Rhetoric and Experience Architecture 1602359601, 9781602359604

Table of contents :
Front cover
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo
2 Beckon, Encounter, Experience: The Danger of Control and the Promise of Encounters in the Study of User Experience
Patricia Sullivan
3 Experience Architecture: Drawing Principles from Life
Roger Grice
4 Analyzing Activity for Experience Design
Cheryl Geisler
5 Feminist Rhetorics and Interaction Design: Facilitating Socially Responsible Design
Jennifer Sano-Franchini
6 Personas as Rhetorically Rich and Complex Mechanisms for Design
Erin Friess
7 “Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design
Heather Christiansen and Tharon Howard
8 Experience Architecture in Public Planning: A Material, Activist Practice
Kristen Moore
9 Methodologies: Design Studies & Techne
Ehren Pflugfelder
10 Ethnography as Research Aggregator
Andrew Mara and Miriam Mara
11 Audience Awareness: Resituating Experience Architecture as Execution
Cait Ryan
12 Kairos and Managing Experience Architecture Projects
Ben Lauren
13 Toward a Rhetoric of the Place: Creating Locative Experiences
Anders Fagerjord
14 Dialogic, Data-Driven Design: UX and League of Legends
Cody Reimer
15 Making as Learning: Mozilla and Curriculum Design
Rudy McDaniel and Cassie McDaniel
16 Memorial Interactivity: Scaffolding Nostalgic User Experiences
William C. Kurlinkus
17 Designing Digital Activism: Rhetorical Tool as Agent of Social Change
Douglas M. Walls, Delia M. Garcia, and Amy VanSchaik
18 Badges as Architectures of Experience: From Signaling to Communication
Stephanie Vie, Rudy McDaniel, and Joseph R. Fanfarelli
19 Relocations: (Re)visioning Rhetoric in a Modern Amusement Park
Jill Morris
Contributors
Index
Back cover

Citation preview

“Rhetoric is a natural choice for UX work.” —Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity

RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE represents the evolving ideas of an emerging area of study. Experience architecture focuses on the research and practice of creating technologies, products, policies, and services that serve the needs of various participants. Experience architecture addresses issues of usability, interaction design, service design, user experience, information architecture, and content management for websites, mobile apps, software applications, and technology services. Experience architecture also represents an emerging context for the practice of a variety of research and practical skills. These proficiencies are incorporated into commercial design and development work as user experience design, which has become an effective workplace moniker for this assemblage of practices. The study of language, and especially of persuasion, grounds experience architecture. Rhetoric sustains the technology-rich discussion of language and design that characterizes the contemporary exploration of the emerging practice of user experience design, and experience architecture enriches discussion of relevant research and methods. Experience architecture is a professional practice merging the newest technologies with ancient knowledge, hence the need for a volume in which rhetoric and experience architecture are in dialogue. RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE includes chapters from twenty-five authors in three countries and eleven US states, representing eighteen universities, research institutions, and design firms.

3015 Brackenberry Drive Anderson, South Carolina 29621 http://www.parlorpress.com S A N: 2 5 4 – 8 8 7 9 ISBN: 978-1-60235-962-8

RHETORIC and EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

RHETORIC and EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

“I really like the definition of experience architecture. As Potts and Salvo write in their introduction, ‘experience architecture requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single-task scenarios.’” —Donald Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, author of The Design of Everyday Things

Potts and Salvo

EDITED BY LIZA POTTS and MICHAEL J. SALVO Parlor Press

RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

Edited by Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo

Parlor Press Anderson, South Carolina www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA © 2017 by Parlor Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Potts, Liza, editor. | Salvo, Michael J., editor. Title: Rhetoric and experience architecture / edited by Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo. Description: Anderson, South Carolina : Parlor Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017038154 (print) | LCCN 2017047258 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602359628 (pdf) | ISBN 9781602359635 (epub) | ISBN 9781602359826 ( ibook) | ISBN 9781602359833 (mobi) | ISBN 9781602359604 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781602359611 (hardcover : acid-free paper) Subjects: LCSH: Communication and technology. | Rhetoric--Technological innovations. | Content analysis (Communication) | Information resources management. | Research--Methodology. | Social change in literature. Classification: LCC P96.T42 (ebook) | LCC P96.T42 R53 2017 (print) | DDC 808.00285--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038154 978-1-60235-960-4 (paperback) 978-1-60235-961-1 (hardcover) 978-1-60235-962-8 (pdf) 978-1-60235-963-5 (epub) 978-1-60235-982-6 (ibook) 978-1-60235-983-3 (mobi) 2345 Cover image: 2016. Photo by Michael Lechner on Unsplash. Used by permission. Book Design: David Blakesley Copyediting by Jared Jameson Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [email protected].

