#schrage

Sadly I couldn't attend to the two lectures Experience Prototyping and User Testing due to sickness. I have done my furthest to catch up from home, reading through what has been posted on canvas such as slides and exercises. I have also made sure to read all the literature associated to these lectures.

Reading about the purpose and practice of serious play brought me insights of how play can give valuable information and bring forth hidden opportunities. The chapter also challenged my prejudices about play being the opposite to serious. I feel enlightened by reading how playful prototypes act as “...a tool for discovery, insight and test” (s.19, 2013).

I find it interesting how Schrage writes about the bond between hypothesis and prototype. He means that there has to be a hypothesis to be tested for a prototype to be a prototype. He means that you craft a hypothesis by crafting a prototype, no matter the medium you craft it in (s.22, 2013). I feel enlightened by this too, and will consider it into my further prototypes. Drawing from my latest prototypes - texting, video-mailing and voice-messaging friends and family I definitely feel like we did what we did to craft a hypothesis. We needed to test how these ways of communicating were interpreted by friends and family, and to see the difference between the different ways.

Schrage means that prototypes that encourages serious play often leads to ground-breaking discoveries, like the radar and steam engines (s.20, 2013). I could be wrong, but I interpret his chapter to mean that prototypes which encourages serious play are interactive prototypes. Prototypes that need the tester/user to interact (play) with it to be understood and to gain new insights from it. It’s from experience that we often draw conclusions. 

Although, Schrage has some points of calling it “play” instead of interactive prototypes. He mentions that “...’play’ represents a surreal, unreal or ‘not quite’ reality” (s.25, 2013) and means that the freedom that comes with seeing ‘beyond’ the reality is a powerful way to gain insights and to shape a new reality. While just interacting with a prototype might just spawn ideas of the present - playing with a prototype might spawn ideas of a potential future. He writes that “...uncertainty is essential to successful play” and I think this a major point that we often miss when interacting with a prototype. I believe that we, as humans, often are very good at finding connections and are very bad at living in uncertainty. I believe that that's a factor for us to often miss out on novel and new-thinking ideas and opportunities - because we’re too scared of the uncertainty. Will it work? How? When? etc. These questions are important, but maybe not until we’ve explored uncertainty the way it deserves to be explored.

Parents keep child's gender under wraps

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110524/ts_yblog_thelookout/parents-keep-childs-gender-under-wraps

I know this may be old news by now (posted May 24) but I still can't get the message it carries out of my mind. I highly recommend reading the article I posted on the top, but for a quick summary: Two parents decided NOT to reveal their healthy baby's gender and this has essentially caused an uproar from family, friends, etc. For those of you who remember Baby X (http://www.sa.ucsb.edu/women/blog/file.axd?file=2011%2F4%2FBabyX.pdf) people don't know to do when they cannot approach a baby and say "Oh, she's a doll!" or "What a handsome boy!" Is it that unacceptable to simply acknowledge a healthy, beautiful new being in the world?

I've focused some of my studying in gender issues but I have not delved into the subject nearly as deeply as I would like to, so please excuse and feel free to correct me if I begin to over-generalize. I believe there is something inherently wrong with the way gender has been constructed in our society. And sadly, I cannot seem to put my finger on exactly what that is.

Gender is no longer as simple as, "If it has a penis, it's a boy." Genitalia doesn't tell gender and neither do hormones, physical attributes, neurons... There is no universal "if you have this, then you're this." I hate to say it, but I am morally dumbfounded to even find an appropriate definition of gender.

I believe we have a few options to ameliorate our current dependance on gender categorization. I think a good first step is to proliferate the categories: add a checkbox on the SATs for intersex, male-identified female, female-identified male, unkown sex, etc. The list goes on and on. Think though, would this not be an excellent way of educating the public and making aware the fact that gender is by no means a binary system? However, I can't help but see this eventually going too far... Refer to the "one drop rule" of race: "I'm one drop Irish, one drop German, one drop South African, one drop Russian...." There's no end to the combinations people can conjure once this option is offered. Once people are aware that there are other options besides White or Black, they cannot help but start to think of all the ways they now fit under the "Other" category. Gender proliferation, therefore, would be a great step to induce awareness of the problem, but as far as solving it goes... I just don't see it.

That leads me to a quasi-eliminativist approach. (For further information on this, please look to Laurie Shrage's "Sex and Miscibility" where I agree with much of her argument). What if we could eliminate the gender binary system to the extent that it was only on a medically need-to-know basis. Other than that, humans were free to be and love whatever they chose. A good friend of mine uses the term "sexual fluidity" and I'd like to apply that to gender as well. There would be no gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, trans-sexual; there would be humans and love would be fluid, so to speak.

Sound nice? What about transsexuals, though? The people who enjoy a sort of dual-identity; the ones who need categories to be established for them to enjoy their category. With quasi-eliminativism, transsexuals lose this identity, because there would be no need to classify someone as a female in male's body, or vis versa. Also, I wonder if we eliminated gender identities, would we begin to lose other forms of categorization? Such as hierarchies in the workplace or support groups for certain kinds of people/causes (would there be a women's movement?). What would happen to reproduction if we could no longer preach to find the opposite sex and form a family? I don't have an answer for this either.

This all brings me back to baby Storm. Storm's parents seem to be acknowledging the gender system as current standards define it, but they are letting Storm choose his or her or its place. As one of Storm's parents so eloquently put it, "If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs."