Today, we swallow information on the Internet without even thinking about whether it is worth checking. The media pushes us to certain values and opinions under the guise of curiosities or information that does not concern us, which we accidentally saw on the internet. Based on this, we build a pattern and an image about a topic without realizing that in reality, it could be the complete opposite. People are not inclined to actually verify information; it takes time and energy. Depending on how much time we spend online, our brain is still digesting this information, even if we are not consciously aware of it. The media manipulate the status quo with ease, because who will check every piece of data seen on the Internet? Another question – is it even possible? What could then be said about important information the masses should see and which emotionally touches almost every person?
Propaganda is the systematic dissemination of facts, arguments, rumors, and other information, including deliberately false information, in order to influence public opinion. The word comes from the name of a Catholic organization created in 1622, the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith). Propaganda is also seen as a pre-planned and purposeful spiritual influence on the audience, the purpose of which is to attract the audience to the side of the one who conducts the propaganda, that is, to control thinking and behavior. Ultimately, propaganda is a collection of certain structures, and fragments of symbols that influence human perception and behavior.
Generally speaking, propaganda theories were also the first theories to focus on the media, its content, influence, etc. researchers tried to explain how the media can use this or that information by influencing people, as a result of which they learn certain points of vision. At the time, the simplistic stimulus-response theory of mass communication dominated, according to which the media could deliver stimuli to each person in a certain way that would be equally perceived by all recipients and cause them to have similar or congruent reactions. The power of propaganda is related to the vulnerability of human consciousness, and not to the characteristics of specific messages. A crisis or political conflict is potentially dangerous, as it leads to mass psychoses and exacerbates people’s susceptibility to propaganda. There is also the opposite view that a successful propaganda campaign must have a long, carefully designed strategy, during which it is necessary to create certain symbolic images and teach people to associate the required emotions with them.
Why do we need propaganda? What are its main goals for today? Propaganda is one of the main means of political manipulation. Propaganda cannot be compared to advertising. Advertising is closer to self-presentation or to the informational genre. Advertising primarily affects people’s emotions. Propaganda affects both the emotions and the minds of people. Accordingly, propaganda can be negative or positive. Positive propaganda seeks to communicate certain beliefs to the consumer in an understandable way. The purpose of positive propaganda is to promote social harmony and education of people in accordance with generally accepted values. As an example, campaigns for the protection of the environment also often use propaganda mechanisms to convey information. There’s nothing wrong with that, as a lot of people started to think about it now. Problems begin when the mechanisms of influence that are involved in propaganda are used for the selfish purposes of politics.
How to save yourself from the influence of propaganda? We are idle to check every information that is around us. Plus, you need a huge amount of knowledge to critically evaluate it, and this is one of the main ways. The only thing we can do is to critically analyze, and perceive everything and not believe in one source. Build the perception of various topics based on several sources. Unfortunately, our brain will still build an imagination about the world even if the source is not checked, so if you have not verified the information, try not to spread it further. So we can stop influencing others with an opinion that is not based on verified information and transfer it further like a virus.
When I thought about how to fix this problem, I came up with the idea of creating a program that will check the information for us. Agree when we have a notification that the information in this article is subject to propaganda, we will perceive the content in a completely different way. Uniting programming and theoretical knowledge about propaganda that will be collected from various examples, we can get a fairly useful tool. The only question is how to use it. Since in order to check the information for veracity, I would need an incredibly large database that would be independent and renew itself on different sources, which in its essence should involve artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, I definitely don’t have enough time for such a version, so I decided to make a demo version as an example. I will collect a database of the most common propaganda techniques with different slogans. The program will have to check the text for sensitive content and look for words that provoke emotions. So in the first version, I will be able to make warnings for users when absorbing all sorts of content.
Propaganda is a tool that allows you to manipulate large masses of people. Everyone is subject to it in one way or another. The conclusion is quite simple. Do not believe everything that is written on the Internet. Do not believe even some of the theses given in this article. My goal is to prevent you from creating an alternate universe in your head. This way we can protect ourselves and others from obvious manipulation in the first place.
Since the second half of the semester, I decided to change my topic. Researching about Augmented Reality Storytelling was interesting, but I do not feel that I want to continue doing my research in that direction. Thinking about another topic was also hard for me, because I always have a hard time making decisions, but I think I have found a new interesting field, which I would like to focus during the course. It is the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Design. I am not quite sure where exactly this path will lead me, but I really enjoyed learning about it and thinking about it’s possibilities.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
There are several definitions for AI. For example, John McCarthy’s (computer scientists) defines AI as following:
“It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.”
In general, Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of intelligence processes associated with humans through machines. Examples for this processes can be the ability to reason, discover the meaning of something, generalize of learn from past experiences. As for now, there is no machine able to match the human flexibility over wider domains or in basic everyday knowledge. But, there already are some processes with the ability to perform certain specific tasks with the same or even higher level than experts. Today, we already have a lot of touchpoints with AI. Sometimes, it is obvious, for example if we use systems like Siri (Apple), or Alexa (Amazon). But we also deal with it through search engines or recommendation algorithms (like YouTube, Amazon or Spotify).
There are two different types of Artificial Intelligence:
Weak AI (or Narrow AI) Weak AI is created/trained to perform a specific tasks and is not able to function without human interaction. It is the type of AI, which we deal with in everyday life, like on speech recognition devices.
Strong AI Strong AI is made up of Artificial General Intelligence (a theoretical form of AI, where Artificial Intelligence matches human intelligence, which means it would have self-aware consciousness) and Artificial Super Intelligence (it would even pass the human intelligence), which is, for now, only theoretical without any practical examples.
Can Artificial Intelligence be creative?
