Designing Experience
DICK RIJKEN

I thought about renaming this presentation with a term of John Perry Barlow's: `re-experientializing information', because that is rather accurate. The main points of my speech are about designing experience rather than information.

My speech is roughly structured as follows. First, I will talk about complexity, which is actually the reason that interaction design emerged as a new field. Interactive systems have existed for ages, but they were usually so simple that there was no real need to think explicitly about interaction in designing.

Secondly, I will talk about information ecologies. Large network structures like the Internet should not be regarded as systems, but rather as ecologies.

Then we'll come to the main part of my speech, which deals with experience.

I'll close with examples from our education program.

I'll tell you a little bit about my own background. The Utrecht School of the Arts has four faculties: Music, which is the traditional conservatory; the Faculty of Visual Art and Design, which used to be the Art Academy; the Faculty of Theatre and Drama and the Faculty of Art, Media and Technology.

UTRECHT SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, NL

- Faculty of Art, Media and Technology:

- Audio-Visual Design (4 yrs)

- Music Technology (4 yrs)

- Image and Media Technology (4 yrs)

Founded:

1990: Interaction Design (175 st, 4 yrs)

1992: Euro-MA Int. Multimedia (15 st, 1 yr)

1994: Centre for Interaction Design

The AM & T faculty was founded in 1988 and has four four-year programs. The first one, audio-visual design, is like old media. They make television productions and do a lot with documentaries, for example. The second, music technology, focuses on applications of computers and electronic instruments in music and electronic performance and composition. The third one is image and media technology, which basically focuses on things like computer graphics and computer animation. I'm head of the Department of Interaction Design, and the main product of that until now has been the four year curriculum in interaction design. We've been working at that since 1990.

At that time, multi-media basically didn't exist. So for some students it was really strange. They started the course in `91--the first batch. And they will graduate next year as multimedia designers, which they never anticipated when they started their studies. And this is an example of the kinds of changes that we all have to deal with in our field. For a curriculum, it means that we change twice a year to keep up.

Since 1992, we have a master's of art program in interactive multi-media, which is much more practice-oriented. It focuses on things like CD-i and CD-Rom production and design. This year we started the Center for Interaction Design, an expertise center connected to the curriculum that attempts to make accessible all the knowledge, experience and expertise in the field.

C o m p l e x i t y

So what's complexity all about? To begin with, we'll soon have a rapid convergence of all kinds of different industries. The media industry, computing industry, telecommunications industry, entertainment industry, consumer products and professional products will all merge into one industry. This one huge, digital industry is the backbone of the information society. All the old products will disappear and we'll have new ones that we don't even know about yet.

I think this sentence sort of sums it up --all information will be inside computers and computers will be everywhere.

So the question it leaves us with is: how can we feel like human beings? How can we feel at home in cyberspace? Yesterday, Amy Bruckman said cyberspace complements real space. Yes, but real space was the only thing we use to have. So reality will change in its entirety because of this added kind of space.

So what is the aim of our interaction design curriculum? Imagine that you're 17 or 18 years old and you come to us next year. It's `95 and you will graduate in `99. What will the world look like in `99? No-one has a clue. That's the main difficulty of designing a four-year curriculum -- to design it so that you teach things to people that will still be useful four years from now. How does one do that?

' E x t e r n a l ' . C o m p l e x i t y

What do we interact with?

- Tools: action, choice

- Media: submission, acceptance

Information Ecologies:

- immersion, mutual definition, evolution, growth

Design? One might speak of two kinds of complexity: external and internal. External complexity is concerned with the question: what actually is it that we interact with? We used to interact with hammers and all kinds of different tools. And we use to interact with word processors. So the tool perspective is a very traditional and effective one for some computer products. The word processor is a tool that I make words with. Translated into human terms, tools are about action and choice. As a user, I determine what happens. I determine the content of the system. The computer as a medium is a secondary idea.

If the computer is a medium in the traditional sense, then the main idea from the user's point of view is submission and acceptance. That means that someone else made a selection or content or whatever and I look at that content and process it in some way. But the difference between tools and medium is the difference between active and passive.

