INTERACTIONS ARE FIRST OF ALL CONNECTIONS

Language connects people. It helps communicate felt meaning and turns otherwise nondescript occurrences into meaningful experiences. Transformation into meaningfulness is the result of language operating through the actions of a community (Dewey, 1958). In this sense, language helps distinguish humans from other animals. For example, humans can not only feel the heat from a radiator and want to be near it out of pure instinct, as an animal might. Language helps us learn the significance of staying warm from our community, give a name to the source of heat and teach to others what we know. In this sense, a language acts as an instrument to communicate and interact with other people who know how to use it and who share our understanding of the surrounding world. By creating things like language to connect to other people, we provide a situation for their use and so the imagining, making, using and passing on of shared mechanisms like language, signs and gestures, provide people with a way of connecting with the world around them, communicating values and making or finding meaning. Such connections are extended through the invention, manipulation and use of objects in the world. People first imagine a way of freeing themselves and others from a situation or condition of subjugation, oppression or lack of meaningfulness. New artefacts are created out of this imagination, then used or perceived by others. As, by nature, people are part of and contribute to a social world, these artefacts become shared in use. In this sense, the creator of the artefact aims beyond a selfish existence of building objects for self preservation: as a means to their own ends. People contribute and use artefacts in a shared world. In this sense, the acts of creating and using an artefact are joined through the possibility to imagine and the interaction which takes place through the artefact. We can see this interaction as being a connection between two sides: on one side the desire to free oneself from the idea that its impossible to avoid certain conditions and at the same time achieve an higher level of richness in life; on the other side, the act of being freed from that condition. The artefact is between, merely the thread which connects creator and subject in shared meaning supported by the existence of the artefact in their lives. When the artefact is a meaningful addition to the lives of the users of it, it frees them from a given condition, just as when fire was discovered many millennia ago. In doing so, early people freed themselves and all the generations of humans to follow, from cold and darkness. Continuing to use fire for heat, cooking and light, later people used their own imagination to adapt it to suit them better, creating heaters and stoves and harnessing the energy of fire for previously unimagined applications. The users of the artefact use their imagination to adapt it and channel it and in doing so, make it more meaningful for their own lives. Fire has not finished as merely a tool to achieve a prescribed outcome. Instead, it has been developed, changed and understood in new ways. The human who first made sparks to create a fire provided the artefact, but it required other people to use it in a way that freed them from an oppressive situation of cold for the connection to be made to the original creator’s vision. To explain further, one might say that an artwork becomes meaningful at the moment when it is perceived as such by someone other than the artist: a painting that never finds objectified expression on canvas cannot become art. A person may appreciate Van Gough’s technical application of paint or feel excited by Bolero, or perhaps be perplexed or angered by the latest art installation of a dissected cow. But these responses alone do not constitute an aesthetic experience. People are unified in the aesthetic experience when it comes to the point of perceiving the artefact in a way that connects them with the act and experience of creation. Art produced only for selfish admiration by the painter or perceived only as a beautiful composition on the wall is arguably not art, not without the two-way interaction of creator and subject through the artefact.

