Computer games are sometimes seen as supreme examples of full-experience products. Appealing to physical as well as mental skills, they indeed provide interesting examples of a shift from information to experience. A player acts in some environment, engaged in immediate and intuitive loops of control and feedback. However, in many cases, what is left is entertainment in the form of intense experiences and self-centred dexterity.

Moreover, with computer games, MTV, advanced input devices, gesture-based input techniques, etc., the body has entered the arena. Experience in future information environments will be multisensory and multifaceted (physical, cognitive, emotional, motivational, spiritual). There is a danger that these experiences will become hollow -- that they will be roller coaster rides that don't go anywhere. Action and experience are two sides of the same coin and we need to understand them in a fundamental way. It is a challenge for interaction designers to create truly meaningful experiences that communicate as well as entertain.

From Users and Systems to Information Ecologies
If we look at users and their interaction with information systems, we can view them as agents that share information spaces where they communicate and co-operate. Good examples of this can be found in Rheingold's book on virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993) that illustrates how people in social contact on the Internet have established communities where rules of conduct have evolved in self-regulating ways. We can view the Internet and other networks (also human-only) as information ecologies with co-dependent communities.

An Ecological Perspective:
Local Action
Distinctions between tools and media become irrelevant as they merge, grow and everything interconnects. Trying to take the best of both worlds is not enough. We cannot just throw everything we have learnt from media and computing together and expect synergy to deal with the design challenges. We cannot stretch the old metaphors much further. We need non-reductionistic metaphors for interactive systems that allow us to deal with new forms of complexity and rich experiences. The sole thing that anchors these developments is interactivity.

Ecology is the study of systems or organisms in relation to their environment. We propose an ecological perspective,, where the individual interacts with, or rather, acts inside an information ecology. Users, systems and hybrid forms are seen as active agents that define and influence each other reciprocally. They are significant components of each other's environments. They share information spaces where they communicate and co-operate.

This metaphor motivates us to focus on features like: local instead of global control, self-regulating behavioural patterns instead of rigid procedures, continuous change and evolutionary development, implicit instead of explicit order, etc.

The word "ecology" is taken from the Greek OIKOS, meaning house, the immediate human environment...

Self-regulating Behavioural Patterns Instead of Rigid Procedures
In the ecological perspective, interaction can be seen as dynamic patterns of behaviours (potential and actual) that define fluid relationships between systems and users. Information ecologies give rise to patterns of communication with other users or other systems in a way that cannot be controlled or predicted beforehand. Ecologies can maintain their stability despite the fact that information may be inconsistent and delayed and decisions are made based on imperfect knowledge. Also, many interactive systems are not used in isolation. It is often uncertain what the effects will be of the introduction of a new product in an existing environment (home, office, school). Information is produced and made available at different locations, transformed or integrated and made available at other locations, and so forth. This will establish complex, self-regulating patterns of relationships.

Continuous Change and Evolutionary Development
Information ecologies are open systems and designers need to be aware of this. Radical change is virtually impossible and small additions can have large-scale effects. The development of many future systems will have a very evolutionary character. For example, many future database networks will grow and evolve according to how, by whom, and by how many they are used. We can ask ourselves how vulnerable our novel products are: what possible external changes may affect its use in a positive or negative way? We must leave room for accidental as well as intentional interaction, as well as for evolution.

Implicit Instead of Explicit Order
In complex ecological systems, the relationships between species form an intricate web, while every individual organism adapts to the environment. The ecological perspective stimulates us to examine, foronments). Finally, I will present our interpretation of `human-centredness', that focuses on human experience and action.

Complexity, Change and Us
The past decades have given us a dazzling spectrum of informaigners must facilitate processes of growth in existing ecologies and prefacilitate it in the creation of new ecologies. The former requires sufficient sensitivity to recognise these patterns and the latter requires a highly imaginative ability to set up preconditions that stimulate growth and development in specific directions that are beneficial for users.

The way we attempt to integrate the ecological perspective into interaction design practice is not to turn to formal cybernetic systems theory, since this tends to feel disembodied once the relationships are carefully modelled and represented in terms of control and feedback loops. This inevitably distorts the living reality. Users shape and are shaped by information ecologies. We focus on the individual experience of users, in relation to other agents (human as well as non-human), because this is where real meaning is born. Local action is local experience is local meaning.

