14 April 1995

Larry Friedlander:  Want to break out of the box and the window.   Move to story spaces, or museum space.  May use metaphors from theater, improvisation. example of a Greek chorus, fluid zone.   What interaction is possible?  How can aesthetic constraints exist or function?

Charles Kerns:  How can we use video to communicate experience?  Still images <=> "then", video <=> "now".   In Larry's Fantasy Lit. class,  students explore where  genre's of fictoin can be situated.    

Current media analysis often forgets the space where the machine sits.   Would like to look at design theory (eg. Mech Engineering) which studies how people interact with technology.

Michelle Baldonado-Wang:  How can we designate, assign meaning, annotate in these new document structures?  Design issues in context of fluid documents.

Ben: 

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4 May 95

For your convenience, I put a README
URL=http://www-leland/~xinwei/pub/img/readings/Lakoff
 annotating the scanned sections from Lakoff's book.   I tried to choose sections which seemed relevant to either categories or to semantics.

Please forgive me for so freely and clumsily paraphrasing you in my notes.   These are just a way for me to tack down a few of the ideas that we floated in the seminar, so I can recall them later.   By putting words in your mouths, I can make a pseudo-conversation so I can reconstruct more pleasurably some threads of ideas.  If you mail me your observations with permission,I'll include them in the discussion trail.

Gregory brought in photos of groups of objects (spools, pile of chairs, heap of, as Decker put it, pushable things with handles).    Remarked that, in response to Lakoff's taxonomy of categories, it seemed that people often grouped things in heaps.  (but heaps which are thematically coherent, as suggested in photos?)

[include Greg's explanation.]

Also, relevant to the discussion of modeling desire, most software pays no attention at all to intent or desire, only to technique-- eg  Illustrator is a complex set of menus and tools, which takes a while to learn.  At first it can seem like a jumble of functions.  But after mastering Illustrator, you don't have to think of the menus and tools anymore, only of what you want to do.

Decker:  Looking at Gregory's photographs, it's interesting how I categorize the objects in one photograph as things with handles that I can push. 

There's Polanyi's example of a man using a cane.  At first he's feelung the tip of the cane, tapping against the ground, but after habituation, he forgets the cane and is feeling the ground.   Similarly, children must learn to feel their fingers, and distinguish their body boundary from what it touches.

Ben: Maybe starting out with the category is already making a fateful choice or restriction or tautology.   Favors a systems approach from which one may or may draw categories.   Questions the body-based approach to meaning.   What is the "body"?   One might think of culture as that regime to which the body is subject.   That is, body may be a function of culture.   From this perspective, we can then ask, what are the systems of culture?    An interesting aspect of Freudian or Lacanian approaches is that they provide narratives out of which one can stabilize a notion of body, which distinguishes them from Lakoff's taxonomic approach.  [ACH! poor wording - xw]

In the context of writing about writing (Albert Lord, Walter Ong).  There's the distinction drawn between oral and "literate" culture.   In a culture possessing the technology of writing, communication models are based on communicating agents (nodes) who exchange messages along arcs (dyadic relationships).   [ Or maybe n-adic. Each communication is a point to point transaction. - xw]  
In pre-oral culture, where people couldn't record communications in marks or exchange/keep marks, people existed in an aural field which surounded them.

Pain - In the Iliad algos was assoc. not with war injuries, but with pain of separation from kin/home.

Judy:  I need to relate these theories to how I work.   There's quite a different feel to working with a computer and working with something like watercolor or pastels.   I choose different media for different effects [on me as well as "on paper" - xw].  But when I work with a medium, I have to let it go its own way.  I don't feel this with the computer.   But on the other hand, I realize that I couldn't have done my dissertation without the computer: undo radically changed my work.  

Trace: pointed out the implications of infinite undo of any sequence of gestures
Xavier:  I tell the museums [Louvre, ...] with whom I'm working to set aside issues of content and interface, and think about the visitor's experience.

Xin Wei:  So what are systems?  What advantages are there to taking systems as somehow prior to the stabilization of the body, as Ben put it?  (I feel that there are advantages.)

Can we really characterize computer media as media?  Is erasure, infinite undo-ability, or provisionality a defining attribute of the medium?   I'm intrigued by Judy's description of letting a medium "go its own way."   Compare this with Brenda Laurel's remarks about how necessary constraints are for desiging human experience (ch 4, Computers As Theater). There may be a subtle play here between diction (choice of color/words) and narrative flow (effect).

Interesting that Decker uses kinesthetic characterization.   I do believe that there are indeed kinesthetic schemas, only that Lakoff's examples are not convincing.  For example, listening to a Bach sonata for solo violin, I can remember the pleasure in the muscles of my right arm as I bowed the passages.

Greg, Judy and Decker's remarks are redolent of Heideggerian language. All this discussion of things ready-to-hand is most elegantly captured by ZhuangZi's Butcher Ding parable.  [qv Suggested Readings for excerpt - xw]

Ben's description of the speech era vs. language illustrates wonderfully the possibility of a communication model which is not based on a graph metaphor.   And just as we can have communication fields, we can have semantic fields. Saussure's inchoate figure of sign - signified cloud layers.

Fuzzy set theory illustrates how non-traditonal models can still admit an implementable formalism.   Maybe a bit of point set topology would be useful.

I hope next time, as an exercise, people can begin to tie some of what we've discussed back to some design scenarios, such as a replacement for menu systems, and an examination of the "search and retrieval" gestures so intrinsic (dear?) to "Information Technology."   For example, I think that even at the most vulgar :) and straightforward level, Lakoff et al's non-classical categories furnish tremendously useful alternatives for iconic  as well as text-based object/command user interfaces.  Imagine how one might design and implement UI's using fuzzy, radial, prototype, production-rule (algebraic) categories.   I'd leave aside metaphoric & metonymic extensions for later exercises, at least until we've explored other folks' notions of metaphor.

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