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

1 Introduction

3

Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo

2 Beckon, Encounter, Experience: The Danger of Control and the Promise of Encounters in the Study of User Experience Patricia Sullivan

17

3 Experience Architecture: Drawing Principles from Life

41

Roger Grice

4 Analyzing Activity for Experience Design

57

Cheryl Geisler

5 Feminist Rhetorics and Interaction Design: Facilitating Socially Responsible Design Jennifer Sano-Franchini

84

6 Personas as Rhetorically Rich and Complex Mechanisms for Design 111 Erin Friess

7 “Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design Heather Christiansen and Tharon Howard

122

8 Experience Architecture in Public Planning: A Material, Activist Practice Kristen Moore

143

v

9 Methodologies: Design Studies and Techne

166

Ehren Pflugfelder

10 Ethnography as Research Aggregator

184

Andrew Mara and Miriam Mara

11 Audience Awareness: Resituating Experience Architecture as Execution Cait Ryan

197

12 Kairos and Managing Experience Architecture Projects

209

Ben Lauren

13 Toward a Rhetoric of the Place: Creating Locative Experiences

225

Anders Fagerjord

14 Dialogic, Data-Driven Design: UX and League of Legends

241

Cody Reimer

15 Making as Learning: Mozilla and Curriculum Design

258

Rudy McDaniel and Cassie McDaniel

16 Memorial Interactivity: Scaffolding Nostalgic User Experiences

274

William C. Kurlinkus

17 Designing Digital Activism: Rhetorical Tool as Agent of Social Change Douglas M. Walls, Delia M. Garcia, and Amy VanSchaik

291

18 Badges as Architectures of Experience: From Signaling to Communication Stephanie Vie, Rudy McDaniel, and Joseph R. Fanfarelli

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19 Relocations: (Re)visioning Rhetoric in a Modern Amusement Park 323 Jill Morris Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments We want to thank all the authors who contributed to this volume. Over a long and tumultuous path to publication, our contributors were patient, professional, and productive. Our goal from the outset was to create a forum for academics and practitioners to share their experience and, along the way, convince as many as we could that experience architecture was a term that accurately described their work. Charles Sides was convinced early on, and offered valuable feedback and advice at an important moment. Ashita Nichanametla, Erin Brock-Carlson and Michelle McMullen offered us great insight and helped us construct another interface for readers to encounter the book. We would also like to thank Laura Gonzalez whose work on international user experience is helping us plan our next project. Michael is grateful to Liza for pushing the project along when he just could not even, and Liza is thankful for Michael’s persistence. We presented early versions of this work at the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) and are thankful for our colleagues’ patient guidance and direction during early stages of the work, and are especially appreciative for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (ACM-SIGDOC) for helping us refine our approach and for providing excellent feedback in Silver Spring, Maryland and Limerick, Ireland. David Blakesley has a vision for the future of academic publishing; Jared Jameson has been sharp-eyed. Any value here is attributable to these collaborators and any missteps are of our own making. Our spouses have been patient as we discussed what we affectionately refer to as “The RXA,” disrupting family time. And to our children, Liza’s Zöe, Katie, and Jayne and Michael’s Aila. Joy.

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RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

1 Introduction Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo

E

xperience architecture (XA) represents an emerging context for the practice of a variety of research and practical skills. On one hand, these proficiencies are incorporated into commercial design and development work. User experience (UX for short) has become an effective workplace moniker for this assemblage of practices. The study of language, and especially of persuasion, grounds user experience architecture. Rhetoric sustains the technology-rich discussion of language and design that characterizes the contemporary exploration of emerging practice and enriches UX’s research and methods. Experience architecture is a professional site merging the newest technologies with ancient knowledge, hence the need for a volume in which rhetoric and experience architecture are brought into dialogue. With chapters contributed from twenty-five authors in three countries (and eleven US states), representing eighteen Universities and Research Institutions and design firms practicing experience architecture, this edited collection represents the evolving ideas of an emerging area of study. Experience architecture (XA) is focused on the research and practice of creating technologies, products, policies, and services that serve the needs of various participants. XA focuses on issues addressing usability; interaction design; service design; user experience; information architecture; and content management for websites, mobile apps, software applications, and technology services.

