Philosophy of HCI - Post-mortem

So, I broke the rules - I decided to write about the tools before my final impressions on the course. Why you ask? First, because I find that this post is a better closing chapter than that. I wouldn't want to sound like a band who plays a nice epic final song at a concert and then comes back for an encore and completely breaks the experience. Not that I think this is some epic Queen song, quality wise, but please, let's not spoil the metaphor with technicalities.

Second, because I wanted to speak of how my use of tools during this course influenced my view of my idle times. That's because the most important consequence of this course is I'll never see idle times the same way again.

When I (and most of us) think of human-computer interaction, we think of humans doing something to computers (action) and computers response to this (reaction) in a cycle of communication until a task is completed (interaction). But not all interaction is two-way, and not all interaction is initiated with a purpose, and not all interaction preempts reciprocation.
Computers try to communicate much more than we request of them - they're always telling us what time it is, how much battery is left, how many emails on God know how many inboxes are begging for your attention. And these can be passive information, but most often than not are not - computers are needy, greedy beasts - "Hey, look at me, there's a very important email from your mom you must give your undivided attention to, right now!"
And we also tell computers the most stupid stuff sometimes - why do we spin the mouse around when we are bored, bringing an idle screen back to life and spinning the hard drive up? Are we now begging their attention? Asking for an interruption? Or is this just payback for all those notifications in improper times - "Hey, look, I moved your mouse for no reason whatsoever - who's needy now?"
Maybe I fixated a little too much on our first experiencement, but I'd like to think otherwise - I think it opened my eyes to a whole bunch of interactions that we, interaction designers, neglect - incidental interactions, accidental interactions, non-reciprocated interactions.
All of these are communication and should be studied, improved upon. And now I have more than a fixation - I have a purpose. I don't think I can pretend my thesis will go the same direction it was going only six months ago. I have you to thank and to blame, Emanuele, for killing any chance of me writing anything other than these tiny neglected interactions I had paid so little attention to before!

What tools did I use during Philosophy of HCI?

What kind of question is that, I ponder? The interesting thing is that studying philosophy requires not much more than a brain (one would joke that a brain with a liking for knowledge, but I digress). I would argue that, before anything, I used my brain a lot.

Ha ha, funny, you'd answer, we all use our brains for learning; but do we? If you're in a simple listen-and-repeat mode, your brain is being taken for a ride - you go to a lecture, you listen (or you waste away playing silly games on your laptop in the hopes that whatever seeps in through the cracks in our concentration accounts for learning) and you then repeat ready-made concepts in a test. We've all been there - able to answer some questions on a given subject, but unable to think critically about it. But if you don't allow yourself to philosophize during a philosophy course, what else are you going to do? I have seen philosophy courses being taught that way - teacher blabbers philosopher's names and their schools of thought, students "learn" them, never think of what they had to say, game over. Not this course though - we heard of movies, football matches, idleness, but not of Spinoza, Kant, Deleuse, Nietzsche. Not much space for easily digested factoids on philosophy there.

So we were not taken for a ride - or maybe we were, but we had to pedal our own bikes this time. Like one of these nice GPS-enhanced countryside explorations Emanuele talked so much about, we were powering our own little exploration of the field and, in the end, our 'brain muscles' hurt, but have we seen some beautiful stuff in the way!

Another good friend of mine that I took to these rides was my trusty smartphone. Nowadays, saying "I brought a smartphone" is like saying "I wasn't naked" - we all carry these little buggers everywhere. But just like our brains, it's not having one that counts, but how you use them. From the very first "experiencement", I used mine as a chamber of isolation, pumping tunes into my head, as a source of easily searchable information, or simply a nice escape for my idle times. Oh, what effect this course had on what I think of idle times - but that I'll leave for another post.

Just as when riding a bike, I could definitely finish this course only using my 'brain muscles', but my trusty sidekick was there. When biking through the marshes and hills and woods of the subject, I could find solace - and distraction, and sometimes some cheap satisfaction during times of doubt by quickly Googling away some question - thanks to my phone. My sidekick. My side-brain. 

Last 'Experiencement' - Describing the world in pictures, and back again in words.

During a week (I know, it was supposed to be two weeks, but I have a semi good excuse) I collected pictures that, to me, should synthesize the day. It is becoming more common than ever to express yourself in pictures - what was once the domain of the semi professional photographer or the tourist, that entity whose eyes and hands seem sometimes to be fused to a camera, is now an everyday happenstance thanks to the likes of Instagram and its super-easy way of destroying applying cheesy effects to otherwise good mundane pictures.

