The Overlooked Role of Cues in Design

1. The Overlooked Role of Cues in Design Codes, Cues, Clues & Affordances

2. Taking Notes? this presentation is on-line at http://lissack.com/codes.ppt background reading is at http://lissack.com/lissack_reader.pdf Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

3. Complex Systems Thinking • Inter-relatedness • Ambiguity • Emergence • Multiple Levels • Multiple Perspectives • Weak Signals Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

4. Complexity reveals difficulties in “meaning” • Complexity thinking worries about compartmentalization and categorization • Identity of actors, situations, and contexts is seldom stable and often time proceeds in multiple directions • Emergence and weak signals raise questions about models, labels, attributes, metaphors…. and meaning Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

5. Design in a Complex World • Thousands of readily discriminable objects. How do we deal with all of them? • Partly, the way the mind works. • Partly, the information available from the appearance of objects. • Partly, the ability of the designer to: • make the operation clear, • project a good image of the operation, and • take advantage of the other things people might know. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

6. Good Design… at least for objects • Well designed objects . . . • are easy for the mind to understand • contain visible cues to their operation • Poorly designed objects . . . • provide no clues, or • provide false clues. • Principles of good design • the importance of visibility • appropriate clues • feedback of ones actions. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

7. Design… for meaning • easy for the mind to understand • contain readily apparent cues to their operation • appropriate clues • feedback between ones actions and ones knowledge • To “know” is to have enough data to support a willingness to act • To “understand” is to have enough data to “explain” another’s willingness to act Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

8. Key Concepts • Explanation • Knowledge • Models • Behavior • Affordances • Constraints Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

9. Explanation • The nature of human thought and explanation. • We want to have an explanation, and we will construct one in order to eliminate any puzzle or discrepancy in our lives. • As “narrators” we feel we need explanations Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

10. Knowledge • Satisficing for a willingness to act • Precise behavior can emerge from imprecise knowledge, because . . . • Information is in the world • One to one mapping of affordances is not required. Retrospectively one choice is made. • Constraints are present. • Models and narratives can contribute to retrospective explanation. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

11. Models • We base our models on whatever knowledge we have: • real or imaginary • naïve or sophisticated • even fragmentary evidence. • Everyone forms theories (mental models) to explain what they have observed. • In the absence of feedback to the contrary, people are free to let their imaginations run free. • Thus the presence of models can serve as an inspiration for explanation and knowledge and as a constraint on “free association” Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

12. Behavior • In everyday situations, behavior is determined by the combination of . . . • internal knowledge • external info • awareness of possibilities • constraints. • There’s a tradeoff between the amount of mental knowledge and the amount of external knowledge needed. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

13. Affordances • An Affordance is the perceived and actual properties of a thing. • Primarily those fundamental properties that determine how a thing could possibly be used. • “Affords” means, basically, “is for.” • A chair affords support, therefore affords sitting. • Affordances provide strong clues to things’ operations. • When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

14. Constraints • Constrain possible actions/behaviors • Are made more effective and useful if they are easy to see and interpret. • Can be physical, cultural, semantic, or logical Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

15. Inter-relations Important to Design • Meaning can be inferred from knowledge or explanation • Knowledge and explanation can be both inspired and constrained by awareness of models • Behavior stems from mediated knowledge • Affordances and constraints act as the mediators • Explanation is a retrospective stance to narration Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

16. Meaning “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” —Lewis Carroll Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

17. Three Design Elements • Codes • Clues • Cues Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

18. The Coding Fallacy The semiotic world is composed of codes -- of signs and symbols that can be translated via a look-up table. The “coding” fallacy underpins a philosophy of realism and its derivative ontologies. By contrast is the ontology of ‘cues”. Codes have the advantage of definition, cues have the vagueness of situationalism. Clues fall in the middle as tokens of narration which act as code or cue. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

19. Codes • Codes are efficient. Lookup tables work. A means x. B means y. C when found in situation g means w and in situation h means z • Codes are separable from attendance, affordance, and effectivities. Codes are assigned semiotic abstractions of varying complexity and whose requisite lookup tables vary in terms of situational specificity. Those who have been trained in the quantitative sciences or whose world view has a foundation in realism are often asserting the primacy of codes. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

20. Codes are part of the “modern” • Semioticians seek to identify codes and the tacit rules and constraints which underlie the production and interpretation of meaning within each code. Daniel Chandler • The process consists of parsing the natural language to extract the different terms it contains, mapping these terms to the concepts available in the ontology and finally extracting the most relevant codes from the intersection between the different concepts. In the process ambiguities are detected and automatically solved. Frank Montyne Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

21. Science Places Great Emphasis on Codes • What happens in perception is similar to what at a higher psychological level is described as understanding or insight. Perceiving is abstracting in that it represents individual cases through configurations of general categories. Rudolf Arnheim • Reading a text involves relating it to relevant 'codes'. Roman Jakobson • Perception depends on coding the world into iconic signs that can re-present it within our mind. The force of the apparent identity is enormous, however. We think that it is the world itself we see in our "mind's eye", rather than a coded picture of it' Jacques Derrida Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

22. Complexity Suggests that Codes are not as Omnipresent as We may Think In re combinatorial environments, meaning is characterized by a fluid, shifting, continuous state of becoming. In this form of fleeting context, content is always emergent, arising out of the superimposition and or juxtaposition of a series of "poetic“ elements and processes functioning in relation to one another. Fleeting and shifting qualities of engagement become an experiential focus. During interaction, the user, through direct experience, encounters a series of potential "states“ of meaning. We should always view these states as a temporary glimpse at a continuous process of meaning-becoming, motivating the thought and behavioral reaction of the user. William Seaman Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

