Many of these terms have been overexposed. The word interaction has lately been applied to just about any relationship between people and things, as though shapes interact in a Picasso painting. More properly, the word implies deliberation over the exchange of messages. Thus you don't interact with a book, you just read it. But using electronic communication, you can interact with other people who are not physically present, who take part in the interaction at some other time. Thus through digital media, we interact indirectly.
p5
When a term spreads through a culture quickly, it often represents a passing wave of seeing the explainable world in some particular way. Then the metaphor wears off. The need to explain new technologies in terms of older realities generally tends to diminish. Thus automobiles eventually ceased to be horseless carriages.
p10
We can observe plenty of annoyanace in the form of petty information pollution ... its purveyors assume no more responsibility for information pollution than nineteenth-century industrialists did for dumping sludge in the river. The assumptions behind its cultural ambition and its availability are made at the source, not the destination. Proactive information feeds treat all quiet time and space as something that needs filling. Portable and embedded devices take these streams out from your computer screen and into the world, where they are more difficult to turn off.
p17
Computers became the first technology to provide two-way engagement. Despite common misuse of the word, not everything that is operable is interactive. A film may stir deep reactions; a chisel might let a sculptor feel that work is flowing; a lathe may have several buttons and controls; a telephone lets people interact remotely; yet none of these technologies is itself interactive. Only when technology makes deliberative and variable response to each in a series of exchanges is it at all interactive. Such exchange is like a conversation in how participants coordinate process as well as content by means of acknowledgements, corrective interruptions, and cues.
p20
The role of computing has changed. Information technology has become ambient social infrastructure. This allies it with architecture. No longer just made of objects, computing now consists of situations.
p21
While acknowledging large philosophical questions, the discipline of interaction design tends to focus on the mechanisms of perception. For a long time, a cognitive dualism has underlain behavioral approaches to the design of technology. Now some residual connotations of analytical behaviorism must be overturned.
To begin, there exists a claim that only humans have a conception of the world as it is from no particular standpoint. Wittgenstein said that a cat can find its way around the neighborhood--but that it cannot see itself finding its way around the neighborhood. To do the latter would require a reflective "survey perspective" that appears to be distinctly human. For an example of such a perspective, to count the number of windows in your house, you do not have to be in your house. To recognize your house in an aerial photo, you do not need to have seen it from that orientation before.
p32
Many of the most prominent studies of spatial mental mapping have examined the readily documentable process of wayfinding. The Siegel and White studies of 1975 established the distinction of route and survey perspectives, as well as the use of information processing in wayfinding. Much subsequent study has reinforced the view that navigation consists of making decisions at landmarks, even if the resulting "picture" is less of a map than a recombined collage.
p33
Spatial Literacy. One learns to read a city without the aid of books and maps, and to do so partly on the basis of experience with culturally similar cities; some individuals and some cultures develop more ability than others at this.
As with most cultural differences, spatial dispositions show up in language. For example, while an Englishman might live "in" a street because a street was once a public living room, an American lives "on" a street because it is merely an address, and to judge by current naming practices, would prefer to live on a road, a lane, a court--anything but a sreet.
p37
In our most habitual contexts, embodiment provides a continuing basis for human-centered design. For much as the body imposes a schma on space, architecture imposes a schema on the body. The proportions, image, and embellishments of the body are reflected in the proportions, image, and embellishments of buildings. Similarly, cities reflect the form of their buildings, cultural landscapes reflect the structure of their cities and towns, and mythologies orient all of these in the world. Although the sciences have extended this scale of artifice farther into the immense and the microscopic, the orders of magnitude nearest to human dimensions still affect everyday experience most directly.
p47
Setting describes objective space. Context is not the setting itself, but the engagement with it, as well as the bias that setting gives to the interactions that occur within it. Environment is the sum of all present contexts. Environment is not an "other" but a percption of persistent possibilites for action.
p48
Places emerge at crossovers between infrastructures. Where one flow prompts, regulates, or feeds another, development occurs. Where the boats met the trains, great cities grew. Increasingly, such connections occur between digital and physical infrastructures. Electronic communication has intensified, not undermined, the hubs of actvity in the world's entrepots.
p48
Cognitive science has emphasized mental representations at the expense of context. "Thus we have produced reams of studies on mentalistic phenomena such as "plans" and "mental models," and "cognitive maps," with insufficient attention to the world of physical artifacts. Designers more interested in rich description than in predictive models tend to welcome such emphasis on artifacts. As a way of describing the intrinsic unity of context, activity, and intentionality, "activity theory" has become a useful expression.
p51
Typological Abstraction. A theory of place for interaction design incorporates embodied cognition into a workable design philosophy through types. In a single design notion, type unites periphery, passivity, phenomenology, adaptability, affordance, facility, appropriateness, and scale. Thus it is a difficult term, which means different things to different disciplines. For present purposes, consider type not as a functional classification, but as a generative design abstraction. This is a central idea for more context-based pervasive computing, and it should help bring interaction design into closer relationship with architecture.