Instagram is most definitely not the only culprit of this renewed culture of communicating by pictures. There is 4chan, the western equivalent of the Japanese 2chan forums. It's an anonymous forum where people feel free to express themselves in slurs words and porn pictures, home to the meme phenomenon. Below, a rare image of a rather innocent 4chan picture thread (they are usually a lot less suitable for a blog post you want your professor and colleagues to see):

From there were born subcultures such as the demotivationals and memes, pictures that express an opinon in a zany way and can completely replace a reply in an internet conversation:

The pinnacle of this type of textless communication is the recent rise of Relay, an instant messaging application where instead of writing, you can search a collection of community-curated animated GIF images to express that hard-to-put-in-words feeling you want to convey. It's specially addictive when talking to close friends, with whom you already have strong non-verbal communication skills:

So back to my week. I had a very stressful week, I had visits (something I love, but can't cope very well with), shitloads of work, schoolwork and, in the weekend, a birthday party to organize. I see the narrative rather well in my sequence of images, but your mileage may vary (even after lightly describing my week, you probably won't be pointed to the same feelings those pictures express to me). These pictures carry a lot of prägnanz, as in they carry a lot more significance than their concise nature seems to imply.

As the culture of non-verbal expression sees a rebirth and more and more people use memes outside of internet context, it's fairly clear that this multi-dimensional forms of expression will only become more commonplace, as they allow us to express things where verbal communication simply falls short. Walk around the streets of Tallinn and you'll see meme faces pasted to light posts, announcing parties and sometimes even replacing spokespeople in advertising. The meme culture is here to stay (which only confirms Richard Dawkins' idea that the meme is the cultural equivalent of the gene, spreading our cultural phenomena in the zeitgeist the same way sex spreads our genetic material in the gene pool).

Moral Artifacts - Philosophy of HCI

What is an artifact? A man-made object, an archaeologist might answer. A product of the social behavior of an individual or group, a sociologist would reply. Anything that bears information about the culture of its creator, an anthropologist would muse. Technologists have a different approach - artifacts are byproducts of software developments, undesirable alterations in data, visual glitches. Apparently, some artifact did something bad to a technologist some day in the distant past and left a negative bias forever tainting their relationship.

Taking into view this bias, can an artifact be "bad" or "good"? Can it be "moral"?

If an artifact bears cultural information, it can carry the moral baggage of its creator. If it's the product of a social behavior, it can be intrinsically bad or good. It is so because there was such intent in its creation, or because it is so heavily shaped by its moral context that this moral bias cannot be extricated from the artifact.

But the most interesting interpretation of a moral artifact it that of artifacts that can shape morality through their usage. The most obvious example that occurs to me is the condom.

It began as a form of birth control for the 15th century nobility and swinged in importance as prophylactic and contraception for centuries, but the difficulty and pricing kept them from mass adoption until the 19th century, when it, although illegal in many places (damn you, religious morals!), became the most popular method of birth control. In these years, a surge in 'moral' rigidity made ignorance of proper sexual behavior (prophylaxis, contraception, abortion etc) widespread and the condom fought this surge in unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But it wasn't until the 1910s when cement dipping and later latex made mass production of condoms possible.

In the '30s, the Anglicans relaxed their disapproval of contraception (something the Catholics are still to do) and the two World Wars made condoms still more important as American soldiers received a ration of condoms and were instructed on their proper use. This created a generation used to contraception and STD prevention. The free sex movement of the '60s would not be possible without condoms, nor would AIDS have been kept at bay in the '80s without them.

Even now, when we are in specially reactionary times (and for the first time in years we see condom fatigue in many cultures), condoms are an inextricable part of our culture, and it's difficult to tell who shaped whom: are condoms to blame for our sexual culture, or is it the other way around? One way or the other, it's undeniable: the condom is both a fruit of and a huge influencer of current culture and morals.

A (atypical) week in pictures

Cognitive experiences mediated by technology - Three examples

It's really difficult to come up with only three cognitive experiences mediated by technology. If you were born in the 90s, you probably know no other type. I was born in the late 70s but still, raised by a geek father and a very open-minded mother, I was exposed to technology in a way that most children raised in the 80s weren't, at least not in Brazil: I had an Atari, dad brought a computer home and started learning to code COBOL, I got to play tons of computer games and started coding myself at a very early age.

