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“The soul of an [aesthetic] object has three aspects: A sensuous quality, and idea embodied in its function, and a feeling expressed in its form.” (Dufrenne, 1973, p.138)
Cupchik and Hilsher argue that Dufrenne “fails to appreciate the expressive potential of design products. In addition to instrumental value that is implicit in the structure of a ‘useful object’, there is also an expressive quality that is incorporated into the design.”
“When you examine a design object, the more meaningful the object is to you, the more carefully and slowly you will examine the object, with the result that the experience of the object in space will be more intimate.” In the visualization only the more popular musicians are named, while the rest require the user to hover over the circle to identify the artist.
First I’ll examine an element of a social interaction on Rdio, where users can look at the music habits of friends or strangers over time. The following image is from my own listening habits after a short period of use. The size of circles directly correlate with the amount of song listens.
Music or artists that are significant in a person’s life are likely to change over time. You might go through a phase in your life where you listen to a certain type of music heavily and upon looking back on your listening choices you laugh at yourself.
Sensuous quality:
Sensuous defined: “Relating to or affecting the senses rather than intellect.” So rather than just giving a user a quantitative excel list of song listens, Rdio transforms these listens into these circles. The circles are somewhat tangible, as they can be moved around the digital space. Other than the slight tangible nature and the variety in object size, there is not much else that is sensual about this feature. The circles are uniform, bland in color, and flat.
Function:
“An idea embodied in its function” the viewer gets a picture of perhaps the individual and their personality. Music preference has often been cited as being able to make reasonable predictions of individuals and their personality. The following research displays a strong correlation between music taste and the ability of complete strangers to make predictions on that individuals’ personality:
“In 2003, Sam Gosling and I conducted a few studies on music and personality and discovered several significant associations. For example, and as shown below in Figure 1, people with strong preferences for classical, jazz, and folk music (dubbed Reflective & Complex) tend to have personality traits associated with openness (e.g., creativity, imagination) and verbal ability, and people with strong preferences for popular styles of music (Upbeat & Conventional) tend to have traits associated with extraversion (sociability, talkativeness), agreeableness (friendliness, warmth), conscientiousness (reliability, dependability), and low levels of openness (conventionality, dogmatism), verbal, and analytic ability.”
“The results suggested that people are able to form accurate impressions of others solely on the basis of their music preferences. As depicted in the left set of blue bars in Figure 2, the participants formed reasonably accurate impressions about extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (emotional instability), and openness.”
http://web.mac.com/jrentfrow/Jason_Rentfrow/Music_%26_Personality.html
Feeling: still figuring this out.
Hey just wanted to pop in and ask about the sample papers from last year/s?
I’d like to get an idea of how the other ones look. Or does anyone have papers that critique a certain interaction, that’s NOT a movie?
Using Kai’s post on Flikr as inspiration I’ve decided to work out some thoughts on use qualities in terms of my chosen interation; Rdio.
Pliability:
In the “collection” part of the site, you can peruse your entire music collection. Because your collection can grow to a massive number, you can place filters to narrow things down. The visualizations of the music artists that you listen to the most add an element of pliability that is catered to your specific music tastes. You can move the bubbles around and manipulate the positions, much like physically moving a vinyl collection around a desk. The size of each bubble corresponds to the number of times you listen to that artist, the artists “grow” in importance to the individual’s music collection.
Fluency:
Regardless of the actions taken on the site, when it comes to the core feature – the music, there is an element of fluency. The music player is always present on the page and users can transition from song to song quickly and gracefully. The other activities on the site such as writing comments and reading reviews never disrupt the music.
Identity:
On the top navigation of the site you have all of the links to the most important features. In the same area the user’s name and picture is prominently displayed in large, bold letters. This gives the Rdio product a feel of identity, something that belongs to one individual.
Personal connectedness:
Rdio gives you the option to be very connected to a network, or not at all. You have three options; you, your network, and everyone. This empowers the user to connect and get in touch musically with friends or strangers. However, the level personal connectedness is limited to a tiny profile image, a name, and the musically-related actions that the user is performing. Users can also follow “influential” people who “know what’s cool first” much like a twitter user follows tweets.
Transparent:
The main operation for Rdio is playing music. It is afterall a music streaming service, with a few added social elements. I have yet to see any kind of activity that distracts from the main element – music. There are no pop-up modal windows or obfuscating frames that hide the music player. The frames in the site are cleverly built, they allow the user to continually manipulate the music player while interacting with the other social elements of the site.
I’m still looking for an interaction that sparks my interests, and I think I have found a possibility. Please give me your thoughts!
