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Michael Lissack 1 The Overlooked Role of Cues in Design Codes, Cues, Clues & Affordances

Michael Lissack 1 The Overlooked Role of Cues in Design Codes, Cues, Clues & Affordances

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Page 1: Michael Lissack 1 The Overlooked Role of Cues in Design Codes, Cues, Clues & Affordances

Michael Lissack 1

The Overlooked Role of Cues in Design

Codes, Cues, Clues & Affordances

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Taking Notes?

this presentation is on-line at

http://lissack.com/codes.ppt

background reading is at

http://lissack.com/lissack_reader.pdf

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Complex Systems Thinking

Inter-relatednessAmbiguityEmergenceMultiple LevelsMultiple PerspectivesWeak Signals

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Complexity reveals difficulties in “meaning”

Complexity thinking worries about compartmentalization and categorization

Identity of actors, situations, and contexts is seldom stable and often time proceeds in multiple directions

Emergence and weak signals raise questions about models, labels, attributes, metaphors…. and meaning

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Design in a Complex World

Thousands of readily discriminable objects. How do we deal with all of them?Partly, the way the mind works.Partly, the information available from the appearance

of objects.Partly, the ability of the designer to:

make the operation clear, project a good image of the operation, and take advantage of the other things people might know.

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Good Design… at least for objects

Well designed objects . . . are easy for the mind to understand contain visible cues to their operation

Poorly designed objects . . . provide no clues, or provide false clues.

Principles of good design the importance of visibility appropriate clues feedback of ones actions.

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Design… for meaning

easy for the mind to understand contain readily apparent cues to their operation appropriate clues feedback between ones actions and ones knowledge

To “know” is to have enough data to support a willingness to act

To “understand” is to have enough data to “explain” another’s willingness to act

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Key Concepts

Explanation Knowledge Models Behavior Affordances Constraints

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Explanation

The nature of human thought and explanation. We want to have an explanation, and we will construct one

in order to eliminate any puzzle or discrepancy in our lives. As “narrators” we feel we need explanations

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Knowledge

Satisficing for a willingness to act Precise behavior can emerge from imprecise

knowledge, because . . .– Information is in the world – One to one mapping of affordances is not required.

Retrospectively one choice is made.– Constraints are present.– Models and narratives can contribute to

retrospective explanation.

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Models

We base our models on whatever knowledge we have: real or imaginarynaïve or sophisticatedeven fragmentary evidence.

Everyone forms theories (mental models) to explain what they have observed.

In the absence of feedback to the contrary, people are free to let their imaginations run free.

Thus the presence of models can serve as an inspiration for explanation and knowledge and as a constraint on “free association”

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Behavior

In everyday situations, behavior is determined by the combination of . . . internal knowledgeexternal infoawareness of possibilitiesconstraints.

There’s a tradeoff between the amount of mental knowledge and the amount of external knowledge needed.

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Affordances

An Affordance is the perceived and actual properties of a thing.Primarily those fundamental properties that

determine how a thing could possibly be used.“Affords” means, basically, “is for.”A chair affords support, therefore affords sitting.

Affordances provide strong clues to things’ operations.When affordances are taken advantage of, the user

knows what to do just by looking.

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Constraints

Constrain possible actions/behaviorsAre made more effective and useful if they are

easy to see and interpret.Can be physical, cultural, semantic, or logical

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Inter-relations Important to Design

Meaning can be inferred from knowledge or explanation

Knowledge and explanation can be both inspired and constrained by awareness of models

Behavior stems from mediated knowledgeAffordances and constraints act as the mediatorsExplanation is a retrospective stance to narration

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Meaning

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

—Lewis Carroll

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Three Design Elements

Codes

Clues

Cues

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The Coding Fallacy

The semiotic world is composed of codes -- of signs and symbols that can be translated via a look-up table. The “coding” fallacy underpins a philosophy of realism and its derivative ontologies. By contrast is the ontology of ‘cues”. Codes have the advantage of definition, cues have the vagueness of situationalism. Clues fall in the middle as tokens of narration which act as code or cue.

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Codes

Codes are efficient. Lookup tables work. A means x. B means y. C when found in situation g means w and in situation h means z

Codes are separable from attendance, affordance, and effectivities. Codes are assigned semiotic abstractions of varying complexity and whose requisite lookup tables vary in terms of situational specificity. Those who have been trained in the quantitative sciences or whose world view has a foundation in realism are often asserting the primacy of codes.

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Codes are part of the “modern”

Semioticians seek to identify codes and the tacit rules and constraints which underlie the production and interpretation of meaning within each code.

Daniel Chandler

The process consists of parsing the natural language to extract the different terms it contains, mapping these terms to the concepts available in the ontology and finally extracting the most relevant codes from the intersection between the different concepts. In the process ambiguities are detected and automatically solved.

