I have not an example but a question about the building of a shared vocabulary, so I’m posting it as its own post instead of in the other thread. We talked about having to build a new language for this kind of practice we’re going to engage in here. How would this shared language be disseminated/learned? Through the writing of books/papers? What if another “language” (perhaps from another school, e.g., the one in Denmark [?] Jeff mentioned) gets published and then they have to be somehow resolved? Is that how different (rival?) traditions are born?
(These questions could probably apply to any academic practice in its early days, so there is probably a historical precedent here…)
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January 10, 2013 at 5:52 pm
Katie O'Donnell
You bring up a really interesting point and I am not sure there is just one answer to your question. These different types of languages from different regions/disciplines etc get disseminated through just plain-old exposure, writings, discussions, media portrayals etc.
When I read this post, the first thing I thought about was dance. I’ve studied and participated well over 15 different dance genres and the vocabulary used between different genres has both a lot of overlap and a lot of conflict.
For example, the same exact movement in might be called a “Shuffle Step” in Tap but called a “Rally Down” in Irish Hard Shoe. Similarly, at the dance studio I teach at currently, some of the teachers have different names for the same step just in Tap. A “Broadway”, “Alexander”, “Shirley Temple”, and an “Eight” are all the EXACT same but we call it something different based on our background (the specific type of tap we learned, the region, who are teachers were, etc). It confuses the hell of our students. When another teacher and I realized this, we set out to try and create a standard set of terms for each set that we stick to in order to help our students and future Windfall Dancers. Working together, the tap teachers were able to come up with a set of terms that we will use. It took a lot of compromise, I learned more variations in a type of dance I loved, we found that some terms made more sense than the ones we were personally using, and overall really improved how our studio teaches and talks about Tap. We now have a neat little binder with the vocabulary we decided to use.
Bringing this back to IC…
Art, UX, Literature, different theories, computing, and any other discipline you can imagine has it’s own set of vocabulary just like each genre of dance. Even within those fields we see variation. Having communities like CHI, or even small scale like this class blog, allow for discourse about languages differences. We can borrow from one another, debating how we want to define and use terms or concepts, and continue to expand on how we think about things.
January 10, 2013 at 8:33 pm
meredithelzea
I also think about the current interface designs that are out there and how that language has been developed (gestures, for example). In some applications I have on my phone, I can swipe back to the main menu, but in others I cannot. But then again I stumbled across another gesture (of holding my finger on a special label on a row, allowing me to pick up an item and drag it… I hope this makes sense) that I saw in an app for the first time, and then saw it again somewhere else. So maybe it’s about seeing what’s already out there and staying consistent with those already developed terminologies, but then also adding on when we see a void. That is hoping that our additions are recognized and used consistently as well. Obviously it’s not that easy… there are big players who set some of the standards and the lowly 2nd year grad student’s ideas might be overlooked, but making sure we are aware of what those big players are doing and staying consistent with the existing will help form this entity.
January 14, 2013 at 2:30 am
tsaiyiwu
How interaction design can have its own language to communicate with users is for me a fascinating question too. I study comparative literature and have no experience of designing interfaces, so allow me to summarize and clarify again (my understanding of) Crampton Smith’s ideas here in order to build up my proposition.
Crampton Smith explicates that the “languages” of interaction design can be of 1-D, 2-D, 3-D, 4-D. Clearly, the languages does not limit to verbal forms. And more importantly, the interactive languages communicate with users not so much through arbitrary conventions as verbal language does. Instead, the languages should follow the principles Crampton Smith brings out—clear mental model, reassuring feedbacks, navigability, consistency, and perhaps most important of all, intuitive interaction. Arguably, the interactive language communicates with users exactly through intuitive interaction, and perhaps it is not picked up through any more artificial, forced, and provisional way. That is to say, it does not communicate in the way dancing jargons or academic publications do. It does not speak to you because you are in a certain circle; it should speak to your intuition and this intuition is not socially or culturally specific.
How, then, can interaction design have its “own” language, if by asking the language to be intuitive we are also expecting it to be universally applicable? To answer this question, I think of cartoon. Every cartoon has its own language. Usually, the characters’ bodies are very elastic in a certain, often exaggerated way. From time to time we watch different cartoons, we will find out every cartoon abides by different sets of rules. The bodies in Spongebob can fuse and separate but it is unlikely to happen in Tom and Jerry. We can pick up these rules because they operate like rules of some quasi-physics and the causation is usually clear. To think about new languages of interaction design, I imagine they work in analogy to the rules of cartoon. They are not any real rules of physics existent in nature; they are invented by some artists and operated only in a certain virtual world; they nevertheless can always be picked up through intuition and interaction—and less by conventions which can puzzle outsiders.
To pose an example, here is a clip of the classic Tom and Jerry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=Ha2Vz3av6RM
The sounds of the characters’ steps work very much like the sound feedback we would have in interaction design. They conform to our intuition but as a matter of fact are not any real sound we can hear in our daily life. They are artificially invented, existent only this cartoon world, yet artistically intuitive.