Unlike one’s unalterable and inescapable pre-understanding in Heidegger’s account of the hermeneutic circle, a schema can be radically altered and corrected.” (p32)

 

Annotation:
Heidegger’s pre-understanding that comes with a person to any experience has parallels in both psychology and cognitive theory. Psychologists refer to the primacy of the genre, while cognitive theorists refer to the primacy of the hypothesis. Hirsch suggest that these are analogous, and that “cognition is analogous to interpretation” (p32). But unlike a hermeneutic circle, (s)he prefers a schemata than a circle. The argument and preference is that a schema is easier to be “radically altered and corrected” (ibid.). It needs to be remembered here that Hirsch is concerned not with interpreting the interaction of experience but only speech between more than one person (which is a specific subset within an interaction experience). 

Holism without Skepticism… Circularity

BOHMAN, J.F. (1991) Holism without Skepticism: Contexualism and the Limits of Interpretation. In: D.R. HILEY, J.F. BOHMAN, and R. SHUSTERMAN (Eds.) The Interpretive Turn. Cornell University Press. pp129-154

“the background thesis makes all actions, theories, and expressions context dependent. Taken together, circularity and reference to a background exclude the possibility of reducing interpretations to semantic explication or to some other procedure for fixing determinate meanings without reference to holistic constraints. These two premises [_1&2] alone are sufficient to warrant scepticism about interpretation. It is commonplace in hermeneutics to argue that circularity need not be vicious.” (p137)

Annotation:
The fact that interpretation is circular, perspectival and exists within a socio-cultural context (meaning the interpreter’s actions and expressions are context dependent) does not mean that the circularity itself be vicious. Just because a determinate meaning cannot be achieved, due to such an existential problem of the individual’s understanding of being-in-the-world, doesn’t mean that understanding cannot be reached within using a hermeneutic circle. On the contrary. 

Representational Theory… Inauthentic Mediated World

KENNEY, K. (2005) Representational Theory. In: K. SMITH, S. MORIARTY, G. BARBATSIS and K. KENNEY (Eds) Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp99-116.

“Behaviourists attempt to observe and measure the real world directly. Phenomenologists are exclusively interested in a person’s introspective experience. Semioticians and rhetoricians try to understand the linkages between our internal world and the external world, and that linkage is necessary, they believe, because the external world is always mediated by our senses and our mind. Whereas rhetoricians have investigated how humans create and manipulate symbols in order to persuade other humans, semioticians have been more interested in how humans (and other animals) interpret all kinds of signs, including symbols, that were created by other people, as well as natural signs, including symbols, that were created by other people, as well as natural signs that may have resulted from plants, animals, or inorganic matter. Both rhetoricians and semioticians, therefore, are concerned with how ‘signs’ mediate’ between the external world and our internal ‘world,’ or how a sign ‘stands for’ or ‘takes the place of’ something from the real world in the mind of a person.” (p99)

Annotation:

We exist in a mediated world that in the digital age is sometimes a re-mediated world. This existence can be framed as inauthentic (a Heideggerian concept). How someone navigates and orientates their way through this mediation, making sense of and interacting in their world is important to understand for interaction design. There are a variety of qualitative methods to observe and reveal this processing. Kenney discusses what aspects Behaviourists, Phenomenologists, Semioticians, and Rhetoricians are interested in studying, and where they overlap or conflict with each other.

The main grouping between semiotics and rhetoric focus on the relationship within the internal and external world of the processing of semiotic signs, how the message is (re)mediated, perceived and understood. Behaviourists obviously are interested in the exhibited behaviour within the world, of the manifestation of how this process affects them. Whereas the phenomenologist is interested in the internal processes of how they experience the perception, understanding and reaction to the message that changes their behaviour.

Visual communication in this context is concerned with both the internal and external processing of the semiotic-facilitated meaning. It is concerned with the shaping of the semiotics externally in the design, but can also be used to reveal and visualise the phenomenological internal processes of the experience, to “convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures of simulacra” (Harman, 2007, p#)

Guerilla Metaphysics… Heidegger

HARMAN, G. (2007) Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing Company.

“What must be rejected from the start is the prevailing model of humans as transcending or negating the world, as critics who break loose from animal bondage and stand in a windy, starry space of freedom. We should be equally suspicious of those hermeneutic versions of critique that merely add the caveat that perfect transcendence is impossible.” (p#)

Annotation:
The Heideggerian phenomenological revealing of an experience is situated within a context and the world. It is not some permanent state of transcendence outside of that context or the world*. This is a reason why Husserlian transcendental phenomenology is not being followed in the thesis.

* may return and expand this point.