A type may be as much about form as function. For example, the town square is a distinct urban type more on the basis of its intrinsic form than on its uses, which may vary from week to week, and century to century. Indeed the square is memorable for how its configuration affords so many uses, the accumulation of which increase its resonance as a type.
p55
Basic principle of interaction design. Know when to eliminate an obsolete "legacy" operation, when to automate, and when to assist an action. Know when to empower, not overwhelm.
p85
Among the ways to achieve more natural interaction design, there is none quite so obvious as using position for input. You do not have to be a genius to understand the potential of a device whose sole instructions are to take it somewhere and turn it on. Maybe a third step would be to pop in a filter for what you want to know: plant identification, history of a city, bar hopping, tracking your friends, finding your tribe.
p89
A model represents a theory. It is a perennial failing to mistake the representation for the reality, however. The map is not the territory. A representation shows this, not that, and does so with some particular purpose. A representation may be about something that does not exist. Two representations can appear alike and yet refer to different things.
p115
These settings accentuate the social aspects of information technology. Identification remains essential to place, to belongings, and to trust. This is highly subjective of course. People tend to identify with settings they have casually appropriated, such as some corner of a park where they go to exercise--and not, by contrast, with settings that monitor, control, and foist a guaranteed experience on them.
p118
One set of situational types
At work...
At home...
On the town...
On the road...
p120
As many designers like to speculate, located documentation could be implemented as an "augmented reality" overlay based on a comprehensive model. The often-cited Architectural Anatomy project at Columbia University demonstrated the early rudiments of this possibility by modeling the bare structural system of a building and mapping appropiate views of it onto transparent goggles worn into that building.
p124
Many designers recite urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg's principle of the "third place": a location for conviviality that supplements home and work as a site for everyday life.
p132
Communication technology assists in physical gatherings. The first thing said on Alexander Graham Bell's phone was "come here, Mr. Watson." Less directly, advertising on broadcast media increases the importance of "destinations." When coupled with the reality that people tend to decide where they are going before they get in their cars, and tend to spend their money near wherever they get out of their cars, electronic inducements to meet someplace assume great social and architectural importance.
p134
It's a short step from polling to cruising: this is, social circulation in search of one's kind. In civil society the promenade formed a gracious opportunity for its participants (not necessarily so graciously, in their minds) to check each other out. Various urban types from the boulevard to the boardwalk to the grand stair at the theater have served this end. The history of technolgoy has yielded new variations. For example, the railroads introduced the resort hotel, where the social cruising could be carried out over a week-long visit, with the assurance that only those of similar means were present.
p135
Tourists want to see, and be photographed at, known monuments. As described earlier, an induced demand for tourism feeds on clear landmarks, around which often only incidentally related resort amenities are built.
Given the millions of photographs that are taken over and over of exactly the same views, the camera has to be the key technolgy for these sites. The "overexposure" of particular sites suggests a steep increase in demand; people want to see what everyone else is seeing. Increasingly, tourists bring along information, often in the form of guidebooks, which shapes what they see and how they see it. Guidebook selections distinguish tourism market segments.
p139
Among technologies that influence settlement patterns, perhaps none has had greater impact than the automobile. Moreover, the car itself has become a place where many people spend much of their day. A typical car depends on several internal microprocessors to operate, and now research has advanced communications to and from the vehicle as well. Citizen's band radios and cellular phones already provide plenty of chat, for which they are rightly resented as a hazardous distraction to driving. Next come navigation systems; by mid-2000, Hertz has deployed its NeverLost system in over 30,000 rental cars. General Motors expected to have a million subscribers to its OnStar navigation service by the end of the year 2000. The auto industry has taken a liking to the rearview mirror as a sky-visible site for telecommunications. One maker, Gentax corporation, already has mirrors with "GPS system interfaces, cell phones, microphones, emergency notification systems and and like" on more than a dozen vehicle models in North America.
p140
For most of us other than the captives of sprawl, walking remains the most fundamental form of mobility. Walking gives scale. Interface designers in search of natural technologies might focus here. Technologies that we can use while walking are the most truly portable.