Both of these perspectives are outdated or they will be very soon. All kinds of hybrid products are starting to appear. You're using your tv as a shopping tool; multimedia will appear on desktops in office environments. The concept of information ecology, which is important in our educational program, provides us with a clearer picture of what is happening. The Internet is really a very good example: a huge ecosystem where everything depends on everything else. It's like a giant web of relationships and the key word there is immersion. That's very important. As a user, I'm not outside the system. It use to be: this is me and this is the computer. With an information ecology, I'm just one player inside the ecology. I shape the ecology and it shapes me. This reciprocal definition is at the core of the idea of an information ecology. It's a mutual process. Information ecologies evolve and grow in unexpected, unpredictable ways.

So what does this mean for design?

Designing becomes problematic. You can't really design anything anymore. I can't say: well, this is what I want so this is what I'm making and that's that. When users become consumers as well as producers of information, I must design a kind of `pre-facilitation'. As a designer, I must insure that the users will be able to make their own information, to shape their own environment, to create their own home in cyberspace. I can't make their home for them.

This became obvious when we did some exercises with `home' in our education. It's very difficult to explicitly design a home for anybody. And so the idea of home is very much something that will have to grow. But who sets up the preconditions? That's the idea behind the ecology. It's the designer who creates preconditions that facilitate. It's a bit like what Amy Bruckman said yesterday: the designer has to facilitate growth. So what you're designing is not a plant, but a seed. And users will allow that seed to grow. Rather then one activity, design now is a continuing process. I'm constantly monitoring what's going on and making slight adjustments.

Kevin Kelley addresses the idea of a swarm system in his recently published book Out of Control. He talks about ants and all kinds of eco-systems. A swarm system is more general, but the swarm systems in his book are also a good model of information ecologies. They're unpredictable, you can't control them, they have side effects you'll probably never predict, and so forth.

So where does that leave the designer? We have a bit of a problem here. The obvious (and I think the right) thing to do is just to go back to the user. Simply to look at what's going on inside the homes where we put our technology. Try and put yourself in the place of that user.

' I n t e r n a l ' . C o m p l e x i t y

What characterizes interaction?

Information

Communication

Experience and Action

Rich experience: body, mind, soul

re-experientialize information

Now we're headed for the second kind of complexity, which is internal. We're witnessing a shift from information to experience. The idea of information processing is: there is the information and here I am interpreting it. Reading text from a screen or looking at tables, for example.

The next step (and this is mainly what things like multimedia do) is to introduce a much fuller experience in the interaction. I'm not just looking at information. I'm actively involved in manipulating information. For example, if there is a human being on my screen talking to me, it's completely different than a table or a piece of text. Someone talking to me produces a different emotional relationship between me and the computer, or between me and the person. So what am I having a relationship with, anyway?

There's a clear shift from information and communication to experience. And especially to experience and action. Two things become one: what I experience and what I do. And I think that is the crux of the information society. As a designer, you must allow other people to act. So I'm not designing things for people to look at; I'm designing environments that people act in. This makes the experience very rich. It involves the body, mind and soul. Computer games are a wonderful example of a completely physical type of experience. No-one would call a computer game information. It just doesn't make sense. In a computer game, I'm actively involved in manipulating all the things on the screen as fast as possible. Computer games are emphatically physical and body-oriented.

We've been dealing with the mind for tens of thousands of years. And with the soul, the spiritual side of things. Our information technology will force us to make moral judgements. To really examine the core of our value systems. And those are dimensions that deal with spirituality and give meaning to the world in a deeper sense. That's where John Barlow's code comes in, the idea of re-experientializing information.

In the information society, I'm the one who makes truth. I'm the one who makes information while acting. I am experiencing while acting. So what does that mean for interaction design? I've listed all of the central issues as we see them. And nothing is what it seems.

I n t e r a c t i o n . D e s i g n

--Nothing is what it seems--

Time? Space?

Information Ecologies

Local Experience=Local Action=Local Meaning

= local Responsibility

Everything is Debatable

What happens to time? How much time is spent in an information environment? You don't know. The user knows. The user determines how much time they want to spend. If I make a movie, it lasts one hour and thirty minutes. If I make a CD-Rom, nobody knows.

