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BEYOND HANDWAVINGTHE ROLE OF PERFORMANCE
IN INTERACTION DESIGN
ELIZABETH GOODMAN www.confectious.net @egoodman
The genesis of this talk lies in a quick encounter I had with a friend of mine, a designer whom I shadowed as part of my dissertation research. Let's call him Rene.
Rene told me that he wasn’t working on wireframes anymore -- what he called doing the “real work” on the project. Instead, he was “handwaving” with clients.
And I took it for granted at the time. But later on, re-reading my field notes, I thought -- wait, Rene is spending a lot of his time preparing for and then conducting these meetings. He’s a senior designer. This is part of his job. Why ISN’T handwaving "real work"? What is handwaving? what is "the real work" anyway?
Rene was expressing a sentiment that’s pretty common in both practitioner and academic circles
What I heard often was that the “real work” of design is ideation and drawing -- and that relationship management and communication are less central to what it means to be a designer.
This talk will argue that performance is, indeed, “real work.”
ABOUT THE
STUDYProject observation at three interaction design consultancies
Interviews with individual designers
Conference-going and directed reading
Download the dissertation at
Download the dissertation at
http://www.confectious.net/design-practice-ethnography/
WHAT I DIDI started thinking about interaction design and performance as part of my dissertation work at UC Berkeley's School of Information.
I had two motivations1) Reading a lot of design theory and felt like a lot of the work I did and that I saw my friends doing wasn't being accounted for.
Specifically, the emphasis on *creativity* and *thinking*. Every designer I knew was a fountain of ideas. But some were clearly more successful than others at getting those ideas built and into the world. I wanted to figure out why.
2) Also, I wanted to improve my own practice.
So I spent about a year, off-and-on, hanging out with designers whose work I respected to try and figure out what made them so good at what they did. I met other designers individually And I went to conferences like this one and took lots of notes about how speakers TALKED ABOUT what they didI also read a lot of how-to booksNotes, photos, videos. I counted Post-it notes (no, really). Lots of video analysis.
But it took me a long time to see performance happening at all. Because it's so pervasive, I took it for granted. Just like my designer friend.
DEFINING PERFORMANCE
Boundedness
Narrative
Audiences
Schechner, R. (2013). Performance Studies: An Introduction. Routledge.
The definition of "performance" I use draws from classic literature in the field of Performance Studies:
(1) Performances are bounded episodes. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end(2) Performances require an audience as well as a performer – the audience – even only imagined -- is necessary to the definition. (3) Performances are narrative. They tell stories.
PERFORMANCE IS ORDINARYAS ILLUSTRATED BY A VIDEO NOT SHOWN HERE
Here’s what performance looks like in everyday interaction design work. I’m showing this particular snippet because it’s both ordinary and extraordinary. It’s ordinary in that this is a very mundane meeting about a very routine project in a genre – an ipad-compatible shopping website – that is particularly standardized. Yet it’s extraordinary because it illustrates the fluency of expert embodied skill.
Lets watch it. The designers are looking at an array of conceptual sketches at the beginning of the proejct. Alan, the male designer has misunderstood what Audrey, the female designer, intends with a sketch. He reads the sketch as including a dropdown that reveals pictures of what’s for sale. Audrey explains what she really meant – not a dropdown but a skinny bar that gets bigger and smaller. This distinction turns less on a technical difference than on an aesthetic, affective “feel” that for Audrey differentiates the dropdown from the bar.
This is a classic performance episode.
It’s a bounded event – this meeting is going to begin and end.It involves witnesses – Alan and Audrey are talking in front of a more senior interaction designer and visual designer. They need the senior designers to agree on what to do next.And it involves storytelling – in this case, what the website is going to do when a user taps or clicks on a link. It’s not Hamlet, but it’s a good example of the kind of stories that businesses depends upon.
It illustrates the difficulty of collaboration. There is no system. Just these black and white, static drawings. There are no users. Just Audrey and the team. They are trying to make some decisions about the navigation directions. They have to make a decision on the basis of their own guesses about how future users will perceive the system described in the drawings when it’s implemented. Audry and Alan know each other well and are both very skilled, but they can still misunderstand even a seemingly very clear schematic. That’s why Audrey has to start gesturing.
