neuron and brain

Just forgot the mention that one of my friend Wei said that each of us is a neuron, and the whole human world is a big brain. I really like this metaphor because I was thinking about the connection between human beings, natural world and the artificial world.

The meaning of religion, culture and HCI

Eight friends ate and played together in the evening on Friday after Pumpkin Carving. All the chatting remains on the same theme: the meaning.

The conversation began from Dalai Lama. I found that I almost know nothing about him except that he is a Chinese, got a Noble peace prize and there are several Tibetan restaurant in Bloomington. And in that evening, they told me that he has his philosophy, and wrote a very popular book which was popular all over the world except China and it is forbid. Someone told me that:" you could feel you connected with the natural and whole world very peacefully, and forget yourself in the moment when all of those Lama begin to chant sutras together". I don't know if I could feel that moment or not.

Another friend began to teach us about Christian because he is a Christian and all the others are not. He asked us some questions which I believe that he doesn't know the answers neither. For example: don't you think that there is the heaven? I really don't know.

I asked them :"Dn't you think all the Chinese believe Buddhism since thousands years ago?" I know I am totally wrong especially when someone mentioned minorities. They have their own God.

One person said that he comes from a literary family, so his family believes no God but science. Another one said her family believes no God too. She said, her family only show respect to her family ancestors when the most other Chinese were showing their respect to those Buddhism gods. But, they believe that their ancestors could know they were missing them, telling stories to them and asking helps from them in some way. What is the "some way" though? Where were they or their souls existing? This goes to the religion origin.

During the whole process, we were asking question about meaning--from a small sign to life. For example, what is the meaning of the cross sign? Which religion's sign has Jesus, and which hasn't? How should you treat us as a Christian? And finally,what is the meaning of your life?

I found these religion conversations very interesting due to its relationships with culture and HCI.

We define ourselves as Chinese student and hang out together every week or every several days, and suddenly we found our huge difference regarding our believes. How much does religion matter in HCI??? Does it only matter when the design will be used in Church or other religion place or for religion ceremonies?

I chatted with an Indian guy in a job fair half year ago. When we talked about why google was not the No.1 search engine in China, I said that maybe google just need another different Chinese name instead of using it's pronunciation in Chinese language. How many people tend to think about which country the company belongs to before they open a webpage to search? I don't know. But I think it is unbelievable if people consciously consider this. But why Chinese use Baidu more often than others? I believe that it is the name origins from Chinese (one sentence of a poem), and therefore it is easy to remember and type in.

I am not sure how much culture matters in HCI, but I am sure it really matters. Especially if we want to design ensouled artifacts.

I remember that Jeff showed us the short vedio about Spring Festival decorations and activities in World of War Craft in February. He said he thought it was nice to see this happened in the game world. I thought that it has special meaning to us only because of the connection between us and the culture. And of course, the meaning differs according the strongness of the connection. This back to the religion issues. We respect other religions, but not necessarily believe them or reject them. I guess in HCI, it is not about respect or others, it is about how to show the connections, get our emotions resonated. Where the meaning arises in a religion?

Well, thank you for reading to the end. This post is not well organized. It is just a flow of my thought, begins from a chatting evening, goes through whatever I could think of, and end at my brain stopped working. After writing this, I thought maybe this could be a pre-writing exercise, right?

a presentation experience on last friday

A concrete activity:

I had a very special presentation experience on the last Friday morning. The presentation was given to a group of girls aged around 10 I believe. In the presentation, we (an undergraduate student from School of Informatics and I) planned to briefly introduce ourselves first; then one of us was going to ask them the question about that what kind of people they think we are as people in computing (here we thought we would get some answers such as nerdy looking, with big glasses, etc.); then we would present our questions (such as how does this person making his living or who is a computer scientists, those kids pick one from four photos) to them, and they could choose answers by using their remote handlers; after these questions, we planed to give them some project examples for what we do in computing. We have 16 slides and 9 questions, and for each questions, there are two screens, one is for the question, and another one provides the statistical result of the answers they chose.

Looking back at the phenomenon in the presentation process by using those theories we learned on classes:

We got a plan and practiced for around half hour together in that morning. The process was rationalized based on time. We predicted their answers for our question and made the different parts pf the presentation connected based their answers—our expectations from them. We supposed to get a nerdy figure our of their mind and show them that we are ordinary people just like other people, and you never separate them from others by looking their face and photos. However, those kids were not very cooperative. They told us people in computing are just usual people like us. They have already known the answers before we “convince” them! Related with HCI, this means the real context. We think we know what will happen in a certain context. But we never know before we actually observe the activities truly happened in real context. We share the same horizons about people in computing with those kids, but our horizons about who those kids are have some problems. Maybe this is one of those unexpected results of the artifact world. By surfing on the Internet, they can easily know these simple questions.