23. Witness Einstein The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced an combined... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. Albert Einstein Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

24. Context and Narrative are Important Elements in Knowledge and Explanation • We live in a time that is exemplified by fleeting messages, complex shifting meanings and mercurial contexts. William Seaman • Our identities are constructed along narrative principles, and often constructed and reconstructed in the actual telling of stories about ourselves in daily life, in family groups, etc Jerome Bruner • we tell our lives as narratives, but we experience them as hypertexts’. Jay Lemke Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

25. Clues (1) Evidence used in a narrative feedback loop for explanation Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

26. Clues (2) • Clues do NOT create knowledge • Clues can support models • Clues can provide evidence of constraints • Clues can create awareness of affordances Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

27. Cues and Gloms Semiotic affordance and effectivities are “cued” when an observer pays attention to some “cue” and has a cognitive experience. These experiences will then be processed for later attention and action. [One] does not have to restructure separately all of his earlier concepts. . . Once a new structure has been incorporated in thinking .. . it gradually spreads to the older concepts as they are drawn into the intellectual operations of the higher type. Lev Vygotsky To communicate about a given situated activity, we pick our words. By picking particular words we are, in turn, picking meanings (and not only a specific meaning, but also a glom of meanings, the particularities of which are determined by the user from the context). The meanings we pick influence both our perspective on the situated activity we are relating to (or communicating about) and our sense of the possibility space and adjacent possibles relating to that activity. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

28. Gloms Words evoke families of meanings. These families of meanings are referred to as a glom. The multiplicity of meanings implicit in a glom allows, when each such meaning is viewed as a medium, new possibilities for action. Vygotsky distinguishes between more primitive gloms and higher level concepts. First come the gloms, and then only when abstracted traits are synthesized anew and the resulting abstract synthesis becomes the main instrument of thought does a concept emerge. Vygotsky notes that when there is dissonance between the understood meaning of a concept and new input, what ever it might be, i.e. when a concept breaks down, there is reversion back to the glom. That reversion allows for change. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

29. Cues (1) Cues are the operants perceived and attended to which trigger a meaning and/or an action by the attendee. The operant might be a physical affordance or its corollary effectivity or it might be a semiotic affordance and or its corollary effectivity. It is important to recognize that attendance is critical to cue operants. In the absence of attendance there is no cuing and in the absence of the activity or cognition of cuing there is no cue. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

30. Cues (2) Cues are the label for the emergent meaning which results from an intersection of attendance to environment, situation, history, and cognition such that semiotic affordance and/or effectivities are perceived to allow for action, assignment of cognition, label, or code, or for boundary breaking. In symbolic representation, "the symbolic does not simply point toward a meaning, but rather allows that meaning to present itself." In other words, "what is represented is itself present in the only way available to it. Hans-Georg Gadamer Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

31. Cues (3) • The emergent meaning of cues requires that we extend the concept of affordances to the semiotic sphere. A semiotic affordance is the possibility that a situation or a cognitive sign offers to an attendee. Semiotic affordance are not properties of the situation or cognition but rather are joint properties of the situation/cognition/attendee and attention. In the absence of attention there are no semiotic affordances. • Semiotic affordance have their corollaries in semiotic effectivities. The potentiality of an attendee to make use of a possibility afforded to him/her by the semiotic situation. Cognition thus corresponds to the potentiality of an animal to take advantage of a physical affordance afforded it by the environment or the particular subset thereof which the animal has attended to. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

32. Two Kinds of People Those who operate in the world of codes are less than tolerant of the vagaries suggested by cues. Those vagaries are suggestive of inconsistencies and incompleteness that bother the code people. By contrast those who are more comfortable in the world of cues are less bothered by the assertions of the coders that there is such a thing as exact meaning and that lookups are appropriate. In reality both groups make use of the conceptual framework of the other, but the cuers are usually more explicit when making use of codes and the coders are usually more emotional (and want to declare not themselves) when making use of cues. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

33. Rules for Art • The ‘peak shift principle’ makes exaggerated elements attractive • Isolating a single cue helps to focus attention • Perceptual grouping makes objects stand out from background • Contrast and Perceptual ‘problem solving’ are both reinforcingVilayanur Ramachandran Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

34. Designing for Meaning Approach 1 The User is a “Coder” -- meaning is found on a look up table Approach 2 The User is a “Cuer” – meaning is found by evoked attention to affordances found in context Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

35. Design Errors Approach 1 Context is not addressed and cues predominate Avoidance of responsibility for choosing Willingness to act (knowledge) is misunderstood Approach 2 Predilection to ascribed meaning of code not recognized due to offloading of “information” to the environment Requirements for evoked attention overlooked Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

36. Example 1 Mother tells teen “I want to pick up your dress at the cleaners before they close.” Teen runs out of gas and is out of money. Teen drives to the cleaners around 5:45pm to intercept Mom. Mother is not there. Teen goes to great lengths to borrow money to get gas to get home. Teen blames Mother for not being at cleaners. Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

37. Example 2 The Mayor Of Cincinnati Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

38. Example 3 Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

39. Example 4 Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design

40. Example 5 Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design