Many devices are light enough to carry comfortably but are heavier in terms of usability; they require us to step out of pedestrian traffic, or even to sit down to use them. Many skills and perceptions change when one is walking. Some are more acute than when we are still and others are blunted. This simple distinction begins a typology of portable device design.
p141
Scales of Place:
Body < Wearables and Portables < Rooms and Buildings < Neighborhoods
p143
What we choose to build matters just as much as how it looks, or how well we can make it operate. This choice is largely a social process; proposing what to do involves negotiation. Part advocacy, part virtuoso authorship, part ethnography, part engineering science, and part architecture to live by, interaction design needs conscientious multidisciplinary discourses.
p147
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is not different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training; is the principal mark the distinguishes the professions from the sciences.
p148
The need to connect architecture and interaction design comes from overlapping subject matters and escalating social consequences. The two disciplines converge on the design of operable inhabitable systems. The path toward connection involves a shift from foreground objects to background experiences. The more recent discipline's path already follows that route. It is an evolution worth examining.
p154
By limiting design condideration to that which is numerically predictable or visually fashionable, we produce a lot of junk. By expanding the design of context-based information technology to reflect appreciation, experience, usability, and desire, more of us can contribute to the cultural assimilation of so much technical production. We do not seem to mind being surrounded with books or buildings because those have been through much more such cultural deliberation. Depending on choices we face in design practices, interactive systems could similarly assume cultural meaning. In any case, they seem destined to surround us.
p168
Digital ground is shorthand for a complex proposition: Interaction design must serve the basic human need for getting into place. Like architecture, and increasingly as a part of architecture, interaction design affects how each of us inhabits the physical world.
To engineers focused on means, this appeal toward ends may seem to philosophical. Yet philosophical questions seem more important than ever. Whether by design or default, technology has allowed a huge shift from a political attachment to a single home place toward a cultural connection with a multiplicity of nonhome places. Tribalism and nostalgia do little good in a networked world. A wholesome attitude to place has come to mean something else. More than ever, many places influence most lives, even the lives of peole who do not move around. Now more of us are on the move than ever before. To the Earth's millions of migrants and refugees, life takes place in ways outside rooted origins. An unprecedented class of "high-tech nomads" call any number of places home. For us, technology provides not only mobility but also ways to connect. Because this activity is so often mediated, improved design can shape our desire and ability to connect with our surroundings.
p172
Any philosophical agenda for situated design must compare place and space, place and community, or place and placelessness. Without going deeply into the dialectics of such comparisons, which fill volumes in their own right, it is worth briefly noting some distinctions. This should help clarify what place has come to mean and how our present concern reflects an intellectural watershead change.
p175
Perhaps the simplest distinction between space and place was given by Yi-Fu Tuan: "Space is movement; place is rest."
p176
The only way to treat such symptoms [of dislocation] is to change their basic cause. However powerful these many manifestations may seem, this distress is more fundamentally a consequnce of a modern philosophy in which place scarecely bears mention, but space and time have become primary constructors of experience. Evertying points to questions and reconsiderations of value--but not necessarily to relinquishing the quality of life.
p181
The notion of place does not have to consist of a nostalgia for origins, the perception of place does not consist solely of discovery but involves the active construction of insideness and outsideness.
Normally a place reflects a tradition of appropriateness. As Edward Relph put it, "Places are defined less by unique locations, landscape, and communities than by the focusing of experiences and intention onto particular settings." Thus why we can speak of the identity *of* a place, we must also admit identification *with* a place. Place is as much about subjective insideness as objective boundaries.
p182
Lives themselves are the places people know, and the kaleidoscope of cities and countries around them just keeps turning.
p186
Getting into Place: Architecture, Interaction and Ground
The cultural geography raised here may seem like a digression, but it is not. Meeting the design challenge of pervasive computing has to involve some larger, unquantifiable pictures of place and community. Supporting the way we belong to multiple places and communities has to improve our dialoges on what those places and communities are. A place is not just some positional coordinates. Community is not just a marketer's mailing list. Rather these are complex, subjective perceptions in which the nature of mediated interactions plays a vital role. When experience flows we get into place. Flow is of course an essential goal of interaction design, and fixity is an essential goal of architecture. Now the two join. To complement the spaces of information with the contexts for getting into place, it helps to think in terms of ground.
p190
Places are essentially repositories of value, although not necessarily of measurable, convertible, instrumental value. Indeed, places are accumulations of capital, whose increase needs more accurate economic representation. Depleting that kid of capital cannot be treated as free goods or net income. Correcting this accounting error has become the most fundamental goal of practical environmentalism.
p193