They showed their childish characters when they interacted with those questions though. For example, there is a question: what is this person’s profession? And we show "spiderman's" picture on the right side of the slide, on which he has his camera in his hand.


The options are:

A. Photographer
B. Actor
C. Computer Scientist
D. Super Hero

They chose all of these four answers even they were exciting at the time they saw this question and claimed that they know him.

They need to point at the adapter by using their handler when they chose their answer. However, they tended to point their handlers to the screen where the question was shown. When this happened, another presenter had to hold the adopter and reminded those kids that they have to point at it in order to get their answer calculated.

Here I got a point about “breakdown”: it could be very small thing and maybe totally unexpected. We found that those small girls could not understand the meaning of “profession”, their confusing made us very uneasy, and we have to change it into ”make a living with”.

In the whole presenting process, a lot of judgment was made to direct the process based on what was happening -- embodiment. We have several really cool and interesting examples about Music Informatics and Virtual Reality. But we cut them down because we were run out of time. Those girls were educated hopefully. They were very energetic and involved. In order to let them get the meanings of the presentation, we say it clearly that why are ask those questions and give those examples. They are not just for fun or cool feelings. We use them as media to show that we could do a lot of things such as game design and music control rather than just coding. We use a very simple sudoku game to show those girls that not all the logics are unsolvable or as abstract as E=mc2.

After this presentation was done, I did reflection-on-action, and new knowledge about presentation was gained. Such as, presentation could be interactive activities rather than lecture style. Also my experience of living in the US therefore horizons were enriched in someway both consciously and unconsciously.

An interesting question I asked myself is who could we use these philosophy theories interpret people’s unconscious behaviors? People’s unconscious behavior is highly context related, isn’t it?

what did I do in the last three days?!

O MY GOD, I just realized that I didn't finish my pre-writing until now. However, I did some reflection-on-action work.

After Tuesday's class I decided to do the most time-consuming work: re-read those readings and gather all my notes and those underlined sentences together! It turns out that it is a huge project! Usually I read on my screen. I could not stop underline those so good sentences when I read those theories due to that the mouse would never short of "ink". Other than underline, I made so few notes on those pages! Although it is a huge project, and I didn't finish it until now and plan to stop now, I still believe that it is a so good idea I got from Tuesday's lecture. It is not easy time when I realized that I just throw all my learning methods away since some time I don't exactly know. I used to have a lot of good learning methods once upon a time. Reviewing old works is as important as learning new things. But now I seldom to re-examine the old works I did. I should do it regularly.

Now I decided to focus on pre-writing, and hope I can get something out of the messy mind.

from game experience to Activity theory

Nine friends played Wii games today at my home including sport games and Mario party games. We have four handlers which means that we could have four people play at the same time. When we played those minigames, eight of us were really enjoy. Another one was very busy and working by using her laptop.

Clearly, everyone has a clear goal, win the game. In order to win, people use strategies, and share their win strategies with others. When we played 2 vs. 2 games, people shout their strategies to their partner about how to divide their labor, and how to aim their targets. Through the practice sessions, we were trying to find some tips by doing consciously. We were trying to stand out of others by predicting the others’ behaviors and actions. Sometimes we wanted to win, and also want others to be happy. Activities were mediated in the game experience.

However, it seems that nobody really think about the final goals of the party during the gaming process. Maybe they were thinking about it, but who knows!?

Based on this game experience, I got some questions about Activity Theory. In AT, we mentioned in our class that all the activities involved in conscious mini goals. How about when activities happen in a social contexts, and everybody has different mini goals and maybe has similar activity? Or maybe we all have same mini goals but express it in different ways? When these happen, we have no way to connect a specific goal and a specific activity due to the dependency on people and context. The mini-goal direct activities are always changing. How can we connect activities and operations with planed and un-planed?

In one game, suddenly one friend found a new way to shake the handler and he won the game. He was very happy to tell others that we could shake the handler faster by using his strategy. And every other three players stared at their own handlers and began to shake in that way. This is really a wonderful breakdown!

I also think that the mind/body theory was challenged in this game. It is impossible to think and plan our activities first before actions. The situation in every moment decided by the past activities and mediated by both the game environment and other people’s reaction. A lot of operations were conditional response. and happened unconsciously. However, if some players are very familiar with the game, and they got the ability to predict the possible situation in the future moments, and they kind of got “more time” to react to the situations they were facing. This matches the embodiment theory and this kind of familiar shapes the sensibility in HCI design.

