Chris, Ken and others
Now that violin playing has turned into hair splitting, I want to unfold the argument that I, without much success, intended to make in my first post. With ordinary user interfaces, such as GUI’s, no matter how skilled one is in button pushing, the quality of one's push rarely has any effect on the outcome. This is highly contrasted with the violin viewed as a user interface; the skill of the user is clearly reflected in the outcome of the interaction. Ullmer and Ishii proposed the abacus as a compelling metaphor to illustrate the seamless integration of representation and control in tangible interfaces (Ullmer and Ishii 2000). We can challenge this, and get a different view at interaction, by choosing the violin as a metaphor and in it find a range of qualities that a number of researchers subscribe to, e.g. Tom Djajadiningrat (with a number of colleagues) who for several years have challenged assumptions like movement monotony and ease-of-use. In an interaction course, taught by Marcelle Stienstra and myself, a group of students succeeded in designing an industrial interface with inspiration from qualities they derived from violin playing. This serves as the background for my outburst.
I boldly stated that the violin has a perfect fit with the human body. Chris Rust rightfully reminded me of the ergonomic problems that the violin pose, problems it shares with any interface that is subject to extreme one-sided activity; just look at the computer mouse. And Chris; feel free to split my hair, although it is grey I still have plenty to share.
Francois-Xavier followed up on Ken’s gentle and knowing lecture on hair splitting and I can only approve of it, I only had eyes for ingrown hairs, sorry!
Best regards,
Mads
References:
Djajadiningrat J.P., W. S. A. G., Frens J. Overbeeke K., (2004). "Tangible products: redressing the balance between appearance and action." Personal and Ubiquitous Computing(8): 294 - 309.
Djajadiningrat, J. P., C. J. Overbeeke, et al. (2000). Augmenting fun and beauty: A Pamphlet. DARE 2000, Elsinore, Demark.
Djajadiningrat, T., B. Matthews, et al. (2006). " Easy doesn’t do it: skill and expression in tangible aesthetics." Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11(8): 657-676.
Frens, J. (2006). Designing for Rich Interaction: Integrating Form, Interaction and Function. Faculty of Industrial Design. Eindhoven, Eindhoven University of Technology: 224.
Jensen, M. V. and M. Stienstra (2007). Making Sense: Interactive Sculptures as Tangible Design Material. Designing Pleassurable Products and Interfaces, Helsinki.
Overbeeke, K. C. J. and S. S. A. G. Wensveen (2003). From Perception to Experience, from Affordances to Irresistibles, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Ullmer, B. and H. Ishii (2000). "Emerging frameworks for tangible user interfaces." IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL VOL 39, NOS 3&4, 2000: 915-931.
Mads Vedel Jensen
Research Assistant, Msc
User Centred Design, Mads Clausen Institute
Web: www.sdu.dk/mci
Alsion 2, 6400 Sønderborg
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:28:49 +0200
From: Mads Vedel Jensen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Difficult Interface Paradox 2
Dear Glen
I am one of the lurkers on the list and as such I have witnessed endless =
splittings of ingrown hairs - and, to be fair, a few interesting =
threads. I have not been active since Kendy but this one forced me to =
the keyboard again.
Anyone with two arms and five fingers on each of them can use this =
interface; size and spatial layout creates a perfect fit with the human =
body. The entrylevel is low, anyone can grab it and get a result from =
the effort and gradually build a skill - from painfulness to perfection =
and beyond. The feedback is rich, direct and coherent, audible and =
haptic. Very hard to master and impossible to teach via language alone, =
a marvellous UI that has given us a Paganini and a Perlman, a Menuhin =
and a Mutter.
Where is the paradox? Does creation of such paradoxes reflect design =
tuition? And research thereof?