Frank Montyne

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Science Places Great Emphasis on Codes

What happens in perception is similar to what at a higher psychological level is described as understanding or insight. Perceiving is abstracting in that it represents individual cases through configurations of general categories. Rudolf Arnheim

Reading a text involves relating it to relevant 'codes'. Roman Jakobson

Perception depends on coding the world into iconic signs that can re-present it within our mind. The force of the apparent identity is enormous, however. We think that it is the world itself we see in our "mind's eye", rather than a coded picture of it' Jacques Derrida

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Complexity Suggests that Codes are not as Omnipresent as We may Think

In re combinatorial environments, meaning is characterized by a fluid, shifting, continuous state of becoming. In this form of fleeting context, content is always emergent, arising out of the superimposition and or juxtaposition of a series of "poetic“ elements and processes functioning in relation to one another. Fleeting and shifting qualities of engagement become an experiential focus. During interaction, the user, through direct experience, encounters a series of potential "states“ of meaning. We should always view these states as a temporary glimpse at a continuous process of meaning-becoming, motivating the thought and behavioral reaction of the user. William Seaman

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Witness Einstein

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced an combined... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Albert Einstein

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Context and Narrative are Important Elements in Knowledge and Explanation

We live in a time that is exemplified by fleeting messages, complex shifting meanings and mercurial contexts. William Seaman

Our identities are constructed along narrative principles, and often constructed and reconstructed in the actual telling of stories about ourselves in daily life, in family groups, etc

Jerome Bruner

we tell our lives as narratives, but we experience them as hypertexts’. Jay Lemke

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Clues (1)

Evidence used in a narrative feedback loop for explanation

Evidence

Explanation

Narrative

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Clues (2)

Clues do NOT create knowledge

Clues can support models

Clues can provide evidence of constraints

Clues can create awareness of affordances

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Cues and Gloms

Semiotic affordance and effectivities are “cued” when an observer pays attention to some “cue” and has a cognitive experience. These experiences will then be processed for later attention and action.

[One] does not have to restructure separately all of his earlier concepts. . . Once a new structure has been incorporated in thinking .. . it gradually spreads to the older concepts as they are drawn into the intellectual operations of the higher type. Lev Vygotsky

To communicate about a given situated activity, we pick our words. By picking particular words we are, in turn, picking meanings (and not only a specific meaning, but also a glom of meanings, the particularities of which are determined by the user from the context). The meanings we pick influence both our perspective on the situated activity we are relating to (or communicating about) and our sense of the possibility space and adjacent possibles relating to that activity.

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Gloms

Words evoke families of meanings. These families of meanings are referred to as a glom. The multiplicity of meanings implicit in a glom allows, when each such meaning is viewed as a medium, new possibilities for action.

Vygotsky distinguishes between more primitive gloms and higher level concepts. First come the gloms, and then only when abstracted traits are synthesized anew and the resulting abstract synthesis becomes the main instrument of thought does a concept emerge. Vygotsky notes that when there is dissonance between the understood meaning of a concept and new input, what ever it might be, i.e. when a concept breaks down, there is reversion back to the glom. That reversion allows for change.

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Cues (1)

Cues are the operants perceived and attended to which trigger a meaning and/or an action by the attendee. The operant might be a physical affordance or its corollary effectivity or it might be a semiotic affordance and or its corollary effectivity. It is important to recognize that attendance is critical to cue operants. In the absence of attendance there is no cuing and in the absence of the activity or cognition of cuing there is no cue.

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Cues (2)

Cues are the label for the emergent meaning which results from an intersection of attendance to environment, situation, history, and cognition such that semiotic affordance and/or effectivities are perceived to allow for action, assignment of cognition, label, or code, or for boundary breaking.

In symbolic representation, "the symbolic does not simply point toward a meaning, but rather allows that meaning to present itself." In other words, "what is represented is itself present in the only way available to it.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

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Cues (3)

The emergent meaning of cues requires that we extend the concept of affordances to the semiotic sphere. A semiotic affordance is the possibility that a situation or a cognitive sign offers to an attendee. Semiotic affordance are not properties of the situation or cognition but rather are joint properties of the situation/cognition/attendee and attention. In the absence of attention there are no semiotic affordances.

Semiotic affordance have their corollaries in semiotic effectivities. The potentiality of an attendee to make use of a possibility afforded to him/her by the semiotic situation. Cognition thus corresponds to the potentiality of an animal to take advantage of a physical affordance afforded it by the environment or the particular subset thereof which the animal has attended to.

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Two Kinds of People

Those who operate in the world of codes are less than tolerant of the vagaries suggested by cues. Those vagaries are suggestive of inconsistencies and incompleteness that bother the code people. By contrast those who are more comfortable in the world of cues are less bothered by the assertions of the coders that there is such a thing as exact meaning and that lookups are appropriate. In reality both groups make use of the conceptual framework of the other, but the cuers are usually more explicit when making use of codes and the coders are usually more emotional (and want to declare not themselves) when making use of cues.

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Rules for Art

1. The ‘peak shift principle’ makes exaggerated elements attractive

2. Isolating a single cue helps to focus attention3. Perceptual grouping makes objects stand out

from background4. Contrast and Perceptual ‘problem solving’

are both reinforcing

Vilayanur Ramachandran

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Designing for Meaning

Approach 1

The User is a “Coder” -- meaning is found on a look up table

Approach 2

The User is a “Cuer” – meaning is found by evoked attention to affordances found in

context

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Design Errors

Approach 1

Context is not addressed and cues predominate

Avoidance of responsibility for choosingWillingness to act (knowledge) is

misunderstood

Approach 2

Predilection to ascribed meaning of code not recognized due to offloading of “information” to the environment

Requirements for evoked attention overlooked

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Example 1

Mother tells teen “I want to pick up your dress at the cleaners before they close.”

Teen runs out of gas and is out of money. Teen drives to the cleaners around 5:45pm to intercept Mom.

Mother is not there.

Teen goes to great lengths to borrow money to get gas to get home.

Teen blames Mother for not being at cleaners.

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Example 2

The MayorOf Cincinnati

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Example 3

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Example 4

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Example 5