During my research, a lot of times this question popped up. Creativity is often perceived to be connected with people, certain methods or tools – not with computers. But do computers also have the ability to be creative? Well, they are to a certain level. For example: IBM (International Business Machines Corporation – an American multinational technology corporation) was asked by 20th Century Fox to create a trailer for their horror movie “Morgan” with the use of their AI “Watson”. Watson analysed the visuals, sound and composition of other horror movie film trailers and with that knowledge managed to create a trailer. You can see the outcome and a more detailed explanation in this video:
This shows that AI has the ability to be creative – to a certain extent. As for now, AI is only able to show creativity with the help of humans. For Watson, it was only possible to create a trailer by analysing other trailers and use deep learning in order to create patterns to understand how a trailer for horror movie works. Only with that knowledge, Watson was able to produce something similar to that.
“It’s easy for AI to come up with something novel just randomly. But it’s very hard to come up with something that is novel and unexpected and useful.” – John Smith, Manager of Multimedia and Vision at IBM Research
How can we co-create with Artificial Intelligence?
To answer the questions, I have taken a look into various projects to find examples on how AI is already used to co-create. I realised that most of the projects I saw could be either categorized in an AI that we, as designers, could profit while creating or AI that we can include in our projects, so that the user can profit from it, or both. Here are some selected examples, which I found especially interesting:
Airbnb – Sketching Interfaces
Airbnb created a tool to transform low fidelity prototypes into code by using AI. You just have to scan your hand drawn wireframes and the AI transforms it into a prototype. This could really speed up the process of prototyping and visualizing ideas in general.
There are many AI that can be used to create images or other assets. One example of this experiments is described in this article of medium.com. The AI is used to turn photographs of real objects into abstract illustrations. It is a part of Google Artists and Machine Learning initiative.
The berlin based studio Onformative created a tool to transform the logo of Oi, a Brazilian telecommunication brand, in fluid shapes through the use of sound input. The outcome is a sound-reactive interactive logo.
The interaction and product designer Xinyue Yang created a tool that uses speech to create animations. You just say what you would like to see in a scene and the program creates an animation out of the information.
To see more interesting projects and experiments with AI, I highly recommend taking a look at these two websites, where a lot of interesting projects are listed:
by Laura Varhegyi, Mira Kropatsch and Marton Szabo-Kass
Design is a discipline, but also an approach and a mindset.
/Emilio Lonardo/
During this year’s International Design Week (10.-13.05.2022) at the FH Joanneum’s Institute for Design and Communication, we participated in the workshop of Emilio Lonardo. He is a designer and CEO of the company D.O.S. Design Open Spaces in Milan, Italy, and was invited to do a four-day workshop with the title “Augmented Habitat (AugH)”. We were a group of 7 students participating, coming from the master courses Communication Design, Exhibition Design and Interaction Design of FHJ.
Each day we had icebreaker exercises and larger tasks which taught us about the approach of augmented habitats. At the end of the week, we were able to use our newfound understanding, to produce a final product. On Friday, all results had to be presented to the whole audience of the International Design Week.
Speed Dating
It takes 7 seconds to generate a first impression of a person. To get to know the group at the beginning of the week, everyone had 7 seconds to talk with each participant and form an idea about them (we didn’t know all the participants before). After the seven seconds were over, we wrote down our personal thoughts about the person, who he/she might be and what trades they probably have. Afterwards, we collected the anonymous notes and read them out loud, one after the other. Each note had to be accepted and taken by someone. We of course never knew for sure if the trades were meant for us, but we had to think about how others might perceive us (in a speed dating situation). As the last part, we summed up our chosen notes and presented ourselves in front of the group, with those trades and a little story about us combining them.
It was insightful and challenging to think about our outside perception and image we show others.
Our own spaces
We wanted to actively use the space around us and therefore selected a space in the classroom we could modify with furniture, our stuff, masking tape and paper in several ways. And not only to change the set up, but also think about the way we want to function and the type of relationship we want to create. We defined the dimensions with masking tape and someone also left a gap open for the entry of the defined space. We started to see many elements we didn’t consider before, like the light and the view, so the way we positioned ourselves to the windows became crucial, just to have the perfect lighting condition. These spaces turned out to be multi-functional and very minimalistic. We presented our ideas to the group. These spaces were meant to be separating us, but also to share it and to have visitors coming over. We also had to come up with a pose for the space, because our own body was also a parameter in the realm we created and to showcase the relationship we fostered in the space.
Own space concept #1Own space conceptsOwn space concept #2
Our personal city maps
Through five different topics, we have created our own city maps by drawing on see through paper on top of the real city map of Graz. We highlighted locations, streets and areas to draw our own
City of monuments: orientation signal elements, symbols and images that serve as visual references,
City of information: all the places where we talked on the phones, took photos, got or gave information,
City of itineraries: all the places where we commuted or parked or left a trace,
City of our mind: all the places where we had spiritual or emotional events or experiences,
City of relationships: all the places where we met, joined, hugged, flirted or kissed someone.
By putting these different maps on top of each other, we could reveal our personal spatial areas of interests in Graz. It gave us a birds-eye view on the streets and places that we use the most or not at all. By comparing the personal maps of the participants, the city’s hotspots could be highlighted, as well as the differences in their lives, motion ranges and individual favourites. As in other exercises, here we could also see how different the perception of people can be about the same city.
Personal city maps example 1Personal city maps example 2Personal city maps example 3
A day in the life of
For this exercise we had to select an urban artefact and write down their “daily routine”. This was all about the meaning an object could hold when they are alive and finding deeper understanding in their needs, feelings and relationship with their surroundings, people and animals. We put ourselves in the shoes of a storyteller, gave the artefacts a backstory and filled out the template for the daily routine with time stamps and the categories: Activities, Feelings, Smell, Tactile, Temperature and Sound. Emilio gave us some great input and we knew we had to dig deeper to find new connections in the stories and came up with new ways these objects could communicate with each other and the outer world. The stories couldn’t get crazy enough, so that was very fun, and also insightful to change the perspective and think about interactions in another way.
