#spadafora

This article reminded me once again of how aesthetics can compete against efficiency, and that aesthetics is an important notion worth thinking of when designing interactive artefacts. And the importance of how form can be dynamic, revealed within the interaction, and what role this plays for the aesthetic experience. Smart objects that evolve their behavior and the interaction we have with them remind me of AI somehow - that the objects remember and develop their own understanding/their own logic from there, which in turn evolves into very dynamic and ever-changing interactions. Even though I don’t have much knowledge of AI, this is an interesting aspect of it according to me. To develop interactive artefacts that are as unpredictable sometimes as humans. It reminds me of the conversation I had with Jaeger about the grumpy coffee maker that won’t make you any coffee in the morning even though you go through all the correct steps - because it’s grumpy since you didn’t clean it properly the day before.

Interaction and interactivity is often abstract and hard to grasp, something they bring up in this article as well. I found the use of metaphors interesting in this context, since they are a way for us to understand something through another (resembling) thing. As humans we are constantly associating things with other things, which is a good premise for the use of metaphors when we’re creating new designs, or experiencing interactions that are hard to put words on. It’s hard to describe something you’ve never experienced before, therefore I believe metaphors are a good way to convey what you mean. This way is also sometimes how we learn new words - through synonyms. Maybe metaphors to design are like synonyms to words? But the same way synonyms don’t exactly mean the same thing, neither do metaphors. Sometimes they can confuse rather than clarify, which is something to stay mindful of. The use of metaphors in design sometimes need to be explicit and make sense to what you’re trying to describe. This is something I thought of during the show and tell of M1 where a few of my peers used metaphors and got critiqued for it because they didn’t buy the metaphors that were used - they were too weak of too arbitrary. They didn’t ground the design, they rather made them harder to grasp than before. I think it’s important that others are supposed to be able to perceive and experience what you’re hinting at or grasping for when using metaphors.

I’ve experienced metaphors as generative during both modules. In M1 we likened our objects logic to a balloon, which made us go down that path further and try to make it really resemble the movements of a balloon. It drove the process forward and I learnt a lot through doing this. In M2 we are currently trying to project a whole personality to our object, but are mainly focusing on calm vs anxious. These behaviors or states are also metaphors, not facts. These states are what our LED object resembles according to us, which means that these states become metaphors that we’re currently trying to continue to design before eventually straying away from it. In M1 Clint reminded us of that it might be a good idea to stop trying to make the object become the metaphor, and rather take a step back and make it more ambiguous, to account for more than just one thing. To let go of preconceived ideas of a metaphor and go beyond the metaphor. This is something I find intriguing as well. Challenging, but intriguing. Since we are trying to design personality it allows for more ambiguity than for the balloon since the latter is a fixed object with own properties, but personalities can change and they are individual.

Using metaphors and personalities proved to make it easier for me and Jaeger to discuss what we wanted to convey with our LED light and how we want the object to be portrayed and designed. It brought the design space down to earth a bit where we could have a common understanding of what we wanted to design. As they mention in the article as well, their users understanding of their interactive artefact (sofa-bot) was helped through connecting its behavior to personality types. Through designing behaviors and personalities into interactive artefacts we inevitably will give these objects more integrity and life than we’re currently used to (touch screens, apps, etc. that do what we expect them to). Adding temporality on top of this, making the interactive artefact change over time and over interactions makes this discussion even more interesting to me. As one of their participants stated, it feels independent and human-like.