All that is to say that most of my cognitive experiences are mediated by technology in the electronic sense (the sense most people think of when saying technology). To filter out the crud, I'll focus on experiences that used to be analog to me until a few years ago:

Navigating is one of my passions. I love paper maps and moving around, and also love urban life and exploring the nooks and crannies of different cities. Until a few years ago, navigating using digital devices was cumbersome (it was only 2006 when I was still printing maps from Google Maps, itself an evolution of going to an airport bookstore and buying a city map). Back then, I'd plan a trip and prepare maps so I could locate myself within the city, waypoints in marker pen and annotations galore, like where to take the correct buses etc. Nowadays I use my smartphone for most navigation, from Google Maps for general mapping to Foursquare to find nice places to eat and drink and Waze to drive around with spoken instructions in Portuguese (it saves some cognitive overhead of listening to spoken English). Nowadays I'm infatuated with an app called Trafi Eesti (iOS and Android) which gives me public transit routes in a way that kicks Google Maps' ass! It can route in different public transit solutions and can also remember your favorite routes and stops so you know exactly when trolley 3 will pass Kaubamaja or the 11 will leave Kunstiakadeemia. Lots of love there!

Speaking of love (and since we'll be talking of long-distance relationships), my relationship with Cau began online and we had never seen each other's face for a long time before I finally decided to travel 500km to see her. We remained living apart for many months after that, communicating via social networking and smartphone apps. This has shaped the way we communicate even now: we love sharing links with each other so even if we're in the same room, we may send a Facebook message every now and then. We are constantly in touch via WhatsApp and, since I'm notified of her messages on my Pebble, I don't even need to be actively looking at my phone to know her whereabouts online and offline: if she posts something to my Facebook timeline, my wrist vibrates, ditto if I'm at work and she checks-in on Foursquare. It even sounds creepy told this way, but this is public information we choose to share (a whole tangle of complications itself, since most people's sense of privacy is completely distorted nowadays, but I'll leave that for another discussion). In a sense, our intimate space is the size of the distance between us, because we're never really apart thanks to technology.

We love watching TV shows together, but decided that, even though cable is very cheap in Tallinn, we'd become cord-cutters: most of the TV shows we like are easier to watch over Netflix, which is actually even cheaper than cable. So we instead subscribe just to fast internet and built a home-theater PC. It replaced the cable box, radio and my XBox 360. I now buy games online via Steam and a single box deals with everything entertainment-connected in the house: no extra remote controllers, no tangle of cables. It actually reduced piracy, as weird as it might sound: we never get frustrated that there's noting to watch on TV or no new games to play, so the urge to download movies via Torrents has decreased, instead of increasing a lot like I predicted it would when we decided to abandon cable and a game-dedicated box. Really unexpected.

There are many experiences more that were re-shaped by digital technology, but these are very poignant examples and I believe they illustrate the concept well. 

Phylosophy of HCI: Experiencement 1, Gaps of inactivity.

As this week's "experiencement" I decided to make a week of rides to work fully internet free.
The decision was not random: my apartment is fairly open-plan, meaning that me and my girlfriend work, cook and watch TV in the same space, so this experiment would be impossible from home.
Also, as I leave work at the same time as many colleagues, we usually take the bus back home chatting, so I wouldn't be able to really disconnect, at least not from the people around me.

The first day I failed miserably, and I'll tell you how. At first I thought that if I just sat down and "did nothing", stayed away from my phone and did not access any online or offline content, I'd be isolated.

But I did not count on my Pebble.

The Pebble is a smartwatch, that is, it's a connected computation device disguised as a watch. Most of the times it's innocently telling me the time and the weather. But it also shows me the number of unread emails, text messages and missed phone calls.
That alone wouldn't be a problem, if it was all the Pebble did. But it also buzzes a very perceivable vibration every time I get a Facebook message, a new email, an incoming phone call, a calendar alert, a WhatsApp chat.
This failure made me realize something very interesting that I had not noticed before: it's been almost one month that my phone has been on mute, as I no longer need audible notifications of anything, as the Pebble successfully eliminated this need for me. I'm hyperconnected, but in a way that's unobtrusive to other people around me.

It made me feel good.

In the second day, I left my "watch" behind. It allowed me to completely isolate myself from the internet, but not from ambient noise. It felt interesting to be immersed in the background buzz. I don't know if it's because of my long diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder, but I'm quite used to daydreaming. I disconnect with the environment all the time, always going to my weird little internal, magical place. But by not being pulled back by constant notifications allowed me to go deeper into this, let's say, meditation.

On the third day, I wore headphones. Not with music playing, but just as a sort of earplug. It felt interesting to be in this extra sensory isolation. I almost dosed off, but not quite.

I traveled for 40 minutes in complete meditatory silence.

I must report that it felt a lot longer than using my phone.

By the way, talking about headphones, silence and background noise, I bumped into this while reading up for this post: John Cage composed a piece of music called 4'33" where he "performs" four and a half minutes of silence. Not pure silence, but that silence full of the little noises of day to day life. It's a beautiful thing, although you might not agree it's music. There's also an app now for you to record your own performance of 4'33" and to listen to other people "performing" it. I don't have an iPhone, so I couldn't try it.

But I'd love to.