A Day in the life Of… Template by D.O.S.
Redesigning city objects – Feature challenge
Every object in the public spaces has its purpose and was (mostly) designed to fulfil some specific needs. In this task, we first had to choose an object in the urban public space, and write down their three main physical characteristics – like materials, forms, dimensions, etc.
Next, we had to redesign the chosen object without using its earlier mentioned three features.
By this, we were forced to think outside the box and concentrate on solving the main problem and purpose of the object in new ways. It was interesting to think about the habits of citizens in interaction with city objects, and how these habits can change if we redesign the objects.
Feature Challenge draft example for city lights
SAugHFari
Everybody sees the city differently, and the inspiration and possibilities bound to certain places. In this task, we created Safari Tour concepts through the city of Graz with 6 to 7 stops we found interesting, that are also attractions of the places. There we had to take pictures, observe what was happening, pay attention to the people and take notes. The next day we chose a theme for our SAugHFari and made a presentation with the SAugHFari route on the map – explaining the concept, our ideas and the specific features of the tour. We then rated the trips we would join with 6 sticker coins for each of us to vote with. The trips were about places to hang out with friends, enjoy the city atmosphere, see animals or have different sensory experiences. The SAugHFari with the topic: restaurants not to visit won in the end. The selected concept was the base of the final task.
A SAughFari map example
AugH Card Game
Emilio introduced a new brainstorming method to generate ideas for the final product concept. It was a simple card game about communication and connecting different goals in the project. A big sheet of paper had many fields with disciplines on it, like production, finance, mobility, etc. and we got six hand cards from piles like topics, technologies and action. We could put a card on a field and then had to say something linking the two areas together, to keep the conversation going. When we had no cards left, we could draw six cards from the piles again. The actions were fun, because if someone was talking for too long we had the option of a card with “stop talking” or we could just ask further questions by putting the action card down. We were talking for a long time until we had said everything, and then we could use some of the ideas we had and go to the implementation phase of the final project.
Brainstorming with the AugH Card Game
Final task: Restaulution
As a final task and project, we chose the most liked SAugHFari trip – from Jasmina Dautovic about the worst restaurants in Graz – and created an Augmented Habitat project concept based on it. The SAugHFari was dealing with the phenomenon of restaurants throughout the city that are not looking very trustworthy or inviting and giving some examples, where you wouldn’t go if you had a chance. So we thought about solutions, how to help these places to change.
After brainstorming about different implementation possibilities, we described the idea of a platform to help these uninviting restaurants with professional advice and community support.
We named the concept “Restaulution”: the restorative solution to revolutionize restaurants.
The base of the concept is a toolbox consisting of professional design solutions by architects and chefs, that serve as guidance and idea collection for every restaurant owner, who wants to upgrade and redesign their facility and service. Architects, interior architects and chefs could provide building blocks (well proven designs, style guides, recipes, etc.) combined with individual consultation options to the toolbox, from which the participating restaurants could choose from.
The framework would be a digital platform (app and website) to host all features of the concept:
Listing the toolbox contents (design and culinary) and cooperation possibilities with professionals
Providing different configuration options for the restaurants
Providing feedback possibilities for old and new customers to assess current designs → get feedback on what the customers want and expect
Showcasing design concepts and new ideas for the public – with possibility for the audience to rate them → get real customer feedback on new ideas
Announcing and showcasing newly implemented design upgrades of the restaurants to attract attention and convince the audience
Listing all participating restaurants and giving a guide to citizens and tourists about the ongoing projects – advertising possibility
We also built a provisional clickable prototype of the app to visualize the concept. This was made available during the final workshop presentations (read below).
With this concept, we wanted to enhance the city itself as our habitat and improve the quality of living. Uninviting restaurants are mostly neglected and not considered to be a problem, but how much better would the image of the city be if there were only high quality services everywhere?
Concept Logo
Dear Reader!
If you have interest, further ideas or feel the potential of the concept and have some possibility and resources to develop the platform further with us, don’t hesitate to contact us – we are open for collaboration to bring Restaulution to life!
For the execution of this project there would be a leading management team who would cooperate with the city. There are funds to improve certain neighbourhoods and it is also meant to improve the city as a whole enhancing the uniqueness of the communities. We want the restaurant owners to perform their best and with professional support from many disciplines they can also reach their goal and therefore also contribute to the prosperity of their community.
The second important link to the refinement of their establishment is the voice of the people living in the city. They can give feedback and also be part of the design development and vote for their favourite design of the facade and interior.
We evaluated the journey of the Restaulution with the CoDE principle (2 scenarios: Continuation, Deterioration, Ending), in the future, 30 years from now. If the project is doing well, we can update all the restaurants and shops that need our support and this project can be extended to more cities in Austria and Germany.
The project could also get really successful for a couple of months or years, with a lot of support, but then later drop in interest and eventually die.
If the project isn’t managed wholeheartedly from the beginning and the team isn’t well selected or the communication and management fails at one point the project can’t be executed and start to function. But with all the weaknesses eliminated, a great team setup and a lot of support from leading design agencies and the Creative Industries Styria the project can open whole new possibilities for the city.
Final Presentation
We showcased our workshop results on the last day, but not like every other group of the International Design Week via Powerpoint presentations on the stage. Instead, we built stands around the hall, so people had to stand up and come to us, and also try out our final product. In one corner, people could scan the QR-Codes that would forward them to PDF slides and show the activities we did that week. On the other side people could look at our maps and mark on a big map their worst restaurant experiences and memories in Graz. In the front people could try out our product and open the imaginary “toolbox” packaging with our Restaulution logo, which invited them to become part of the project. The packaging had a hidden NFC chip which redirected people to our prototype they could try out, when they scanned it with their phone. We were all at different stations explaining our project and helping them to navigate through our stands and on the prototype. The audience was very interested and liked the ideas and the execution.
