Technological Mediation
- What are some implications of interaction design?
Technological liturgies and formation
- James K. A. Smith argues that every practice around a cultural artifact configures a liturgy that influences the way we see the world.
Technology affords and invites rituals of interaction. How you handle your phone might seem to be a rather banal concern. Are the practices of how we interface with a small metal device really worthy of analysis? […] As is so often the case, [a] zeitgeist is succinctly pictured in a rather inane Michelob Ultra commercial in which the world obeys the touch commands of an iPhone screen. […] we perhaps nonetheless unconsciously begin to expect the world to conform to our wishes as our iPhone does. Or I implicitly begin to expect that I am the center of my own environments, and that what surrounds me exists for me. In short, my relation to my iPhone—which seems insignificant—is writ large as an iPhone-ized relation to the world, an iPhone-ization of my world(view). “Imagining the Kingdom”, James K. A. Smith
- One very bad way that technology may be forming us is by psychological manipulation of our attention and some practices that people have been calling “dark patterns”.
The affordances of UI elements
- Thus, we need to recognize that each UI element portrays value-laden form of interaction with the world.
- In other words, UI elements have affordances: they invite us to act in a certain way and not in another.
- See, for example, the very idea of a button:
“Buttons force decisions into binary choices. There is no way of answering that one partially agrees, has not realized the consequences of accepting, or does not care, even though these would probably be franker answers from most users. Buttons are verbs that rule out tenses other than present tense, and rule out modal auxiliary, subjunctive, and other more sophisticated ways in which our language expresses activity. Buttons also designate you as a masterful subject in full control of the situation, which obviously is problematic in many cases, such as the one above, where one cannot oversee, predict, or even understand the consequences of clicking “I accept,” or in other examples where the buttons effectively hide the scripts enacted by pressing it, such as in the “buy” example.” […] Powerful buttons have an unmistakably “trigger happy” feel to them. They make the world feel controllable, accessible, and conquerable, providing ‘Information at your fingertips’ as the slogan goes, or, more broadly, the reduction of society, culture, knowledge, its complexity, countless mediations, and transformations to a “double- click” information society, where everything becomes packaged in manageable and functional scripts activated by buttons offering easy rewards. From this perspective, the interface button becomes an emblem of our strong desire to handle the increasingly complex issues of our societies by efficient technical means—what one may call the “buttonization” of culture, in which our reality becomes clickable.” - Buttons, in “Software studies, a lexicon”, by Matthew Fuller
- What are the affordances of all the UI elements we have been seeing so far? What they invite us to perceive and act in certain ways?
| Element | What they invite us to perceive/act | What they disinvite us to perceive/act |
|---|---|---|
| Buttons | Immediacy, binary choice, accessibility, abstraction | Non-binary choice, conditionality, complexity, uncertainty |
| Checkboxes | ||
| Radio buttons | ||
| Toggles | ||
| Text boxes | ||
| Dropdowns | ||
| Sliders | ||
| Drag and drop | ||
| Pickers | ||
| List boxes | ||
| Notifications | ||
| Pop-ups | ||
| Progress bars | ||
| Tooltips | ||
| Menus | ||
| Tabs | ||
| Icons | ||
| Breadcrumbs | ||
| Accordions | ||
| Carousels |
Interaction design and Christian imagination
What, then, should be the objectives of interaction design? How can they fit in a view of the good life according to our Christian convictions?
- Should we really always design interactions?
- Respecting people’s attentional resources = respecting people as God’s image;
- Promoting Christian virtue and not vice;
- Which should mean an interaction that notices that God is at work — not just ourselves.
- Promoting more engagement with people and all of God’s creation.