YOU HAVE TO PERFORM THE PROJECT TO MAKE THE PRODUCT
Careful staging + Skillful roleplay
Authoritative witnessing
let's get down to the nitty gritty: what did I learn during my fieldwork? and what does this mean today?
I began to think of product as being *performed* into being
Careful staging + Skillful role-play = Authoritative witnessing
CAREFUL STAGING
------CAREFUL STAGING
Producing an audience (it's a production problem of coordination and technology)Assembling the right people holding it together with a patchwork of technologies…this seems like it’s not design, but it is
Forum of collaboration [pic of famous MIT physics building][whiteboard]
We have not yet found a substitute for the whiteboard!Problems of distributed teams: who sits at the table?
STAGING ALIGNMENT AT THE WHITEBOARD
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We see two designers and their client using Post-its, a whiteboard, and stickers to negotiate which features to put in an initial mobile application. No single person can tell the group what features to add first; individual acts of moving the Post-its on the shared board (yellow + concept sketches) add up to a collective decision visible by stepping away and examining the larger picture (green notes).
What’s important here is:1)
Photo from MIT Museum
COLLABORATING IN THE TRADING ZONE
Gorman, M. E. (2010). Trading Zones and Interactional
Expertise: Creating New Kinds of Collaboration. MIT Press.
Photo from MIT Museum
Trading zones facilitate collaboration among different disciplines, as in MIT’s Rad Lab, or Radiation Lab.
Note the different types of people in both photos
They learn “interactional expertise,” or how to speak each other’s language
The trading zone is the stable space that facilitates that
Glassblowing photo in context: http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/243/radlab_POP.htmlPhysics photo in context: http://www.atomicheritage.org/location/cambridge-ma
SKILLFUL ROLEPLAY
ROLEPLAY IN A TYPICAL WALKTHROUGH
So you get THAT when you hit that arrow button <touching a black triangle on the first sheet of paper within the shaded box> and <pauses>
If you click Eat <taps at a line of text next to the triangle, moving aside the first sheet to reveal more of the wireframe on the paper beneath>
just imagine a dotted line here <pincers her fingers on the navigation menu on the second page>
you just land on this page <spreads her hands across the second page>
and this is the Discovery <circles a finger around the central region on the second page>.
SKILLFUL ROLEPLAYrole switching: users, designers, clients, technologies
CASE STUDYokay, this is going to be a little intense. I’m not expecting you to really read all the small text. I’m just showing it as an example of the kind of analysis it aktes to amek what we take for granted visible as a real skill
but this is how you take everyday craft seriously -- you get into the details
This is Audra again, walking the team through a set of wireframes she made to work out the navigation
(1) An indefinite user As she talks and taps her fingers, Audra is invoking the actions and per- ceptions of “you,” an indefinite but very present prospective user who is not Audra herself (A, B).
(2) The web browser The web browser is responsible for replacing one visual region with an- other after the activation of a hyperlink. In moving from the first sheet of paper to the second (B), Audra is enactively simulating how the browser would load a new file.
(3) Designer: Finally, Audra plays her own official role, that of a designer in LargeAgency. She departs from the diegetic narration to gesturally mark a non-existent dotted line ( C) and to in- dicate where she has placed a type of content intended to support Homeward Ceramics’s business goals.
(4) Implied machines and humans Moreover, Audra’s story also has two unmentioned but impli- cated actors (Clarke & Montini, 1993): the iPads and the iPad users whom she is trying to accom- modate with the rollover-free navigation menu.
It’s kind of a virtuoso performance by Audra -- and by her audience, who are all following right along as she switches from role to role.
Where -- and who -- is the user? In the body and out. Professional feelingThis is what’s often called “bringing empathy”
That’s what happens in a design studioThe future users aren’t there -- can’t be there, because the thing doesn’t exist yetSo the designer instantiates them as a way to
PROFESSIONAL VISION
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633.
Photo from the Los Angeles Times
Link to photo in context: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/06/rodney-king-beating-was-catalytic-moment-for-lapd-attorney-says.html
1994
Charles Goodwin
Professional vision teaching non-experts to see and categorize the world like expertshe analyzed videotapes of expert witnesses at the Rodney King trial, successfully taught the jury to see the video to see Rodney King’s actionsNot like the general publicBut like the police officers beating him
He is teaching them how to see, using the still and a pointerThis is a performance
What we’re doing with clients is a little similar -- though not to the same end, of course
But we want them to FEEL as well as see
I want to argue that the empathy doesn’t lie in the persona documentIt’s in the figure of the designer, like that guy (weirdly, wearing a tux) who is showing the jury what and how to see in the videoHe’s doing it not just with wordsBut with his entire body
AUTHORITATIVE WITNESSING
This is a fancy academic term for “getting the right stakeholders to agree, and know that they have all agreed”
What does that mean in practice?