The Restaulution “Toolbox”
Final thoughts about our workshop
The way a space is designed determines how we use it and behave in it. As designers, we are trained to adapt our solutions to the behaviour of the target group. But it is through more visionary approaches, such as in this workshop, that we begin to think about the fundamental essence of the relationship between people and spaces. This way of thinking allows one to find new approaches that reshape behaviour and, by extension, society.
We had a great time with Emilio, who gave us a lot to think about and handed us tools we could use to broaden our imagination when it comes to problem-solving. With all the activities, he challenged us to think in new ways and starting from other directions when designing. We were fortunate to have an interdisciplinary group of people who could inspire and complement each other with different skills, backgrounds, interests and experiences.
With a multidisciplinary approach in design, it is much easier to tell a story and reflect other parts and aspects of a place, brand, product, etc.. We broke down places into separate compartments when it comes to reimagining and shaping a space. This made it a lot easier to think of pieces coming together and the use of a place / space. Not only things like thresholds, facades and ceilings define a space, but also soft components like light, sound, pollution and time.
We were tackling design, design thinking, public urban space & product design and our habitats from different points of views. The tasks challenged our creativity to perceive and think about our surroundings differently, including not only objects, but humans and their relationship as well. If one had to describe the feeling of the workshop in one sentence, it would be: a fresh wind of new approaches, which were brought closer to us in a playful way.
Such international cooperations like this workshop are essential for designers to broaden their perspectives and get to know different people with unique mindsets. We will hope and search for similar opportunities in the future as well.
This Blogpost is rather intended to help me shape my research topic than actually gathering a lot of new information/dive in deep into a subtopic as I am currently working on my research proposal. To get back on track I am going to start with a short summary about what happened so far.
Summary
By definition, making deceptive design patterns means „designing an interface or experience in a way to manipulate users on purpose for the companies sake.“ This can be translated into using a design approach to trick user into doing something they did not intend on doing. There are various different types of deceptive design patterns (11 types according to Brignull), which was the starting point of my research. However the prime example tangential to each of us is the cookie consent manager. Usually the acceptance-button is way bigger than all the others and additionally adjusting Cookies-Settings is difficult and time consuming. Almost never you can find „Decline all“ as primary button. This is an ethical question and we as designers are definitely responsible to find a balance between clients/their business and the user. Therefore we need to rethink all our UX decisions in order to know when it turns into a deceptive design which should always be avoided. Deceptive design patterns are usually influencing decision making and there are two ways of doing this: Finding quick and simple solutions based on our emotions and slower, conscious decisions by processing all available data. 95 % of the time we decide unconsciously and just go with our gut. A quite common way to influence decision making is Nudging, which is achieved by changing process without limiting choice, for example opt in organ donors by default to increase the number of them. To use this strategy in a negative way turns it into a deceptive design pattern real quick. Within my research I also analyzed to examples of deceptive design patterns and showed a suggestion on how it is would be more user friendly. In both cases the UI and visual feel do not change at all with this small adaptations, which proves that they did it on purpose and it could be reversed easily. I also did an excursion in my research on data tracking since it is a related topic. For 2 years there have been new privacy rules in Europe, however the big players still ignore this. But in the future there will be consequences for instance a recent ruling that would make google analytics illegal. I also had a closer look on principles of good design by legends like Donald Norman, Ben Shneiderman, etc. Doing the opposite of those rules is basically an instruction for deceptive design patterns. But this also means this is the way to reverse/avoid them. Just follow the most important rule: Good design is honest.
Main focus points of the thesis and next steps
In my thesis I want to start with a more detailed research phase on the topic, then use the knowledge to apply it on real life examples and develop something new out of it. Following theory will be tackled:
Ethics in UX Design (Universal Design, Codes of conduct in UX, Critical Design)
Psychology of Perception (Human senses, Persuasion, Manipulation/Deception)
Existing Design Guidelines in UX (Golden Rules of interface design, Usability Heuristics, …)
My next steps are to collect a lot of different examples, analyze and try out ways to revert them. Furthermore I want to define a good way how to communicate the problem of deceptive design with clients and make them understand why this is not the smartest way to design and that satisfied users increase profits in the long run. Hence the thesis is a handbook for designers how to actively work against deceptive design.
Idea of a new platform for designers
The idea is to use all this research to create a new platform for designers to fight deceptive design. The main inspiration is Harry Brignull’s website deceptive.design, but instead of just collecting examples in a hall of shame I want to create a community that turns those examples into light patterns. This will be achieved by making weekly, open for public, design challenges with the goal of reverting a specific dark pattern of a company and increase its usability. Consequently companies have free access and input on how to change their products for the better including possible designers that they can hire. Furthermore the platform should serve as a place of exchange for designers about deceptive design and thus give more attention to the problem. The aim of the thesis is to shape the concept of the platform, do research on target group and stake holders, design a functioning prototype and evaluate it in a usability test or execute a heuristic evaluation.
Dark Patterns to Deceptive Design
There has been a very recent change in the wording of dark patterns. In order to be more clear, inclusive and prevent the further association between the words „dark“ and „bad“, many companies and individuals adapted the term to deceptive design patterns. Taking action against racism by reflecting and actively avoiding negative linguistic stereotypes is very important in todays society in my point of view, which is why I decided to change the term in all my previous articles and am going to use the term „deceptive design patterns“ from now on.
List of Literature
In order to check if there is a reasonable amount of literature on my topic available I decided to start a collective list of books and articles to quote in my thesis.
Alrobai, Amen, John McAlaney, Huseyin Dogan, Keith Phalp, und Raian Ali. „Exploring the Requirements and Design of Persuasive Intervention Technology to Combat Digital Addiction“. In Human-Centered and Error-Resilient Systems Development, herausgegeben von Cristian Bogdan, Jan Gulliksen, Stefan Sauer, Peter Forbrig, Marco Winckler, Chris Johnson, Philippe Palanque, Regina Bernhaupt, und Filip Kis, 9856:130–50. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44902-9_9.
