minutes.md

BISR: Critical Design Winter 2016 INSTRUCTOR: DR. JORDAN KRAEMER [email protected]

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Week 2: Interface This are collectively-produced class notes for the class to edit and share.

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03/03/2016

Kumar:

KEY

JK: Jordan Kraemer AC: Ajay Chaudhary (sp) C: comment from a class member Q: question from a class member R: response by a class member

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AGENDA

INTERFACE approach interface design in terms of

• values
• style
• social component / sociality

Adorno + Horkheimer (Ajay to a schpeil on this) Jordan Kraemer article on Sociaity and interface design Latour (Jordan to contextualize in relief of Durkheim and Latour’s critiques of him)

…but first…

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GENDER AND INTERFACE

“The Gender of the Interface” (PPT by Jordan Kraemer)

• what kinds of gender norms are built into interface design?
  • stylistic criteria
  • interactive criteria Q: what is interface? (various answers from class)

JK: Some websites allege to be gender neutral (in not trying to appeal to female or male audience) - e.g. Twitter, Facebook (note: mostly white backgrounds, blue icons and annotations) Female-oriented sites include - e.g. Etsy, Pinterest (note: perhaps bigger blocks of color? more images per square inch) Q: what makes it more female-oriented? JK: assumption here is that it’s the subject matter and intention that’s gendered (the inquiry is about whether this shows up in the actual design)

JK: Other types/norms under consideration (as tech becomes more widespread): - Geek masculinity - Bro-grammer culture

C: is it useful to separate interaction design (gestures, navigational hierarchies, etc.) from branding or graphic design

C: perhaps difficult to separate content from interface? whenever you start a new account on pinterest they make you choose your gender then suggestions that pinterest makes are very gendered

C: types of commenting or communication can be biased towards different genders

C: wouldn’t you have to start with an interface where the content is gender neutral (in order to evaluate whether the interface was gender neutral, i.e.)

C: wrt Marshal McLuhan (somehow) - typography was developed in the western world where language is more linear - any interface [has some set of biases like this] - why don’t we navigate through mind maps or bubbles? - why is everything linear? - it’s all accommodating tech invented years ago

C: tangentially, wouldn’t race or class or other categories reveal differences in interface design? R: yes! C: seems based on Search Engine Optimization - has to do with target audience - target audiences

AC: design for the imagined use - - there are assumptions around the site of the user, the hardware being used, etc. - if I have data that says a given gender is more likely to be in a given situation - then I can use C: if as a designer you assume your user has a conceptual model there is also presumably an environmental model this user occupies the designer then has his/her approach, which could be supportive, subversive, etc. of course they quickly tend toward efficiencies [and norms]

C: anecdote about game designers working toward gender-neutral appeal - equal choices for avatars, boy/girl, more robots, etc.

AC: majority of ppl playing games online are women, but these don’t show up in metrics - because they’re playing games like bejeweled in online interface - or they arent’ the purchasers of the game - Xbox or Nintendo show design choices obviously - but early video game design (mario c1980s), the character you identify with is 100% male heater - in metroid the big spoiler is that he’s actually a woman, which only works if you assume the male role at first

JK: Gender is of course something that’s produced through culture, etc. don’t mean to imply that there’s anything universal about gender here…

C: there happens to be a women’s version of ESPN fantasy football league - it simplified interface, dumbed down content, etc.

JK: Most sites will ask you for gender but very rarely ask you for race, interestingly

C:Another conversation: the field of people behind who are making these interfaces is increasingly overwhelmingly women

C: within people who are teaching: - html and css (more for layout) have some women teachers, but - java scripting (more hardcore programming) are almost all male

C: there seem to be underlying market forces that drive differentiation - gender and race are very available for this

JK: There are a lot of scholarly positions that would argue that these differences are actually tied to capitalism and colonialism and not just arbitrary [or somehow originary]

AC: computing was dominated by women for most of the 20thC - because it was considered like drudgery - the idea that computing was a male industry developed out of this “kit culture” - cf. NASA programs for the moon - black women in particular worked on this - because it was seen as less important
- “oh the tech stuff, let’s let women take care of it”

C: it all ties back to capitalism and colonialism because white men are the only ones who can benefit from that

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STYLE

[ article regarding algorithms ]

JK: a lot of what you see online is determined by algorithms - recommended based on your profile/history - what are the consequences more socially, more broadly? - there’s a whole debate around the relation of culture to style - what does it mean to talk about style vs. creativity

AC: Adorno and Horkheimer are the first Marxists who take seriously the idea of culture

• the idea that culture may not determined to other forces than political economy
  • hyper new-aesthetic manifesto: everything that you think is good design is maybe terrible
• “better useful appropriate” are suspicious goals
  • all problems of society are endemic to society
  • where other ppl take it as a given that problems are exogenous
• all art will inevitably succumb to the logic of the market
  • all roads lead to fascism and totalitarianism (for the frankfurt school)
• they migrate to Los Angeles, which is not totalitarianism
  • but they observe culture in a way [in which patterns emerge]

Horkheimer (read aloud): “The separation between individual and society in virtue of which the individual accepts as natural the limits prescribed for his activity is relativized in critical theory. The latter considers the overall framework which is conditioned by the blind interaction of individual activities (that is, the existent division of labor and the class distinctions) to be a function which originates in human action and therefore is a possible object of playful decision and rational determination of goals.”

