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

The Overlooked Role of Cues in
Design
Codes, Cues, Clues & Affordances
Michael Lissack
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Taking Notes?
this presentation is on-line at
http://lissack.com/codes.ppt
background reading is at
http://lissack.com/lissack_reader.pdf
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Complex Systems Thinking
 Inter-relatedness
 Ambiguity
 Emergence
 Multiple Levels
 Multiple Perspectives
 Weak Signals
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Design… for meaning
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Key Concepts
 Explanation
 Knowledge
 Models
 Behavior
 Affordances
 Constraints
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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”
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Three Design Elements
Codes
Clues
Cues
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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’.
Michael Lissack
Jay Lemke
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Clues (1)
Evidence used in a narrative feedback loop for explanation
Narrative
Evidence
Explanation
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Clues (2)
Clues do NOT create knowledge
Clues can support models
Clues can provide evidence of constraints
Clues can create awareness of affordances
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Rules for Art
1. The ‘peak shift principle’ makes exaggerated
elements attractive
2. Isolating a single cue helps to focus attention
3. Perceptual grouping makes objects stand out from
background
4. Contrast and Perceptual ‘problem solving’ are
both reinforcing
Vilayanur Ramachandran
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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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.
Michael Lissack
Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Example 2
The Mayor
Of Cincinnati
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Example 3
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Example 4
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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Example 5
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Codes, Cues, Affordances & Design
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