Gray, Colin M., Yubo Kou, Bryan Battles, Joseph Hoggatt, und Austin L. Toombs. „The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design“. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. Montreal QC Canada: ACM, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108.
Nielsen, Jakob. „Enhancing the Explanatory Power of Usability Heuristics“. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Celebrating Interdependence – CHI ’94, 152–58. Boston, Massachusetts, United States: ACM Press, 1994. https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191729.
Norman, Donald A. The design of everyday things. Revised and Expanded edition. New York, New York: Basic Books, 2013.
Shneiderman, Ben. Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer-interaction. 3rd ed. Reading, Mass: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.
Shneiderman, Ben, Catherine Plaisant, Maxine Cohen, Steven M. Jacobs, und Niklas Elmqvist. Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction. Sixth Edition. Boston: Pearson, 2017.
Maier, Maximilian, und Rikard Harr. „Dark Design Patterns: An End-User Perspective“. Human Technology 16, Nr. 2 (31. August 2020): 170–99. https://doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.202008245641.
Ardito, Carmelo, Paolo Buono, Danilo Caivano, Maria Francesca Costabile, und Rosa Lanzilotti. „Investigating and Promoting UX Practice in Industry: An Experimental Study“. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 72, Nr. 6 (Juni 2014): 542–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.10.004.
Bardzell, Jeffrey, und Shaowen Bardzell. „What Is ‚Critical‘ about Critical Design?“ In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3297–3306. Paris France: ACM, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466451.
De Martino, Benedetto, Dharshan Kumaran, Ben Seymour, und Raymond J. Dolan. „Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain“. Science (New York, N.Y.) 313, Nr. 5787 (4. August 2006): 684–87. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1128356.
Edwards, Ward. „The Theory of Decision Making.“ Psychological Bulletin 51, Nr. 4 (1954): 380–417. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0053870.
_The international week 2022 hosted by FH JOANNEUM was an interesting event. I attended Luis Daniel Martínez Álvarez workshop (#9) called “Aesthetic Echoes of Terror: Construction of the sound Atmospheres of the Uncanny Valley for Videogames and Cinema”. I tried to gather as many thoughts as possible here in this post.
I will start with a short summary of the workshop; the lecturer was Danny from Mexico, and his profession is sound design combined with storytelling – mainly scary stories. He gave us a deep dive in how and why specific sonic patterns appear frightening to us, and how to fabricate such experiences. It was a fascinating topic with even better insights, even for a person like me, which has little experience with sound design. We then went on and collectively wrote a little horror story inspired by our deepest fears; the result was “No-Scream//Nose-Cream”. It’s about a hellish clown, which steals noses while the whole world is falling into the hands of ice cream zombies. Sounds like a weird, and that’s because how it was created: We took a piece of paper, and everybody wrote one sentence and then handed the paper to the next person, to continue the story from this point. This approach created this fever dream of a story within two passes.
After that was done, we then collected a vast array of different sounds of noises in the city, grabbed a Zoom-Recorder and ventured into the city to record said noises. We spent the whole first Day in the city, listening to various sound emitters and recorded those. The goal was to generate a composition for our scary story with these sounds, and so we searched up different places with different atmospheres (like a church) and collected enough sound samples to accommodate every detail of our story.
As I mentioned before, I’m not a sound designer – although I enlisted for this specific workshop because of my previous occupations; game design and cinema enthusiast. The attentive reader might remember that I recently wrote a blog post about how some colleagues and me did an attempt on creating a horror game in unity. So, it was an easy decision for me, what workshop to attend when I read the possible options. I wanted to learn more about the soundscapes of the horror genre and how they are made, and I was not dissatisfied.
But one little hiccup which me (an interaction designer) and a colleague (a media designer) faced, was the fact that we were both a little out of our fields here. So, as we now had all our sounds together, we had to quickly learn an audio software (through an excellent crash curse by Danny) and get to composing – something none of both of us ever did. The tasks for this week were to create two compositions; one for our story and one where we did the score for a little 60 second snippet of a horror movie/series/etc of our choice.
We were both thrown into cold water in a workshop with no prior knowledge of its topics, having no clue of composing and trying to figure out baby steps in this field. Naturally, the sound designers did a task which took as nearly two Days in under 10 minutes and it the results sounded amazing. This was kind of demoralizing to be honest, but it was nice to see what can be achieved when you profile in this topic. To not be completely emotionally destroyed we settled on the taking-part-medal, and just played and experimented around with the sounds, and although our lacking skill had interesting outcomes. Although we had little to no experience, we had great fun and really enjoyed ourselves. Turns out, it’s not always about being good in something from the get-go, but it’s about committing and having fun on the way.
All in All, it was an interesting and wonderful experience and I want to commit some special words to our lecturer, Danny – a wonderful and friendly guy from Mexico who studied music and composition. He knew a great deal about his topics and had great fun in relaying all those information to us; but I think what made the week such a success for our group was his inviting and open personality. If I could rate Danny as a lecturer, I’d give him a 10/10 – it was an absolute blast.
_Horizon Forbidden West is apparently considered one of the new contenders for best Accessibility in Games for the year 2022; and since I had the opportunity to get my hands onto that game, I’d say it’s time for a little case study of my own. Also, this game runs on the same Engine which made DEATH STRANDING possible, but a different Studio. Since I kind of already evaluated this other game, I was curious how they did it, giving the fact that DEATH STRANDING didn’t do that well. When I booted it Horizon for the first time, I immediately noticed one of the big points in the main menu – ACCESSIBILITY – and I was curious, which and how good their Accessibility measures & efforts were.