Embodiment always exist in reality.

Ensoulment

In The Design Way, Nelson and Stolterman said, “In any creative act, something new is brought into the world at the expense of the old—which is then destroyed.” But in today’s class, what we discussed about “ensoulment” destroyed this sentence. I have a kind of feeling that what Stolterman said in his book is always the first part, and if you want to know further or the “true reality”, you need to come to the class. HAHA …^_^

I was wandering that something exits or existed in this world was never destroyed by another design. Maybe it is much harder to destroy something than to create a new one, because the old things, something ever exists, was involved in users’ experience, the process people get knowledge and horizons, and becomes a part of the old world as the past, history and knowledge for ever. We need either a long time or very big effort to destroy or totally remove something from the existing compared with the creating process.

When we talk about ensoulment, usually we think about people give the additional meaning or value to the thing because of their own experience or the special relationships which the thing connected for them. For example, someone treasured his pen as a special thing for him because it was a gift from his loved ones. The pictures of dragon in the buildings of every China town in the big cities of the US become a kind of sign, or Chinese spirit symbol.

When we talk about the ensoulment, it is easy to think something concrete, real, or physical existing thing. They have their own aura. They were created by great effort, energy or time. They have their material characters, culture background or family or personal meanings.

How about the things in digital world? They have “no material quality”, and come and go very often which means usually very short live span. However, loyalty happens in the digital world. One of my classmates just like to use Powerpoint to create prototype and he doesn’t care other softwares which could perform similar tasks. A special thing for me is an online forum (http://www.smth.org). I went to the forum very often since I was an undergraduate student, around 8 years ago. At the first three or four years, I published posts on the forum, and talk with other people, some times we played together both online and in reality. Now, the old friends we make from that forum are all over the world. And people who goes to the forum very often now and I don’t know each other at all. But I ensouled that forum and feel be proud of it when people talk about it. I remember the virtual funeral hold for a real person who died in real world on World war of craft mentioned on Jeff’s class. There is some same thing in them. Virtual world or digital craft becomes a part of real life.

What is it good for HCI design? Yes, it is hard to design something eternal or ensoul it during the designing process. And no one knows how to design something to let people ensoul it. It is totally non-sense. However, before we begin the design process, we are kind of making an argument of why we need a new thing, or the design. The more we connect with people’s fundamental understanding of the need, and the meaning of the world and life, our design more tend to be ensouled later by people and deeply rooted in people’s lives. Or otherwise, who knows? !

Motion

If it is the motion make films living compared with photographs, and therefore gives films overwhelming power to encourage the directors to express and create far beyond record and remind, entice audience to involve beyond just know and accept. What is the motion in HCI? The dynamics in a social network? The feedback and guiding point in an information system? The communications between people and people, people and artifacts, artifacts and artifacts? I guess, AND what else?...

If the motion is only the sequence of activities, it was bland and nobody will like it. This is why the directors make a lot of stories happen on those characters in a relatively short time. And of course, there are some stories happen rely on someone's imagination and would never happen in real life. However, these imposable stories have their root in out society including history, geography, religion and all other aspects could encompassed in cultures. Based on this point, what could we borrow from them to HCI?

The special effects were created and used to enhance viewers' experience. The special effects give directors more power to express their imagination. Sometimes, those special effects make the viewers timid and they still want to continue to watch. Technologies was used everywhere in this world now and for doing everything. But why do we use technologies if we can do same thing without them?--because the technologies give us more power to control the situations we are facing. Sometimes people want to go away from all technologies and pay high price to live in somewhere could not connect with any new technology (cell phone, computer, TV) for one or two night, but nobody want to live in the primitive society for their entire life. We are all looking for something, sometimes we know, sometimes we don't. If only we can know what other people are looking for, we got the motion for our film.

...

AMM culture in different cultures

photos as statistic pictures are reminder of the past time, here and then.

Films, a serial of pictures which was called motion plus audio provide a much more vivid scenes to us. And we get a kind of here and now illusion. After we get the illusion, we enjoy them a lot.

TV shows, movies produced in the US tend to tell stories happened in the same year or age which was produced.

A lots of Chinese TV shows, movies, and especially those popular ones tend to tell stories which was happened decades, hundreds even thousands years ago.

In China, from thousands years ago, there is a special professional job. One person narrate, play multi roles, and some times also imitate natural sounds, animal sounds at the same time, to tell a story. We call it ventriloquism or oral imitation. Sometimes they use several very simple tools too.

You can find some similar one from the following link, but of course, it is in Chinese:

http://www.sddp.net/sh/china/shys/gdpspd.asp#

It is kind of the first example of “here and now” in Chinese culture.