What happens to space? What happens to space when I'm telepresent and controlling a huge robot on Mars? I do this (makes a gesture with one hand on a knob) and the robot does this (waves his arm over his head). What does that do to my sense of space, to the way I do my spatial reasoning? Nobody knows. Information ecologies are very important issues. They prompt you to think of facilitation, evolution and growth. And of the idea of non-linearity of information. Information isn't what it seems. It has many different branches and one item of information can have multiple meanings, depending on how I arrived at it. That's strange: meaning is out the door. Actually, meaning is in the user. The user creates meaning.

Like John Barlow said yesterday, everything is debatable. Non-linearity is part of the reason why. I can get anywhere from anywhere. So I create my own paths, my own meaning, my own truths.

Another important aspect is the multi-dimensionality of information and structures. To a graphic designer, a page is a page. To an interaction designer, a page can be anything. It can be an entrance to any number of different layers behind it. Any little region on the screen can have a number of other things attached to it. So things aren't what they seem. That old word processor with its screen is now a super-duper, multi-user game, a graphical mud that the user can operate.

The central idea is that if you focus on the user, local experience and local action, then giving local meaning is a local responsibility. Since nobody is telling me what the truth is anymore, I have to make it for myself. So I'm responsible for what I do.

To a degree, the information society creates a form of existentialism. In a way, existentialism is very much a European branch of philosophy.

When I was in Canada about a year ago, I saw a T-shirt poking fun at Jean-Paul Sartre. I think it showed his answering machine. It said:

(I'm not here, you're not here, there's no message, there's no beep)

The idea is that existentialism is a negative, nihilist way of looking at life. But if you actually read Jean-Paul Sartre, this is not the case. It's about freedom of choice. It's about responsiblity. It's about accepting responsibility for your actions. So the information society is about responsibility. The difference between a hierarchically structured organization and a network is: if I'm a boss of a hierarchy, I don't have to be responsible. I just tell people what to do. When to shut up. If I'm a player in a network relating to all the other players, I have to take responsibility for my role in the network. If I don't perform well, I'll soon be out of the network. So if we change from a hierarchical society to one structured much more like a network, it greatly increases my responsibility for what I do.

Let's look at an example of how information can become experience.

ECHTE LIEFDE DOORSTAAT ALLE STORMEN

ECHTE LIEFDE HEELT ALLE WONDEN 

ECHTE LIEFDE OVERWINT

ECHTE LIEFDE MAAKT BLIND

This example is from an assignment that we did in one of our courses. It's a very small thing, but it neatly sums up the essence of what I'm trying to say. The assignment was: design a little environment that people act in. Again, the emphasis was on acting. This is the information. Actually, it's a Dutch poem. I'll translate it for the English speakers. It's about love and hate. That was part of the assignment. The assignment was: make a story of love and hate and don't use any roses, because that's too corny. So the poem goes: `Real love resists all storms, real love heals all wounds, real love conquers, real love makes blind'.

What happens when you make this information, this black text on a white screen interactive? (looks up at a computer-generated screen of roses). Roses. I'm sorry.

A part of the poem has disappeared. What can I do? I can move it two ways: towards the love side or the hate side. If I move it towards the love side, it's nothing but roses (manipulates the mouse so that roses appear on the screen) and the entire poem is present.

If I move it towards the hate side, (manipulates the mouse so that a line from the poem appears on the screen: real love makes blind) barbed wire appears. It's an elegant and simple example of how to present this to someone and allow them to explore this little space by themselves.

I n t e r a c t i o n . D e s i g n . E d u c a t i o n

Curriculum Structure

Human-centred approach

Examples...

I want to talk a little bit about the structure of our education. I'll begin with the curriculum structure and explain exactly what we mean by `human-centered'. Everybody says they're human-centered, but in general, it's rather a hollow term. I also want to talk about a project we did with our third-year students. It focused on the idea of being at home in the digital faculty, which is our information infrastructure. Roughly, this is the structure of the interaction design curriculum. The core, of course, is interaction design. But it is supported by four things, as it were.