I took a quick gander over their accessibility options and was generally impressed by their efforts in the first moments. Scrolling through the different modifications, I headed to the menu points I always search up every time I start a new game, to language and subtitles. Generally, am I interested in which languages (audio/video) that game is available and how the default subtitles are set up.
Straight of the bat, the default subtitles are quite hard to read – small, white, and mostly on bright backgrounds. You can though, change them quite easily to a slightly larger version with also a black background – but there is still room for improvement.
Staying with graphic settings; in the game there is a mechanic called “using the Focus”, meaning that you can press a button to enable an ‘virtual’ overlay in the game world to highlight important objects or crucial information. In this universe, the “Focus” is a little apparatus which sits on your temple (close to your ear, where all your four skull bones join) and projects some sort of augmented reality view into your sight. This is a nice concept, but poorly executed in my opinion. What it does, is it brings a pinkish overlay – which is not changeable from the get-go – to everything in the game world to show said information. In the end, it has small and hard to see icons and often it takes me more time to differentiate what is important or just pinkish noise accidently misinterpreted by my eyes as crucial data. In the first game there was this option after finishing the game to unlock new styles for said focus, so you could change the colour schemes to your liking – or to better say, needs. Such an accessibility option should not be locked away behind the barrier of ‘finishing the game’.
While talking about the functions of the game mechanic Focus, one other use of it while combat – or should I say strictly before engaging/combat, that’s what bothers me – is to plot our plan to engage and attack your enemies. You look at their walking patters, their strengths and weaknesses, the works. But this is inherently where the problem; often you are faced with a vast array of different foes, which all have different ways to be brought down efficiently. So, you often must, in the middle of stressful combat, enter the focus view to see the enemies’ weaknesses. This context info is there to make it easier for you, but ultimately it either annoys you the get a hold of this information, you struggle to get a quick glance, or it rips you completely out of the fight/immersion; because you pressed the touch bar fast enough to open your enemy database overlay menu. Now you can, in all silence and peace read everything up to your hearts content about a specific enemy, just to press the touch bar again and are maybe, quite possibly, be overwhelmed by all the action what was going on and you kind of forgot about it. Such information is just not easily available, but it should be.
Even before you even engage in a fight, often you enter the hostile premises in stealth mode – the enemies are completely oblivious to your presence. To hold up this fragile status quo, you use the environment to conceal your movements, while you close in on them to get the first strike. You sneak around in some read flora, which is conveniently sprinkled generously around the whole map – but the only way the game communicates to you, that you are now in fact considered ‘in stealth’ is through a soft and gentle rumbling of the controller while you traverse said reddish plants. There is no other visual indicator (e.g., an icon or else) except your character crouching in the bushes and some faint and distant rustling noises from the grass, which gets also easily drowned out by all the other sounds. So, now you often are not sure where you are being in stealth begins and where it ends, leading to some little hiccups in your predatory path to your victim and they may see you approaching. The way of how haptic feedback is generally used in this game is interesting and enjoyable, but for some folks it might be to much of a barrier to enjoy the game properly.
Some of the input patterns in the game can be very complex, and cannot be made easier, for example it took me quite a long time to get a grasp of their grappling hook jump boost mechanic, which needs serval factors to get a satisfying result. You need to be in reach of a grappling point, jump, smash the x-button to connect to the point, and while you are pulled towards it, start smashing the o-button to use your momentum to boost yourself to higher heights. Once I figured it out, it works quite well for me, but I can’t imagine not everyone gets that far with it. Also, while in close combat, there are several combos with varying uses to overpower you enemies – they offer some interesting telegraphing points to show you when exactly to press an attack button, but in the end, in the heat of combat it boils down to you just repeatedly smashing both attack buttons interchangeably and hoping for the best. There is room for some people to perfect this craft for sure, but some will stay on smashing level – but it also works out to have fun with the game.
But not to say they didn’t offer the opportunity to automate some input tasks; I’ve spotted the opportunity to enable the automatic deployment of your parachute while falling great hights – a welcome and handy option. It spares you from demoralisation of jumping of some cliff accidently and then loosing your progress to an untimely death caused by gravitational pull on your existence and the following impact force. Talking about loosing your progress, this is a part they got exactly right; they often and on smart points set very well designed autosaves, so your progress isn’t that lost all together. They track and keep most of your picked up items (except story items), your map discoveries and so on. While also browsing some of the settings, I even discovered another nice accessibility/quality of life option – the possibility to turn off all tinnitus sounds. For some people, the constant sound of ‘phiiiiiiiii……’ while you battle against the enormous machines with their metric ton of explosions in this game can get really tiresome, so this helps a great deal I’d say.
Lately, they even rolled out a big update to the game, adding new modes and features. Maybe, there also were some improvements to accessibility – but I got to check it out again. All in all, I’d say it there was an attempt on inclusiveness as far as I am concerned, but not as a deep dive as some other games (e.g., TLOU: PII) have already achieved.
One interesting Idea or Theory I stumbled upon while reading randomly through various accessibility reports was, that each attempt to create more immersion in games somehow keeps adding more and more barriers for others – like adding a highly sophisticated system for locating game objects through sound. A cool feature for everybody who can hear, but as soon you start to rely on this technology for you game design, it could get inaccessible for some people with hearing problems.
As a concluding insight I’d say, an opportunity for me to use all these rather specific and far spread knowledge about approaches to Universal design in Games and other coherencies in this industry would be to work as an UX/UI consultant for games. I’d see myself doing that and I am growing quite fond of that idea – but to digging deeper into this concept is for another time.
Smart home, smart meter, these terms are sprouting from the floors in the home sector like no other. Everyone wants to live more comfortably and more simply. Everything should be smart and make everyday life easier. Mostly, however, these are lifestyle products, but less about things that inform about the general own consumption. Ok. For the most part understandable – you’d rather be entertained instead of seeing what you’re consuming. I think, however, something fundamental must be changed in this attitude and rather the advantage to be seen, if one understands the own consumption, analyzes and in the best case responsibly can steer.
