#seamfulness

Started out this morning with supervision. Went over my experiment with blindfoldedly using my smartphone and came to the conclusion that it will be hard to draw any relevant insights from that particular experiment. This is due to the philosophical paradox of seamfulness enabling seamlessness etc. I could go down that route and maybe in some inevitable way I will, but it is a very philosophical route which I believe will extinct the terms seamlessness and seamfulness in the end. The more I read and interpret these words, the more they become the same. Definitions get mixed up, what once felt seamless now feels seamful and vice versa. Therefore I will try to make more concrete experiments with the “feeling of” seamlessness or seamfulness, without establishing that they in fact ARE seamless or seamful. I believe they can be both, and sometimes that they are the same.

When I used iMovie I experienced what I would call “seamfulness” through the haptic feedback on my mousepad when I tried to extend a clip that couldn’t be extended. I want to continue to experiment with this type of conveyance of seamfulness in other artefacts. I also have an idea of making a GUI “slider” feel heavy in some type of way, to see if this is experienced as something seamful. I believe the “seam” that in this case is the slider, gets more prominent when it’s experienced as heavy, which in turns results in a visible and resistant seam - seamful. The question I want to resolve or explore for these experiments is:

“Is resistance an aesthetic quality of seamfulness?”

Another experiment I have in mind to test this feeling of resistance is to have the phone vibrating when the user tries to put it in a lying position when it’s locked into standing. This would convey the limitation of the turning of the interface more clearly or more prominently - making the experience more seamful.

Another question I have come up with is:

“Can seamlessness be connected to tight coupling?”

MacBook: The mousepad is the seam between the user and the interface. iPad: No seam between user and the interface. Interactive Hologram: Mixes physical seams into the equation

Smart Door combining seamlessness with seamfulness.

David Rose visited Google's Cambridge, MA office to discuss his new book, Enchanted Objects.