The first is media, art and design. Designers, especially those who will be working with multimedia, will have to know about many different kinds of design disciplines. Of course, nobody can ever become good at all these things. There are courses in music and audio, courses in a/v design, graphic design, typography, scenario, you name it. The idea is to familiarize students with all these different design disciplines; to have them sort of sniff at them and be able to make their own choice of a favorite. Or at least to give them enough knowledge about these different design disciplines so that they know what to expect from other people.

Technology is basic. Students need to know enough about technology to be able to understand what it can do for interaction. We do teach programing, but more for the purpose of being able to script simple demonstrations or prototypes than to actually develop software. But students do get the opportunity to specialize in later years and to become more technical, if that's what they want.

Then there are social sciences like psychology and sociology. In order to design cooperative systems, students have to learn how humans process information and how they work in groups.

The fourth branch is philosophy and culture. Although we're rather practice-oriented, we consider philosophy very important. Students must actively learn how to think, mainly in order to deal with the pace of change, to deal with the fact that half of the knowledge we have today will be outdated four years from now. Thinking is not something you do, it's something you use tools for. Mainly your mind, but other stuff, too. Things like simple knowledge models.

This is a matrix so simple that almost anyone could have invented it. We call it the Utrecht matrix. Quite simply, it represents all the possible relationships between people and interactive products.

Suppose we say that every interactive product has content. That content has a structure that is the expression of the information and functionality contained by the product. The content is structured in a certain way. It has a behavior of its own. It acts and it reacts to me. And it has an appearance, a physical form. We say that people have bodies, minds and souls; that minds are used to think, to feel and to want; and that people have spirits.

Basically, you can look at any kind of system and identify what we call its critical cells. For a computer game, the critical cell may be that the appearance must appeal to my emotions. And that its behavior must fit my body. For a decision support system, the structure of the system must match my cognition. The knowledge I have. Things like that.

Something else we do is pay attention to phenomenology. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that is actually a predecessor to existentialism. Up to now, phenomenology has been the main branch of philosophy and psychology that has actively dealt with the idea of experience. Central to phenomenology is the idea of situated experience. All experience is situated in a specific location. There's always a specific user doing specific things. So try to come to grips with your context of use before you start designing anything.

I'd like to talk briefly about the work that we did with our third-year students (the example I mentioned earlier). The idea was to create homes for different kinds of users in the digital faculty, which is basically our network. First, we had them do typography exercises. We had this Webster Thesaurus, which has a lot of entries under the word home. The funny thing about a thesaurus is that if you look at a word like quiescence, it has a giant list of words around that concept. So the thesaurus contains clouds of meaning, which I think is much more interesting than a dictionary. So we move through these clouds of meaning. If I want a `home' here, to feel at home has three entries: freedom, pleasure and content. So home here has a giant list of words to choose from.

So we told students to do some typography with these words. This is an example of how you build home in an abode. The abode is the building, and the home is what I make in it. To feel at ease.

By doing this, they get some kind of feeling for the breadth and width of the idea of `at home'. Then we had them write up experience: descriptions of people coming home, people being home, people leaving home and people coming into someone else's home. I have a giant list here, but basically we asked them to write onepage stories about these events. Here's one that deals with a grandson leaving his grandfather's home with his granddad. Getting annoyed by all the little things granddad does. Coming `home' to a house of a lover's parents. A lot of these are about lovers or lover's parents. I guess that says something about their age. This is a great one about someone that doesn't feel at home in his body. He wants to be a woman. Visiting a loved one. `At home" means drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in many of these. Coming `home' unexpectedly into someone else's home. This one seems really wierd until you realize it's about a dog who comes home. If anyone wants interfaces for dogs, come to us. Caring for oneself; taking your insuline injections is something you do at home.

Having them do these things gives them a deeper understanding of what it means for people to be home; or to come home; or to leave home. Another one here addresses the idea that when you leave home, you prepare things for when you come back. All these things can be transferred to electronic environments.

Dick Rijken; Utrecht School of the Arts; Faculty of Art, Media and Technology

Interaction Design department

fax: 035 - 83 64 80 */* email: drijken@artmediatech.nl