BROKEN CONNECTIONS

When the artefact is technological, an added complexity is introduced to the interaction. Interactions through computers are changing the way we live and connect with life and each other, for good or ill, in part because computers have the appearance of being the real point of interaction. We do not perceive the designer behind the system or interface, to the point that the computer artefacts actually appear to take on a persona and behaviour of their own, giving the illusion that we are interacting directly with them. Here, the connection with the real is lost. When a computer crashes or fails in its function, we always blame it as though it were a living entity, too stupid to understand our language of buttons and icons. We direct our attention to the artefact and shun it for its lack of understanding, knowing that another person would have no trouble comprehending. How many times can be heard the chastising voices of “It’s temperamental today” or “he‘s not intelligent enough…he should have understood”. The once object has gone from being an inanimate piece of plastic, to an intelligent machine to an apparently living thing, nowadays. As a result, we cannot perceive of or connect to any notion of a designer who created this technological being and we blame it for its poor understanding of our world of inconvenient actions and transactions. Despite this, we are ready to take it with us and adapt ourselves to its quirks and goal directed way of being. While interactions with technologies are supposed to provide a window onto the potential richness of life, technology can also create new oppressive interactions, forcing humans to adapt to new roles with technological artefacts in their life. To take a case for example, we might question if a computer in a bank, which doesn’t understand that a customer simply forgot to pay money into a loan account one month, is a meaningful part of their life if it is unable to function in a way that is helpful and understanding towards them. As a result of the missed payment, the customer takes on a character in the eyes of the system of an irresponsible person. For the customer, this character is far from their true self. In their eyes a payment has simply been missed; an easily rectifiable mistake. But this representation of the customer within the system - a representation believed by the bank’s employees - is dehumanising and false. The customer is unable to relate to this distorted digital shadow of him/herself and feels betrayed by a false reality existing only as a strings of bits. Surely the designer did not want to see the customer in this light, as an individual who does not care about paying back money owed or their reputation in the bank. Nonetheless, the customer is depicted as though a character in a fictional story, bearing no semblance to real life. Here again, connections are broken between designer and user and between user and their own life. Further, the connection with the real is broken; the system no longer playing a role, the employee user forced to play a role unconnected to their life and the customer necessarily playing an unexpected role that does not belong to their life. Scenes of ordinary subjugations become acceptable at the risk of suffocating appreciation of the beauty of interactions among humans. The designer too becomes victim of technological limitations, distanced from the expression of their understanding of life and the human condition. Expression is reduced by loss of contact with the real, with no space for communicative imagination, whilst the imagination of the user is subjugated to impossible interactions. When computers mediate such connections, feelings of oppression and the
impossibility of imagining further interactions are a result of designer limitations, where they become a victim of their own oppressed expression. To make matters worse, by this stage, the situation is out of the realm of control of the designer, the figure of whom, does not enter into the conscious life of the user. At this point, the connection between the person who designed the system and the experience of the person it is intended to serve, has been irretrievably cut, as has that between the user and their own life. They have lost trust in the system and probably the bank too and feel that this technology does nothing to make their life better. They feel no connection to or through it and, like the designer, no control over it. All in all, broken connections take us far from the richness of things imagined and experienced in other aspects of our everyday life, only to immerse us in fictional scenes. Reconnecting to life, would at this point also mean reconnecting the designer to the user. We cannot ignore the significant place that computers have in everyday life nowadays and it would be incredible to suggest that all these computers should not be meaningful for us, just as long as they are functionally adept. Every person is a unique creative being and brings that uniqueness to the use they make of computers. Yet, for a long time, models and frameworks have considered humans as units of labour, denying any creativity or expression in the use of computers. Perhaps in recognising the limitations of such frameworks, HCI may involve itself in helping structure the meaningful lives of people as they intertwine with technology. After all, computers have not been invented for corporate benefit alone, but primarily as an expression of progress of humankind. The responsibility is also one of continuing that progress to free humans from their own condition. Highly efficient and usable systems are fundamentally not intended to be entertaining or pleasurable to use: they merely serve a purpose well. Nonetheless, there is no value judgement to be made that these systems cannot be linked with meaningful aesthetic experiences simply because of this. It is only that, if the user is to have an aesthetic experience with a computer, the possibility must exist for their emotions, actions and intellect to be engaged. The new challenge for HCI then is perhaps to find a way of freeing up this interaction, opening up the way for computers to be part of meaningful life experiences and thus reconnecting the designerand the user through the experience.

A CONNECTION WITH THE DESIGNER : THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

The designer is able to exert much influence over the nature of an aesthetic interaction experiences through the very fact that they are essentially connected with the experience of making; “the sensory satisfaction of eye and ear, when aesthetic, is so because it does not stand by itself, but is linked to the activity of which it is the consequence” (Dewey, 1958, p.49). Much like an artist, the designer experiences the artefact whilst in the throws of creating it, building the material for experience through the act of expression. Afterwards, the user is relied upon to use the artefact and contribute to the creating of their own experience, inseparable in essence from that of the designer. On the designer side, the doing and perceiving of what is done are connected and instrumental to one another in creating the artefact, while the user then recreates the artefact, perceiving only through the creation of their own experience. In this sense, an aesthetic experience is the result of involvement by and interaction between the creator and the user, constructed jointly and flowing to a consummation and fulfilment. We might then reject the idea that computers are the real and absolute point of interaction with the user and consider them instead as means of communication between designer and user, where the aesthetic experience, as constructed at the point of use, connects designer and user. However, talking of aesthetic experiences involving computers necessarily involves recognising the acts of thinking, doing, suffering and perceiving, as well as feeling emotion and applying intellect. In this light, it is easier to see users as people who bring something to the interaction in terms of imagination and even creativity. This relates more closely to the way people interact directly with other people; it would after all be controversial to suggest that people are not active in their interactions with others or that they do not try to connect with what the other is trying to communicate. Applying this active involvement and connectivity to computer-mediated interaction, it becomes useful to talk of the artefact simply linking the designer’s imagination and expression with that of the user through aesthetic experiences, where the interplay of emotion, intellect and practice from both sides make up the experiential whole. (Wright and McCarthy, 2004) Collingwood suggests that “every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience raised to the imaginative level by an act of consciousness; or, every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience together with consciousness of the same. Now the aesthetic experience is an imaginative experience…the only power which can generate it is the power of the experient’s consciousness” (Collingwood, 1958, p.306). In this sense, the work of the artist, is one of the kind where the sensuous-emotional activity of painting, forms the basis from which their consciousness generates the aesthetic experience of creating expressed by the painted picture or in the designer’s case the technological artefact. It is precisely this externalisation or expression which makes the richness of the aesthetic experience and the connection to the perceiver or user to bring to the artefact their own ideas. Like the creator, the conscious imagination of the perceiver transmutes ideas into a total imaginative experience, identical or close to that of the creator. This might arguably mean that the designer aims to express, not their own personal emotions, but those which are shared with the audience; after all, it is not the role of the audience to be imposed with struggling to grasp the meaning in an artefact to which they feel no real connection. As such, the connection between designer and audience is an actual part of the aesthetic experience, rather than simply a by-product of it. Beyond a mere communication between creator and audience, there is an active and conscious collaboration, based on shared meaning. Also, the designer has an audience in mind when moving from imagination to expression. From this perspective, the artefact becomes more than a tool for communication, becoming instead a means for collaboration between designer and user. The designer cannot expect to be able to design aesthetic experiences for users. They can only put in place certain conditions in the hope of reaching the user and encouraging their collaboration. Similarly, the user cannot expect to have the experience delivered as a part of the computer package and the designer cannot leave it only up to the user to make their own experiences, with the designer concerned only with the functionality of the artefact.