Searching for the right data.
My concept should be mostly about the own energy budget, it should be prepared data that arise from water and electricity consumption and generation. Therefore, data of the suppliers, costs, and the various influences on the price, the energy network in particular of the suppliers, as well as the own data in the household, through electricity meters, smart meters, etc. are of interest to me. This data should then be put into a meaningful relation, updated in real time and reflect the information in two modes: informative + abstract. Thus, the product can be used as an informative overview and control terminal, but also as regenerative data art to become a lifestyle product.
What is Data Art?
Data art or also referred to as data-driven art is based on data sets and thus conveys emotions. Compared to data visualization, which only visualizes data, or generative art, which creates emotions by chance, the art of creating data art is that it is explained in an understandable and appropriate way. Data art can be many things, from images, videos, interactive works or physical representation, so-called data physicalization can also be encoded sounds or music, this is then called data sonification. But this is relatively difficult, because pleasant tones and a sound spectrum generated by data do not always harmonize.
The next steps will be: Clearly define the concept and also the scope and find out the perfect target group for it. Also, I want to get more familiar with the already existing tools for energy budget measurements and determine which program and tools I need to implement the project.
Today, design is rapidly developing in various areas of our lives. Design thinking began to be used in medicine, biology, products, and much more. People realized that by combining different disciplines we can achieve much better results. At the university, we are often told that by gathering specialists from different fields, we can consider the same project from different angles and understand it more holistically by looking at it from the faces and perspectives of different people. Now global companies clearly select employees with different backgrounds and different temperaments to work on the same task. At Design Week 2022 in Graz, we also had such an amazing experience. This year, as students of Fh-Joaneum, we had the opportunity to work at Karla Molins Pitarch’s workshop, which was called UXD How to bring Lab closer to the streets. We spent a whole week working on the project from the very beginning to finish. The task was to understand and convey complex information with the help of design for people who are not related to biology in any way. The tutor divided us into two-person groups and we, as people with different backgrounds, had to design something new for our consideration. From day one, we received a special Toolkit designed by Karla. It was supposed to help us in the process of creating our product. The purpose of the toolkit itself was to unite people from different areas and facilitate the process of joint work with the help of detailed information describing each step in the design process. The toolkit itself contained such subdivisions as knowledge, transdisciplinarity, applied design research, and outreach. Everything started with the lab and led to the street. Each of the divisions contained points that had to be completed in order to move to the next step. Each of the divisions was described in detail so that people who encountered the process for the first time could find everything they need and understand what to do next. Personally, the toolkit really helped me, even though I have been working with the design thinking method for quite some time. He helped me remember the process and follow it in detail. I plan to use it also in the process of writing my master’s thesis. Unfortunately, we, people who did not have general knowledge of the topic of biology, needed to understand the theme of our workshop from the basics. Our task was to realize what chromatin is and how DNA is built on its basis. We needed to create some design system that would tell people who need clarification what exactly chromatin is.”Chromatin is a nucleoprotein that forms the basis of chromosomes. It consists of DNA and proteins (mainly histones). Chromatin is found inside the nucleus of cells of eukaryotes and archaea that have histones. In a broader sense, chromatin is sometimes also called the substance of the nucleoid in bacteria. It is in the composition of chromatin that genetic information is realized, as well as DNA replication and repair. The first day was quite busy. We were divided into two personal groups and we started brainstorming. The task was a joint effort to understand what chromatin is and show us what it is associated with the studs. In the further process, it really helped, because many of us found the beginning of bare ideas in brainstorming. My colleague and I decided to design a game that would mechanically show the operation of chromatin and DNA. We decided to target schools and educational institutions as places to use the game, and students became our main target group. The most difficult thing was to explain to someone what chromatin is if you are not an expert in it yourself. Especially when you have one day of experience with the topic.
The next day we were scheduled to design low-quality prototypes and we moved to the next stage with Carla’s toolkit. We were still trying to figure out how chromatin works and how to show it in a game for children so that they do not lose interest and it helps them in the learning process. The main element in the game was the transfer of genes from one DNA stream to another. We wanted to give children the opportunity to collect good genes and get rid of bad ones. It was important to involve the players in the process and allow them to play a major role. After the first layouts and attempts, we decided to test the game on our colleagues in order to identify the main problems in the process and be the first to receive feedback from users. After the testing process, we realized that we made several mechanical mistakes in the game itself and that is focused on the process of creating DNA and not on chromatin. In the end, we added a few interesting things so that the main thing in the game still remains chromatin. In order to better understand the processes that take place during the creation of DNA, we began to look for people in our circle of friends who are professionally connected with biology, this really helped in the final result. The last day turned out to be the most difficult because it was then that we had to finish all the drafts so that we could present them well the next day. Under the pressure of time and our efforts, we tried to finish everything before the final deadline. A little about the game itself. The game is based on the process of DNA creation and gene transport. The main element is the player, which is attached to his individual DNA. When a player chooses to collect more good genes from a chromatin point or throw bad genes at one of their opponents, they open themselves up and are vulnerable to attacks. The game is designed for 2+ players because the main task is to take away as many good genes as possible. The person with the best genes wins. Also, the game stops when the first player gets rid of all bad genes.
The whole design week ended with a presentation, everyone could show what he had been working on all these days. Personally, I want to add that I would never change my workshop to another one. An incredible experience, working with wonderful people, and a wealth of knowledge. The week turned out to be productive and interesting.
| Summary and reflection on the article with the above title by: Timothy Roth, Aiyun Huang, Tyler Cunningham – University of Toronto.
As Digital Music Instruments (DMIs) are usually designed and used by technicians rather than everyday musicians and performers, the authors of the article carried out a case study with classically-trained percussionists to analyze their intuitive approach to using digital technology.
