topical media & game development
development(s) -- dialectic(s) of awareness
There is an overload of information.
Usually we don't pay much attention to this.
Increasingly, we rely on search (engines) to find the information, when needed.
But often our search is a bit disappointing,
simply because there are too many results.
If only there was more focus in search.
To assist you in proving focussed search, using google,
that limits search to your site, look at the following fragement of code.
google(s)
<form action="http://www.google.com/search?" method="GET">
<input name="q" value="+site:www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/media ">
<input type="text" name="q" size=40>
<input type="submit" value=" ">
</form>
Adapt the url, and put it in your web page, and, voila,
your site is search-enabled.
On a deeper level, we may wonder why we are so impatient,
in a hurry to search for information,
and often not taking the time to properly digest it.
In [NewPanorama] we wrote:
In the course of our field study for the PANORAMA system,
we tried to establish what relation users would have
to the system, not only in the way they interact
with it, but also in terms of what role the system plays
in their lives, and when and how they would be aware of
the systema.
Due to the intrinsic properties of the PANORAMA
system, as a system meant to support social awareness
in a work environment, we could not assume
direct focussed attention.
Instead, we must take
the various forms of awareness or attention into account.
Our thoughts in this direction were triggered
by a lecture of Linda Stone (former vice-president
of Microsoft) at the Crossmedia Week
September 2006 in Amsterdam,
entitled Attention -- the Real Aphrodisiac.
In that lecture Linda Stone made a distinction between
applications popular before 1985,
applications which were in general meant for
self-improvement, for example language-learning,
applications that were popular between 1985 and 2005,
applications that she characterized as supporting
continuous partial awareness,
such as email and news-feeds, and applications
of the period thereafter, from now into the future,
which may be characterized as applications
that allow the user to be creative, take part in a community,
and are in other words more focussed and less dependent
on the external environment.
Admittedly, it takes a few more steps to formulate
a theory of the dialectics of awareness.
However, with the function of the PANORAMA
system in mind, we may make, following [Reproduction],
some interesting distinctions between
the experience of art and architecture.
Where art is usually experienced in a delimited
time span, and is similarly delimited in space,
that is the position of the observer,
architecture is everywhere and always there.
As a consequence, art receives focussed attention
and may be appreciated with reflective distance,
whereas architecture is often not perceived
consciously, but merely present and subject to
an almost sub-conscious sensibility,
which is only brought to the focus of attention
when it is either aesthetisized, for example
when taking photographs, or when something
surprising is sensed, for example in the change
of skyline in New York.
As argued in [Presence],
many of the new interactive systems,
whether in the category of ambient media,
ubiquitous computing or calm technology,
will fall somewhere inbetween the spectrum spanned
by art and architecture, or more likely even
alternate between the forms of awareness associated
with respectively art and architecture.
In designing the new interactive systems and games, we need to be explicitly concerned with
the actual phases of awareness that occur, simply because it
is not clear what role these systems play in our life.
When introducing a new system or artefact, we may distinguish
between the following phases:
phases of awareness
- initiation -- appeal to curiosity
- promotion -- raising interest
- progression -- prolonged involvement
As designers we must ask ourselves the following questions.
How do we appeal to the users' curiosity, so that our system is noticed?
How do we get a more sustained interest?
How de we get the user to interact with or contribute to the system?
And, how do we obtain prolonged involvement, and avoid boredom?
These questions are not simple to answer, and require also an understanding of the
actual context in which the system is deployed as well as an understanding
of the level of (aesthetic) literacy of the user(s).
Aesthetic awareness is common to us all, [Aesthetics].
Having an understanding of aesthetic awareness,
can we isolate the relevant design parameters and formulate
rules of composition that may help us in developing
interactive applications?
According to our philosophical credo, [Creativity], no!
However, the history of art clearly shows the impact
of discoveries, such as the discovery of perspective,
as well as conventions in the interpretation of
art, as for example in the iconic representation
of narrative context in 17th century Dutch painting.
Moreover, the analysis of the visual culture of mass media may also
give us better understanding of the implied meaning
of compositional structures.
The notion of perspective, described in [Perspective],
is an interesting notion in itself,
since it describes both the organisation of the image
as well as the optimal point of view of the viewer.
The normal perspective as we know it is the central
perspective.
However, there are variants of perspective that force the
viewer in an abnormal point of view,
as for example with anamorphisms.
Perspective had an enormous impact on (western) art
and visual culture.
It defines our notion of naturalist realism, and allowed
for the development of the panorama as
a mass medium of the 19th century, [VirtualArt].
Art that deviated from central perspective, such
as cubism or art from other cultures, was often
considered naive.
Photography and its pre-cursors had a great impact
on the perfection of perspectivist naturalism,
and what is called photorealism
became the touchstone of perfection for early
computer graphics, [Remediation].
Apart from perspective, other conventions regulate
the composition of the 2D image,
in particular, following [Semiotics],
the information value related to where
an object is placed in the image,
and the salience of the object,
determined by its relative size, being foreground or background,
and visual contrast.
Also framing is used to emphasize meaning,
as for example in the close-up in a movie shot.
In analysing a large collection of image material,
[Semiotics], somewhat surprisingly found
that lef/right positioning usually meant
given versus new,
top/bottom positioning ideal versus real,
and centre/margin positioning important
versus marginal.
It is doubtful whether these meaning relationships
hold in all cultures, but as a visual convention
it is apparently well-rooted in western visual culture.
(C) Æliens
04/09/2009
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