There’s a ton of streaming music sites that have sprung up in the past few years; pandora, spotify, grooveshark, google play, and “rdio”
These kinds of sites add a certain simplicity, taking the management out of the music collection. No longer do you have to sync, keep track of music files, backup, update, catalogue, blah blah blah. The streaming allows you to carry your collection with you everywhere.
http://www.rdio.com/ is the streaming service that I am currently looking at. I’ve just started using it, and so far it has been an enjoyable experience. Here is their “about” summary:
Rdio is the ground-breaking digital music service that is reinventing the way people discover, listen to, and share music. With on-demand access to over 12 million songs, Rdio connects people with music and makes it easy to search for and instantly play any song, album, artist or playlist without ever hearing a single ad. Discover what friends, people with similar tastes, recording artists and more are listening to in real-time and share across Twitter and Facebook. Build a digital music collection that’s available everywhere – on the web, in-home or in-car, on an iPad or smartphone, and even offline.
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The issue I have is that this site doesn’t really add anything new to the mix. Most of the previously mentioned sites all do exactly the same thing. However, the social aspect on Rdio feels more open and robust. Your music is always on the side panel and doesn’t get interrupted as you explore the music that people are listening to within or outside your network. They also have a feature which visually diagrams your song listens in the shape of circles (like music records or cds) this gives the user a nearly tangible feel for their music preferences, instead of staring at quantitative text-based lists of music.
Oh noes there are 666 posts! I better add one.
I’d like talk about diagetic and non-diagetic in video games. To refresh, here’s the difference:
Diagetic: Something that both the audience and a character is experiencing. For example music that a character is hearing as well as the gamer.
Non-diagetic: Something that only the audience or the character is experiencing. For example music that the gamer can hear but not the character. We are told that all of the things that we are experiencing in a game is diagetic, unless they are things like menus or gui’s that only matter to the gamer but makes no difference to the in-game character or avatar.
So, is non-dagetic bad? Does it distract from the immersiveness of the game when the player is required to go through a non-diagetic part of the game? I think it does. If developers intend to allow the players to form connectedness with their avatars, then shouldn’t the player experience the same things that their character experiences? In-game menus and gui’s force the player to turn and pay attention to buttons, text and other boring stuff. Minimaps are very popular pieces of the GUI for many games, as they allow the gamer to control and see the map from a birds eye view. From my experience they are a very vital and powerful tool for the gamer to make decisions and have a holistic sense of understanding with the environment. However, would the experience be more exciting / intense / unexpected without mini-maps? Imagine in the context of a first-person shooter like call of duty or halo. “radar” maps are often used to give the player a sense of where the action is and where other players are. Is it possible to provide the same benefits of mini-maps with a totally different and diagetic interaction?
No minimap in starcraft concept:
“I’ve heard that people want to be shocked” “having more suspense when an event happens”
-the guy in this youtube video:
Just some thoughts and ramblings. 🙂
Btw my computer keeps changing diagetic to diabetic so sorry if you see a mistake!
I’m also having trouble.
I was going to a music video that I thought was really weird and interesting… I could do a sequence analysis, or do semiotics, write about denotative / connotative meaning…. I don’t know.
I’m feeling stressed out because I learn by doing, for example I could really understand how we did the breakdown for the nightwish video – but other than that I feel stupid and lost and we haven’t even started writing.
What a cool but slightly annoying way to present your thesis [the voice drives me nuts]. I’m sure Meghan has a boatload to talk about when it comes to “severe story-telling”.
As games evolve and become more complex, so do the stories and the ability to immerse the player. Many games are linear. You play through the same or very similar story as every other Joe, and that’s that. What I’m more interested in are games that are not linear, there is no set questline or storyline that the player follows. Games where players all have different experiences and actually experience totally different stories are much more interesting to me. The stories players have don’t necessarily have to be glamorous, its also what the player makes of it and perceives. Stories can change drastically over time, but only if the game allows for it. How boring would it be to talk to a friend in real life about your “avatar’s” story within a game if your story mirrored his/hers?
This video and song is very interesting to me. I’d like to see what people think about it.
Take note of the things that shock you or stand out to you and post it here!
in “the designer” I noticed how being prepared was an important theme.
“The possibility of a designer succeeding in a specific situation is determined by the extent to which she is prepared. A good designer is not the one who best follows the prescriptive steps of a method or technique, or the one who knows “the solution” in advance. Rather, a good designer can approach, appreciate, and assess a complex and unique design situation.” (the designer, 43)
This really stood out to me because of my experience in Boy Scouts. The overall motto for Boy Scouts is “Be Prepared”. This might mean having the right equipment, the right first aid skills, the knowledge to tie tie the right knot the first time, etc. The motto is something to live by, something I reference back to every time I pack to travel somewhere or even the mental preparation I go through for an interview or a presentation. Being prepared is something that you can live by, it can be applied in almost any life-situation.
“It is more a matter of being prepared than having a specific recipe or procedure for how to act.” (the designer, 53)
I’m really happy that this “motto” overlaps into the design field. My thoughts are that if you are adequately prepared throughout your design process, you will ultimately be enabled to do your best design work at that moment in time – without being restricted in any way by moments of “unprepared-ness”.
Thanks for reading.
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