CAN I GET AN AUTHORITATIVE WITNESS?
Meeting 1: On the phone Meeting 2: In the studio
AUTHORITATIVE WITNESSING
people watching EACH OTHER agreeGranting assent that can’t be revoked
In this case, we have two meetings. In the first, the designers are presenting to their client, who is following along on her iPhone because she’s in a car. They’re talking into a conference phone system. She can’t see animations, she can’t do screensharing. It seemed to go well, with her agreeing to a clear direction for a gestural interface. But that seeming agreement ended up causing many problems for the project.
- she didn’t fully understand what she was agreeing to and the designers didn’t have any visual or body cues to hint at her incomprehension- some important stakeholders for HER weren’t on the call -- which she hadn’t told anyone
so when she decided to withdraw her agreement, claiming she’d never agreed to it and that her customers didn’t like the direction, the project delivery timeline was thrown into turmoil. And, in the end, jeopardized delivery. The project did not end well. At all.
The second meeting is the change meeting. The client is in the room, and they’re all looking at the same screen, at the same scale, with the same animations. One designer is physically pointing to what they’re going to change, and how.
When we teach design, we often talk about learning how to “see” a problem. What’s going on here is first a problem of staging, and second a problem of “showing.” The designers have to SHOW their client just how much money and time her requested changes are going to cost, and SHOW her the logic of the choices already made, so that they can get her to commit and stay committed.
Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (2011). Leviathan and the
Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life.
Princeton University Press.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768
THEORYHistories of science: you need the right kind of witnesses to declare your demonstration credible [air pump]
As with scientists in the early days of experimentation (Shapin & Schaffer, 2011), convinc- ing others and oneself requires a skilled display before an appropriate audience to evoke affect, belief, and witnessed assent.
This is one of the most famous “experiments”
Notice the various kinds of emotion in the faces of the onlookers
They believe in what’s happening to the bird. They are convinced.
It’s also important that this is in a private home. It’s an experiment designed to convince not the general public but a select set of witnesses -- the kind of middle and upper classes whose support scientists needed in order to “win” the debates
WHAT THIS TELLS US ABOUT INTERACTION DESIGN
WHAT THIS TELLS US ABOUT INTERACTION DESIGN?
Who saw the talk on communicating vision? GreatI think these two talks are really good complements
Boundaries: these are ritualized activities; we have a structure. Narrative: Helping people see, feel, and believe are central to our job. Witnessing: Stories help us deliver because they limit as well as open up We need to make artifacts to “keep the vision alive” -- the UX roadmaps, the wireframes, the sitemapsBut we also need performance to 1) embody that vision and give it life that stakeholders can feel2) get them to turn that vision into action
There's this hope that the deliverables speak for themselves -- that they'll do the delivering. But like a monologue or a magician’s trick, it's all in the delivery.
Take pride in running a good meeting. It’s almost better than preparing a good document (D.M. Brown, 2010, p. 22).
Successful designers treat the artifacts more like instruments to be played than actors in their own right.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
WHERE WE GO NEXTI'm not telling you anything you don't know.
A bunch of useful concepts that I hope will surface parts of your work that you take for granted.
QUESTIONSHow should we teach performance? And I don't mean teach public speaking skills or selling. Let's also consider what an emphasis on performance might mean for how we teach students and support working interaction designers. This is an open question for me in the future.
Lots of great new prototyping tools. I'm a big fan of Invision, myself. Still need storytelling to make people believe. That walkthrough isn't going to walkthrough itself.
Rise of globally distributed teams- I work in a distributed team -- people in Chicago, clients and product manager in DC- working at making forums of collaboration- what comes next after the sticky note?
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@egoodman
Download the dissertation at
www.confectious.net/design-practice-ethnography
TELL ME MORE...
I’M WRITING A BOOK
www.confectious.net
www.delicious.com/oue
Doing Design:
Interaction
Design and
Performance
Oxford University
Press
Coming out
in 2016