The ecological perspective does not conflict with older ones, but broadens our view. Even if what we are designing is `just a tool', we can look at the way the tool will function in an evolving environment. If we design `just another CD ROM title', we can think about how our design concepts and interaction elements and styles may function when the information on the CD is replaced by a world-wide network. We must aim for designs that function well right now, but also carry in them an readiness for the future.

Information ecologies have qualities that cannot be understood or reduced to their individual components. Yet these qualities are real and we can recognise them if we if we use our intuitions and our personal histories. We complement the ecological perspective with a focus on the individual experience of a user. Aiming for rich user experiences in complex information ecologies, it is our goal to create a balance between knowledge and skill, between ratio and intuition in the design process of interactive systems. This is a balance between synthesis and analysis, where analysis always serves synthesis in the design process.

Human-centredness
In our approach, human-centredness applies to the user and the designer, as well as to the design teacher: all major design decisions relate to users; students and design teachers are human beings, not knowledge bases.

Human
We have been inspired by the European tradition that builds on phenomenology; we assume the following:

• * The "self" is not just a biological essence, but also a social construct.
• * All experience is situated. A situation is a system of relationships, in which the person finds himself. People are involved in a continuous dialogue with themselves, with others, with things and with some entity that represents a spiritual dimension (God, for example).
• * People and their situations cannot be described objectively.
• * People and their situations define each other reciprocally during human experience and action.
• * All consciousness is intentional; people are always conscious of something.
• * People understand their existence in terms of their experience of themselves and of their situations. They interpret their situation subjectively and base their actions on perceived meaning.
• * Experience can be multifaceted: physical, psychological (emotional, cognitive and motivational), and spiritual.

"The mind and the world, jointly make up the mind and the world." --Hillary Putnam

Individual experience and action are two sides of the same coin and they require examination in the richest sense possible: physically, psychologically and spiritually. Every system contains an implicit image of its intended users. The interaction designer must attempt to make this image as explicit as possible during the design process, however unknown and unfamiliar users may be in some cases.

Designers and Design Teachers
Good design comes from good designers. Interaction designers need a specific kind of sensitivity for human and cultural values. Human-centredness is found in our emphasis on the interaction designer's attitude. We believe that it is an attitude, rather than knowledge or skills that characterises the interaction designer. This does not come from books, but from a more personal approach. It is in contact with our design teachers that students notice how this attitude feels and how it translates into design practice.

This attitude is supported by relevant knowledge and skills (from disciplines like the social sciences, art and design) that enable the designer to formulate and express views of users.

Complexity and Change: The Future is a Direction, not a Place
In order to deal with complexity, we take a number of actions. Firstly, the ecological perspective stimulates us to think in terms of evolution and growth rather that revolution and radical redefinition and to carefully monitor the effects of our designs in their real life situations once they have been released. For example, when designing large systems that may affect many people or large organisations, we shy away from formulating radically different solutions to be implemented in a short period of time. Rather, we develop a view of the future (that can indeed radically differ from the current situation) and use that as a guiding notion for a migration path that leads in that direction, thus leaving open the possibility of changing our course along the way. During this process, we hold on to our original assumptions and ideals, but we adjust our course of action according to unexpected developments. If the end result differs from our original vision, this proves our point that the world is, indeed, unpredictable.

Secondly, it stimulates us to investigate the parts only within the whole. We emphasise the use of intuition in addition to rational thought in order to understand the character of the whole in addition to the parts.

Finally, we acknowledge the impossibility of predicting what will happen and involve users in the design process as often as possible. We put extensive effort in the employment of prototypes and other user testing tools and techniques.

Complexity and change are internal, as more of our faculties get involved in complex action and experience. They are also external, as everything becomes connected to everything else, and systems connect us to people as well as to information. Sensitive, human-centred design is not an ideal. It is a necessary strategy for survival in an information society.

References
Alexander, C. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press, New York, 1979.

Benedikt, M. (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991.

Fodor, J., Lepore, E. (Eds.), Holism: A Shopper's Guide. Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1992.

Huberman, B.A. (Ed.) The Ecology Of Computation. Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, 1988.

Kammersgaard, J. Four Different Perspectives On Human-Computer Interaction. in: Preece, J., Keller L. (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction. Prentice Hall, Cambridge, UK, 1990.

Priest, S., Theories Of The Mind. Penguin Books, London, UK, 1991.

Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading On The Electronic Frontier. Addison Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1993.

Varela, F.J., Thompson, E., Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science And Human Experience. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1991.