Best regards,
Mads Vedel Jensen
Post Doc, Msc
User Centred Design
Mads Clausen Institute
University of Southern Denmark
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
-----------------------------
Sent from my 17" PowerBook
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Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:39:54 -0400
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Difficult Interface Paradox
In response to Gunnar's comment about the young male on Everest and easy =
to
use UI.
Violins.
Very hard to master. Impossible to teach via language alone. A dreadful
UI.
And yet the epitome of man machine interface on a musical level.
A songalong keyboard. Easy to learn and dreadful musically.
Does this paradox reflect design tuition? And research thereof?
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
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Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 09:45:48 +0100
From: Chris Rust <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Difficult Interface Paradox 2
Mads Vedel Jensen wrote:
> Anyone with two arms and five fingers on each of them can use this interface; size and spatial layout creates a perfect fit with the human body.
Sorry Mads but this is not true. My partner is a Chiropractor and has
treated professional violinists. She uses the MacTimoney Chiropractic
technique which places great emphasis on training practitioners to
detect subtle misalignments on the skeleton and she has observed that
playing the violin is an extreme kind of one-sided activity that induces
very unhealthy distortions in the body which she finds difficult to
"correct" (For example think of the fact that the violin is partly held
in place by the played gripping it between their face and their shoulder)
So I feel that the violin is probably a well-resolved compromise but
designers should never use words like "perfect"
Having very little hair of my own I feel impelled to split yours
very best
Chris
*********************
Professor Chris Rust
Head of Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University, S11 8UZ, UK
+44 114 225 2706
[log in to unmask]
www.chrisrust.net
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:27:23 +0200
From: Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Splitting Hairs
Friends,
One of the kinds of comment that occasionally goes round in design
research circles is the description of other peoples' research or the
conversations about it as splitting hairs. I'm going to challenge
that to suggest that we may not be splitting enough hairs.
Now it's clear that we can cover the entire field on a single list
with only 1350 subscribers -- and if we could, we would not be able
to cover any range of issues in depth. Even the largest list in our
field has far fewer subscribers than the field as a whole. While
Design Research News has over 8,000 subscribers, and I estimate that
it should be far larger to cover the field.
It matters because there is an inherent tension between size, breadth
of coverage, and depth. DRN comes once a month with broad coverage at
a level that makes it accessible to all readers. PhD-Design operates
in asynchronous but real time whenever anyone wishes to post. To
exactly the degree that we dig into an issue, it will seem deep and
rich to some while other criticize it as finicky hairsplitting.
This leads me to two reflections.
Reflection one concerns the PhD-Design list. From time to time, I get
notes about the list from people asking questions or making comments
on a thread. Some say that they love the list -- it gives them an
opportunity to sample the field, make connections, following a
broader conversation than they get at their own university or design
firm. Even if their school or firm is good, it can never be as broad
as the community of 1,350 who meet here. As I travel around, I find
that people use the list in their own research and teaching, they
save informative and thoughtful notes to share with students and
colleagues, and they like the added perspective it affords them. I
don't actually deserve all the nice notes I get. The list owners are
Keith Russell and David Durling. They built the list after the Ohio
conference on doctoral education in design, and they keep it going.
Obviously, I am active here, and I work with them sometimes on
list-related projects. This included redirecting traffic to this list
and expanding the list after we held a highly successful on-line
debate on another list while getting ready for the La Clusaz
conference on doctoral education in design. The truth is that many of
the subscribers here deserve kudos for a list that has evolved and
grown over the past decade.
Many people post astonishing material here, generous collections of
resources, valuable ideas, and often useful reflections. If I were to
describe them all and thank everyone from whom I have learned
something new and useful, this would be a long post. What I like
about this list (debates included) is that I learn as much from
people who challenge my views as from those who agree with me, as
well as learning from people who amend and amplify my views by way of
divergent agreements.
And this leads to me second reflection on splitting hairs.
Fields grow when lots of intelligent people gather to split hairs.