FURTHER CONNECTIONS: ARTEFACTS FOR SHARING A VISION OF THE WORLD

Treating users as mere information processors, the real work of HCI is suppressed by a world of oppressive interactions. In such a world, user and designer become trapped between expression and imagination, both dehumanised by the finite goal of usability. On one side, we see the user wallowing in selfishness, detached from the richness of life with computers to the utilitarian end of achieving a personal goal. The designer meanwhile is limited to objectivity, unable to connect to the life of the user and contribute to its meaningfulnes through their skilled and heartfelt expression in producing the artefact. Understanding well the objective of the user, the designer produces an object to match it and serve it, at the same time satisfied to have met the prescribed business goals. Between user and designer then stands the artefact; each sees it as the final focus of their interactions, each unable and perhaps unwilling to envision a road of collaboration that goes beyond that technological barrier. In a recent publication, Donald Norman shared with the reader his admiration for his assortment of teapots, a collection of objects of beauty that, on the whole, do not function particularly well. All the same, Norman projects great respect towards these artefacts, naming them and giving them a position of display in his house. Everyday though, he does not normally use any of these splendid pots, preferring instead a very functional and easy to use metal bowl, only occasionally taking down a prized pot to carry out the menial task of tea making. When he does, however, he is undoubtedly aware of how the pot feels different in his hands, the beauty of its appearance and how it requires more work to make tea. He may even think of the designer of the object, admiring the skilled work and wondering at how the creator managed to make an object that so closely matched Norman’s idea of what is beauty in a teapot. In this sense, he connects with the designer, sharing with them some felt and imagined idea of beauty expressed through the actual artefact. Using the “everyday“ metal bowl is quite a different experience. Norman does not spare a thought for the designer of the metal bowl. He is not invited by the object to consider it in any way other than as an efficient tea-making tool. What is relevant at this point is what the object can do for its user, the creator having long-since diminished into the history of its production. Here two choices exist when making tea: to reflect through using a beautiful object, or simply make tea through using a functional one. Such points provide reflections on the richness of interactions and hint at an augmented role for users, as people free to excite in a thorough exploration of the artefact and what new richness it may bring to their life. The user is able to decide if the object is going to become part of their own life, with the choice of rejecting it if it seems to bring no new meaning. This would contradict the idea of an artefact as plain, functional and goal directed, encouraging instead a near sensual vision of it intertwined with and embroiled in everyday life. Users of such artefacts would feel a connection to the designer through its use, recognising on some conscious level, a shared way of seeing the world.Such a vision does not sit comfortably with various recent attempts to incorporate some notion of experience into design. While some have rushed to join the Experience Design bandwagon, it is perhaps an error to assume an approach of designing and programming experiences for users, ignoring the dimension that they themselves will bring to the experience and the interaction itself. While design of this sort may exemplify good craft, it leaves the designer far away from the consciousness of the user, not even allowing space to their imagination and expression, never looking beyond capabilities to receive stimuli and respond as trained throughout many years of interactions with computers.