In their research of other studies, the authors found performance practice to be an important aspect while creating a DMI. Further on, customizability of electronic instruments could be a helpful way to offer classical musicians (used to only acoustic instruments) an easier way to incorporate electronics into their work.
The study was following the practice-based research methodology and “grounded theory”, carried out as a 2-day introductory workshop, free time to experiment and a final questionnaire. The participants were 10 musicians with many years of musical experience, but almost none with DMIs.
They were all given Arduino Uno microcontrollers with some electronic components and speakers, and an introduction into building and programming a simple instrument with them. Afterwards the participants had two months to experiment, build and expand their setup on their own.
All 10 participants went in different directions, their results can be seen in the following YouTube playlist: Participant Étude Excerpts
YouTube playlist of the study participants’ final performances
The study authors refer to the two approaches from a study by T.Mudd, adressing the “entanglements of agency” in musical interactions, namely: communication-oriented and material-oriented perspectives.
They could categorize the participants in these two groups according to their approach of experimenting. Mapping buttons to create a scale, using visual gestures like a finger vibrato on buttons or playing a predefined groove with the Arduino while playing on drums as well could be defined as clear communications of their musical expressions.
Though the majority of participants aimed for the material-oriented approach, experimenting with the speakers, cables and other physical components to alter the dimensions of sounds generated by the Arduino.
From the experiments, the authors could draw conclusions and parallels between percussion and DMI performance practices. According to composer Vinko Globokar, percussionists can be separated into two groups: ones who use separate instruments for different timbre when striking, and others who use one instrument in several ways to create different timbre. This can also be seen in the study, as the manipulation of timbre played a significant role in the majority of the experiments. This was seen within the “material-oriented” participants.
Another finding of the study was the importance of practice and the influence of improvisational music creation attitude. The participants could develop their playing skills on their DIY built instruments within the given weeks of experimentation. This was crucial for precision in the same way as it is with acoustic percussion instruments.
As a result it was underlined that percussion, being a relatively young discipline, can be an optimal area to incorporate digital musical instruments – though braking, or better said “re-adjusting” their tradition.
My Conclusion
Combining the digital DMI with analog percussion instruments can be an interesting way of creating a hybrid digital-analog music by a single percussionist on their own. From this study group, I would have expected a larger number of participants to try the multi-percussion approach and not only focus on the digital components. Additionally I also expected more experimentations with rhythm and melodies, altough there were no real constraints and almost everyone was improvising while creating their music.
I find the approach with Arduino to be a perfect method of getting into simple MDI design, which was also justifyied in this study. I am not quite sure about the further takeaways and lessons learned from this case study, but it is interesting to see the results of experienced musicians when stepping into the new era of using basic digital equipment and trying to express themselves in this new way. Personalisation possibilities of digital interfaces are almost limitless today, which can play a big role not only in getting used to new technologies but also in the performance of the musicians. As music is a very individual and subjective field, DMIs could have a bright future.
Source
Roth, T., Huang, A., & Cunningham, T. (2021, April 29). On Parallel Performance Practices: Some Observations on Personalizing DMIs as Percussionists. NIME 2021. https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.c61b9546
The introduction of digital musical instruments (DMIs) has removed the need for the existence of a physically resonating body in order to create music, leaving the practice of sound- making often decoupled from the resulting sound. The inclination towards smooth and seamless interaction in the creation of new DMIs has led to the development of musical instruments and interfaces for which no significant transfer of energy is required to play them. Other than structural boundaries, such systems usually lack any form of physical resistance, whereas the production of sounds through traditional instruments happens precisely at the meeting of the performer’s body with the instrument’s resistance: “When the intentions of a musician meet with a body that resists them, friction between the two bodies causes sound to emerge. Haptic controllers offer the ability to engage with digital music in a tangible way.
Using basis functions to generate haptic terrains for the NovInt Falcon.
Background
Dynamic relationships occur and are ongoing between the performer, the instrument, and the sounds produced when playing musical instruments. These exchanges depend upon the sensory feedback provided by the instrument in the forms of auditory, visual, and haptic feedback. Because digital interfaces based around an ergonomic HCI model are generally designed to eliminate friction altogether, the tac- tile experience of creating a sound is reduced. Even though digital interfaces are material tools, the feeling of pressing a button or moving a slider does not provide the performer with much physical resistance, whereas the engagement required to play an acoustic instrument provides musicians with a wider range of haptic feedback involving both cutaneous and proprioceptive information, as well as information about the quality of an occurring sound. This issue is recognized in Claude Cadoz’s work regarding his concept of ergoticity as the physical exchange of energy between performer, instrument, and environment. A possible solution to these issues is the use of haptic controllers. As has been previously noted, “we are no longer dealing with the physical vibrations of strings, tubes and solid bodies as the sound source, but rather with the impalpable numerical streams of digital signal processing”. In physically realizing the immaterial, the design of the force profile is crucial because it determines the overall characteristics of the instrument.
My Conclusion
Haptic Feedback of Cross-Modal Terrains in combination with Sonic Sound is a very interesting way to experience a feel of terrains. Experience structure of surface imperfections are the next step to make an impact and improve the experience of Cross-Modal Terrains.
Furthermore the technology already has achieved the Sonic Sound Haptic feedback though ultrasonic waves. For example the company Ultraleap with STRATOS Inspire where soundwaves a concentrated into on point. This will be an interesting approach for testing the haptic feedback in modern technology and might be a more detailed response.
The way they used Max8 for there testing was a good choice due to having a good connection with devices and monitoring values and the images which is provided as a greyscale 2D image. There it is very simple to see and detect where we are on the surface and how intense it is to feel.
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Isaac, Gabriella; Hayes, Lauren; Ingalls, Todd (2017). Cross-Modal Terrains: Navigating Sonic Space through Haptic Feedback https://zenodo.org/record/1176163