I've been immersed in two books on wealth and economic growth. One
dates back to a couple of ideas that Adam Smith first stated nearly
two and a half centuries ago. One idea has had much traction among
economists, the idea of the invisible hand. From this has grown the
economics of diminishing returns or constant returns in equilibrium.
The other idea is stated in Smith's model of the pin factory. Despite
the fact that this is the first and most widely known statement of
the economic advantages of effective organization design, economists
have long overlooked the fact that this also states the issue of
increasing returns. This is a problem that economists long had
difficulties addressing, and it wasn't until the twentieth century
that people were even able to state it as a growth problem of
increasing returns. Even then, it was not until the last two decades
that people began finding ways to work with the problem, rendering it
tractable.
Part of the process has involved -- for want of a better term --
splitting hairs. This involves defining fields; locating the
boundaries of problems and problem issues; seeing where models
created for other problems afforded equivalent terms that could then
be applied to the problem of increasing returns; finding out why the
problem yields more answers with one set of labels than another. The
field of economics makes progress, slow progress, but progress,
because several hundred thousand extremely intelligent people have
been willing to work patiently at the many aspects of progressive
science: splitting hairs, solving puzzles, and -- sometimes --
finding ways to shift position or paradigm for a new run at a problem
that did not yield answers to old approaches.
Several years back, Pekka Korvenmaa and Jan Verwijnen organized a
conference in Helsinki where they invited Tore Kristensen to speak on
design research. Tore summarized the key aspects of fields with
progressive research programs. Such programs, he said,
1. Build a body of generalized knowledge.
2. Improve problem solving capacity.
3. Generalize knowledge into new areas.
4. Identify value creation and cost effects.
5. Explain differences in design strategies and their risks or benefits,
6. Learn on the individual level.
7. Learn on the collective learning.
8. Develop meta-learning.
(Kristensen 1999; Friedman 2001)
At several points in this virtuous cycle, researchers in fields that
make progress take time to split hairs -- they compare models, they
check their models against empirical data, they clarify terms and
definitions, they see why one set of definitions may afford greater
traction than another. This is often slow, difficult work, and --
rather like evolutionary cycles of punctuated equilibrium -- one may
go for years on a corner of a problem before learning enough to
contribute a few thoughts that break things open in dramatic ways for
another part of the field.
We're just starting to get that kind of development in design
research. Our problem is that we still have too few people meeting to
split hairs, too few people willing to enroll in the long,
developmental program that leads to new ideas that breath life into
potentially visionary scenarios.
So I say good on you to anyone with the patience to work through a
problem, to follow a thread, contribute to a dialogue in a way that
helps to unpack and understand more than we know and understand today.
Participating in a discussion list is not the same as writing a
journal article or a monograph -- but it should not be. It is an
opportunity to throw out a quick thought or even an elaborated idea
at an asynchronous seminar with some of the most interesting people
in our field. Can we do better? Probably. As we do, there will be
many hairs to split. I do not see this as a detrimental factor, but
rather as one aspect of the slow development every field goes through
in the process of individual learning, collective learning, and
meta-learning.
Warm wishes,
Ken
References
Friedman, Ken. 2001. "Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into
Practice." In Design and Technology Educational Research and
Development: The Emerging International Research Agenda.
E. W. L. Norman and P. H. Roberts, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department
of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, 31-69.
Kristensen, Tore. 1999. "Research on design in business." (Slides
from conference keynote presentation.) Useful and Critical: Research
in Design.Helsinki, Finland: University of Art and Design Helsinki
UIAH.
--
Ken Friedman
Professor
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:00:05 +0100
From: Eduardo Corte Real <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Splitting Hairs
Hi Ken,
Sometimes the hairs are not really what we think they are.
My stepson once looking at his grandmother's hair proclaimed: "Now I
understand: Hairs are born white and THEN become brown!"
Loved your post,
Cheers,
Eduardo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Friedman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 12:27 PM
Subject: Splitting Hairs
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