A PARADIGM SHIFT

To overcome this limiting view of users and designers, the philosophy of art appears to present fascinating potential as a paradigm for HCI. First and foremost, it may provide a catalyst to help us view the roles of designer and user in a new way, as an alternative to seeing the user as someone who has to accomplish a goal as a Human Information Processor. The power in such an approach may therefore lie in the reconnection with the entity (designer/artist) who frees the user, avoiding the subjugation of the object as a means to an end. In particular, this paradigm may be useful to liberate from fixed ideas of how artefacts can be designed. Nonetheless, it is possible to think that such connections between user and designer might be achieved in some particular design cases which, for their very nature, would consider the computer as just a medium, rather than placing it as the focus of interaction. Doing so, we can carefully consider the role of the designer and of the user in a completely new light, free from our own subjugation of looking through the lenses of HCI. The arts may also be useful to the long-term direction of HCI, in the sense that they encourage the questioning of political and moral issues. Designers need necessarily nowadays to adhere to business strategies and structures and contribute to the meeting of business goals. Reasonable though this may be, it leaves little space for expression and could be said to educate us all towards accepting technology as something out of our control and with little relevance to the reality of human existence in society. It is difficult to think of another sphere of the life where such subjugation would be acceptable. Computers, after all, are not anymore something that most people find it easy to avoid coming into contact with in their everyday activities. It is likely then to be in the interests of the HCI community to be open minded about what the arts may contribute to their discipline, in the very least by encouraging in students, a sensibility towards and enthusiasm to maintain, the richness of human life with computers.
We may also at some point see the development of a fully-fledged philosophy of HCI. Undoubtedly though, if art is to be taken as a paradigm for HCI, some problems emerge. We would need to understand the full implications of considering the designer in an artist-like role and question at the same time if we can simultaneously continue to look at the designer in a traditional way. To now, the designer, much like the user, has been aided, yet at the same time entrapped by the need to follow strict prescriptive guidelines and create artefacts of measurable success. The inevitable difficulty if an alternative concept of an artist-designer were to seep in, is that the metaphorical equivalent – the artist – is a figure left completely free to imagine and express, who may well be charged with passion or have very strong personal feelings about the design subject. The skill of the artist lies in channelling this imagination through expression and connecting to the audience. Fitting this role to the business world in particular may prove challenging. One would also need to consider what these observations can actually bring to HCI. Exploring even further the parallel between HCI and the arts, there emerges a much subtler conception of evaluation, linked to meaning, the aesthetics of interactions and the need to define beauty of interaction, suggesting the introduction of new concepts previously undisclosed to HCI. At the same time, we face all the questions about what art is. These things said, it is perhaps helpful to see that such an avenue of exploration is not quite so radical as it at first seems. People have, after all been practicing Aesthetics in one form or another in HCI whether intentionally or not. Jakob Nielsen, as an example, adopts a formalist perspective to the design of web interfaces, interpreting the reality like a perfect form. Research continues to provide guidelines, in an attempt to offer a level of certainty to designers in accurately supporting the interaction at the interface. The difficulty with such work when applied to certain design cases, is that it deconstructs the artefact to the purely functional domain, imposing pure forms over matter conceived by the designer and leaving no space for expression and imagination. Aesthetics holds some promise as a useful paradigm in this sense: recognising where the connections between people have been broken by technologies and making sure HCI is able to reconnect them.

CONCLUSIONS

Engineering computer artefacts that are joyful, satisfying and easy to use or that provide stimulation on a sensory or visceral level is not the only focus for HCI. Beyond this, there is a great deal of potential to reflect on the meaning of computer use and more importantly, on the aesthetics of interaction through the interface. Taking aesthetics as a paradigm might help explain what makes an interaction beautiful. Most importantly, however, it
may enable HCI to go a little further in looking at the imaginative expression of the designer and the user as a serious and worthy aspect of designing and using computers. As such, the position is quite simply that aesthetics represents an interesting paradigm for HCI to pursue in light of:

􀂃 Reconnecting the designer to the user,
􀂃 Redefining or expanding the scope of the roles of designers and users,
􀂃 Enabling interactions as meaningful connections
􀂃 Considering what the designer wants to communicate to the user through the artefact,
􀂃 The aesthetic experience of using the artefact and the aesthetic experience of the creating,
􀂃 Freeing the designer and the user from their own condition and giving space to expression and imagination

REFERENCES

1.   Collingwood, R. G., 1958, The Principles of Art, Oxford University Press.

2.   Dewey, J., 1958, Art as Experience, Capricorn.

3.   Eldridge, R., 2003, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, Cambridge University Press.

4.   McCarthy, and Wright, P. C., 2004, Technology as Experience, MIT Press.

5.   Nardi, B. A. and O’Day, V.L, 1999, Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. MIT Press.

6.   Norman, D., 2002, Emotion and Design: Attractive things work better. Interactions, ix 4, 36-42.

7.   Norman, D., 1988, The Psychology of Everyday Things. Basic Books.

8.   Preece, J., Rogers, Y. and Sharp, H., 2002,Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. Wiley.

9.   Sheppard, A., 1987, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, Oxford University Press.

10. Tolstoy, L., 1898, What is Art, (Translated by Aylmer Maude), Walter Scott Ltd.

11. West, C., 1997, La Filosofia Americana,(Translation from the original; The American Evasion of Philosophy. A Geneology of Pragmatism), Editori Riuniti, Rome.