boredom in design

molly steenson gave an interesting talk earlier this year on strategic boredom in design. you can watch it here:

she mostly surveys here work done in the cybernetics community up until the late 1970’s, such as Cedric Price’s Generator as an example of “strategic boredom” and Gordon Pask’s Musicolour machine as an example of boredom as provocation. She also introduces a typology of boredom coined by sean desmond healy including:

• Situative boredom (waiting for someone, taking a train)
• Boredom of satiety (doing too much of the same thing, leading to banality)
• Existential boredom
• Creative boredom (being forced to do something new)

she sums her discussion as both concerning what it is like to not resist boredom but to explore it and to see “what happens when we let boredom approach us and when our objects get bored with us.”

i found this interesting as a designer, but particularly interesting since boredom is something we discuss often in shambhala buddhism as a specific inquiry during long meditation retreats and in trying to understand underlying emotional energy.

ethics and design

does usability design take an increasingly role and importance these days? i just received a short note from alan blackwell, promoting a workshop at the british human computer interaction (HCI) conference coming up this september. but i appreciated most how he summarized the overall trend in HCI:

Computing technology is now so pervasive that the study of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is almost the study of everyday life. A consensus has emerged in HCI that its historical concerns, such as usability and efficiency, are no longer sufficient scopes of inquiry. There have been turns to fun and enjoyment, emotional
design, experience design, culturally situated design, critical and reflective design, beauty and aesthetics, and technology for social action.

he goes on to promote the interchange of critical theory and HCI, the topic of his workshop.

i agree with his stated consensus, and i’m noticing as the projects i’m asked to help with incorporate increasingly social aspects. simpler concerns like measures of learnability and productivity are not enough to determine if those designs are good designs. as much we have to consider their impact on our emotional lives and how they enable or discourage healthy social lives.

one example that immediately pops to mind was the recent myspace-related suicide, when a neighbor used a fake profile to torment a young teenager resulting in her taking her own life. is that a usability issue? well the design of the system and how it relates to anonymity played a part in that tragedy. and it’s such a new medium, i don’t think we know enough yet about how those social spaces work or fail us. this is a point danah boyd has been making for as long as i’ve know her. for example, that kids blog and discuss things in public spaces without realizing the long term implications of that kind of behavior. we all don’t really know yet what the long term side effects will be from an increasingly public social space mixed with partial anonymity or the illusion of anonymity. so to alan’s list above i have to add ethics as an important area of inquiry.

blu-ray

has anyone switched to blu-ray? thoughts on the upgrade? better experience overall or just a marginal increase in quality?

i noticed that amazon is having a title sale and it made me wonder if i should finally upgrade. they also seem to have some special promotional discounts on games or similar items but those are specific to each day and you’d need to bookmark the page to really make use of it.

the thought of replacing my small dvd collection isn’t a big deal, i don’t have many favorites, but i’m not sure if it’s worth it if i’m just going to buy some completely digital version of these five or ten years down the road. waste to transition now you think?