topical media & game development
research directions -- experience as meaning
For the design and appreciation of the new category of digital systems,
including
games, we may,
with (forward) reference to our discussion of the history of thought in section
12.4,
well take
pragmatist aesthetics as a common ground, since it does justice to
the existential dimension of aesthetic awareness, and allows for
a process of aesthetic literacy, that is becoming sensible to aesthetic awareness
and reflection. You may wonder though, how we get to this conclusion.
In [Presence] it is observed that the aesthetic potential
of the narrative space centered on the consumer product
has received surprisingly little attention.
The authors then argue that, motivated by insights
from phenomenology, there should be a shift of attention
from use to presence,
where presence does not merely mean appearance
but a more complex dialectic process of appearance
and gradual disappearance dependent on the role
the object plays in the life of the user/subject.
The notion of expressional is then introduced,
to convey the expressive meaning of objects, and in particular
interactive objects, in our surroundings.
For the design of presence, aesthetics
is then considered as a logic of expressions,
in which expressions act as
the presentation of a structure in a given space
of design variables.
1
So far, this makes perfect sense.
We may further mention here the
framework set up by Dhaval Vyas, [Meaning],
which characterizes the user's experience a the result of
the process of constructing meaning.
In diagrammatic form, the process of constructing meaning may be depicted as above.
In more detail, the validity of the experienc as meaning framework
may be substantiated by the foloowing observations:
experience as meaning
- experience occurs during the interaction between the user(s) and the
interactive system(s) in the lived environment
- designers convey meaning (consciously or unconsciously)
through the appearance, interaction and function of the system
- user(s) construct a coherent whole that is a combination of
sensual, cognitive, emotional and practical forms of experience
In other words, an interactive system is determined by
function, interaction and appearance.
As such the framework may be called pragmatist, and has indeed
been nfluenced by [Pragmatics].
Returning to our argumentation,
for objects that are not designed for usability in the functional sense
the notion of use is too strict and is, using a dialectic argument, subject
to the dialectics of presence, as argued in [Presence].
Conversely, using a similar dialectic argument, for new categories of
objects, presence requires use, or getting used to, in other
words a process in which the user becomes interested and familiar with the object.
We may even speak of aesthetic affordance, with the realization that
the notion of affordance, explaining an ecology of behavior, originally stems
from the late-idealist phenomenology expounded in [Sein].
But, however appealing the notion of expressional,
in the light of our discussion in section 12.4,
where we distinguish between aesthetic awareness
as a given, or a priori, sensibility and aesthetic judgement
as being of a more empirical nature, we would prefer
to consider aesthetics as a logic of sensibility,
which includes a dimension of self-reflection
in the sense of its being aware of its own history.
Put differently, to characterize the contextual aspect
of aesthetics, as it certainly applies to art,
we may speak of aesthetic literacy,
that is aesthetic awareness that is self-reflective by nature.
(C) Æliens
04/09/2009
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