[ discussion of ‘vibes’… general excitement]

C: cf. design manifestos, “let’s harness certain language”

JK: [ remarks on the irony of designers writing manifestos ] R:

AC: late 19th C to early 20th C history of manifestos was explicitly political - Art to Life movement: belief was that art could make change happen

AC: divisions between individual and society are - Horkheimer is going to take for granted that these divisions are not “natural” / given

JK: if gender norms are culturally produced, by extension we can change it

C: comment about design living in the managerial class (from last week) feels bad to me - the idea that designers cannot impact the limits of their world feels bad - designers constantly work to recreate their world… R: maybe it’s a temporal consideration when in the design process at the beginning there are more options - then later there are real exigencies/practicalities that limit you…. - vs. art where… R: but design practice and the way it is organized reflects an attitude and approach

C: cf. Adorno… “That all products, even non-conformist ones have been incorporated into the distribution mechanism of large-scale capital…”

C: you may think you have some edge on the process, but… - but at the end of the day you’re just designing a product for a cooperation

R: everything a designer designs is not a product, and may not even be for consumption… - design can be understood as having an intellectual type of labor

JK: style is something we don’t talk about any more, so much….

C: cf. Adorno, his comment was about mass production, - but now we’re in an era of mass customization - how does this thinking apply to algorithms?

AC: one of Adorno’s great fears is mass politics (which is weird for a late- or post-marxist) - but it perfectly links to algorithms as well - whatever ontology you think is so radical, I can sell you something for it (wrt experience with Facebook backend) JK: for Adorno, the potential for mass culture, via mass media, in particular through photography and music recording - Adorno is concerned that the massification of culture is linked to the atomization of the self.

JK: for Wilfe (sp?), what is style? what does this mean about design?

C: his idea that style is possible through these algorithms seems naive - i have the problem of the cutting up and mashing up of something old

C: wrt Benjamin: Reproduction vs. Repetition as distinct - there is something different in the experience of something reproducible - for Adorno these two are kind of conflated

C: the site of consumption is important for both - how one is positioned etc. - i always think about how techno doesn’t make sense unless you’re in the club

Kumar thinks to himself: wrt the idea that it’s ironic that designers write manifestos - designers operate socially - and work in direct engagement with the economy - artists operate more individually - and work in alleged isolation but make claims about politics >> what is more political?

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VALUES AND SOCIALITY

JK: introduction on Latour

• contemporary french social scientist and philosopher who has made a career studying how science is practiced
• he uses a lot of anthropological methods to understand how scientists operate
• his earlier work is about what we think is the division between science or nature (it’s object) and society
• it takes certain kinds of cultural work to separate those out
• it’s typical to think of earlier foraging societies as closer to nature, more recent societies as more distant, but
• his book “we have never been modern” calls into question division between nature and society at all

JK: wrt Durkheim

• modern society as organic wholes, with different parts having different functions (like a body)
• when everything doesn’t work as it should, this leads to feelings of alienation and anomie
• when you hear about “social needs” this refers back to Durkheim
• it is very Durkheimian to talk about something called “the social” which glues us together

JK: what is Latour saying instead?

• can we just point to social needs as a thing?

C: is it not that nothing is social on it’s own JK: yes, that nothing is inherently social

C: Latour critiques the notion of “social fabric” JK: he’s not saying there is no such thing

• but instead rather than assume it you need to account for how that fabric is made
• you need to look at all the links between people and things to arrive at how it comes to be

regarding reading: “Values in Design” JK: what would it mean for design to respect existing values, the idea that design should respect values

C: seems very commercially driven C: seemed pretty naive, seemed like an academic who had not worked in design

AC quotes: “successful infrastructure serves people of different values” - this is not obviously true C: I’m getting a fundamentalist christian vibe as if “values” are somehow universal C: different cultures do have diff. values and a lot of them are more conservative, so… - would it be imposing to “open up” values

“Friend or Freund” - reading of excerpt from article by JK JK: wrt Facebook

• the Facebook interface makes certain kinds of assumptions about friendship
• these, when translated to Germany, for example, imposes alien norms
• what are the implications of this?
  • e.g. translating into local language is either called “localization” or “globalization”

JK: what’s at stake in assuming some behaviors in computing are social?

JK: challenge is to spend a week not using the word social

C: [ diatribe about removing the word “interaction” and substituting instead lists of machines, people, objects and listing their behaviors in relation to each other ]

C: in social media, it’s essentially all the same actions: liking etc.

AC: wrt “values in design” - are these american values? capitalist values? - value-neutral design is not going to exist

C: wrt recent article about teens using tumbler to use money - - this opportunity for profit hinges on anonymity - social media is all very self-similar, but there are particular differences

C: Facebook used to be a ‘hot or not’ app - this is the legacy, the ‘yes or no’ decision - now they are diversifying how you feel about a thing - but in reality they are further chopping it up [ in order to instrumentalize / capitalize on it ] - if 90% of the population is “wowing” about something, how can we turn that into capital?

C: Twitter just changed favorites to likes - ppl had been using favorites like bookmarks to review later - interesting that there are different ways that diff. social media interact C: ambiguity to Facebook like in that it could mean so many different things R: sometimes you want to click like to participate “socially” - this becomes like a lightweight form of interaction - JK: Facebook has a larger range of “reactions” now - incl. Sad

C: Patent for social network filed by Friendster and later purchased by Facebook for $40M

JK: social network analysis goes back a very long time - then ppl started asking what’s the relationship between social networks and computer networks - except for LinkedIn

Clout?

• wrt generating value

Path?

• 50 friend max