Definitions of Experience Architecture We take experience architecture to be the architecture of mediated systems, resulting in a designed capability for those using those systems to communicate. Experience Architecture takes a systems approach to the reciprocal processes of analyzing and constructing social experiences in a variety of networked digital environments as well as a number of physical spaces. While social media represents the most immediate example, this collection demonstrates that a wide range of organizations deploy experience architecture in a broad application in virtual and physical space. These organizations value insights gained employing reflexive, iterative processes of designing interactive environments. While Experience Architecture is new in comparison to Rhetoric, Donald Norman insists it isn’t a wholly new concept, emerging alongside Apple’s first generations of personal computing devices in the late twenti3

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eth century: “the original book says nothing of what has come to be called user experience (a term that I was among the first to use, when in the early 1990s, the group I headed at Apple called itself “the User Experience Architect’s Office”)” (Norman, 2013, p. xiii). Before the web became ubiquitous, long before the phenomenon of smartphone users started gathering likes and comments on their latest updates and photos, Norman named the infant disciplinary formation: It requires a change to emphasize the human needs, to emphasize development for people. Such a change will not come effortlessly. It requires a new process for product development, one that involves the social side of development as much as the engineering and marketing sides. It requires bringing a new discipline—user experience—to the development table. And it requires that this new discipline live up to the challenges before it. (Norman, 1998, p. 229) It is challenging indeed to emerge with a new disciplinary formation facing the always-ongoing crisis in the very Humanities and Social Sciences we are charged with making relevant to the public and engaging with our engineering and programming colleagues. We are, again in Norman’s words, “victims of our own success” (Invisible Computer, 229) because we have “let technology lead the way.” Experience architecture puts human experience first, ahead of technological change or “disruption.” Comprehension begins, through its Latin roots, with taking ahold of something, of grasping it. So we need to grasp how our artifacts emplace us within the world, revealing how we can use these devices to better enjoy our experiences and maximize our time with the people we want to include in our lives. This emerging discipline is part of the process of humanizing technology: it is a systematic approach to discovering with whom we want to share our time and attention. It is quite a different definition of technological development and of user-centered design—with fewer zombies in technology-addled comas and more time available to maximize our presence in our loved ones’ lives. It isn’t surprising to see so many resisting technology when it results in more distance between us, less time spent together while we update, upgrade, and reboot our devices searching for ever-better Wi-Fi signals. Perhaps we are designing the wrong kinds of immersive environments. We need to focus less on single activities that envelop us in technology, and more on creating experiences that are augmented by technology. Meaningful, rich, humane, and valuable technologically mediated experiences drive this field. Experience architecture requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single task scenarios. When we build an app, we need to take into consideration the situations in which peo-

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ple will use that app. Are users rushed, racing between airplane terminals? Is the environment welcoming and comfortable, such as their home? Are they excited to use this app and engage with it? Or, is it a necessary evil in their day-to-day activities, worth wrestling with because of the utility it affords, such as a calendaring system? What other tools are at their disposal? What is around them, and what other media demand their attention? Will the app augment a physical experience, such as purchasing coffee as part of a personal or professional ritual at their local shop? What other apps might they use at the same time, either for cross-comparison or more information? Should these other attendant technologies be linked together, melding spaces, applications, websites, and other digital interfaces into seamless environments? Gone is the moment in which we thought we could build for a simple singular task, if we ever could. Here we must understand the context in which our participants are engaging with these experiences. This volume is designed to help specialists design methods for gathering and analyzing data and understanding network phenomena, ultimately improving the experience for those immersed in these techno-social networks. To understand these ecosystems, we must move beyond isolated tasks of writing, designing, and programming. We need to gain a stronger understanding of strategy and be willing to lead initiatives in the name of the participants who will use these systems and the organizations that want to engage users as contributors. This requires questioning assumptions about technology, ethics, culture, economics, and politics. It requires preparing students to grasp bigger contexts about developing technological solutions that serve actual peoples’ needs, rather than simply driving us to technology for technology’s sake. Experience architecture is the most generalizable expression of creating an environment: it includes investigative research such as contextual inquiry and survey design, analysis techniques like usability testing and task analysis, and practical applications such as interaction and information design and taxonomy creation. It is, perhaps, the name for one of the Sciences of the Artificial that Herbert Simon first wrote about in 1969. Simon was an early proponent of process-oriented design and recognized the emerging field of computer engineering as a form of design. Simon was interested in a wide definition of design, but his work has been most influential in computing. Predating Norman’s work by two decades, Simon’s concern was the realm of the uncertain, what is now recognized as rhetoric. His concerns were distinct from the natural sciences, and hence his title. Simon articulated a range of design-intensive disciplines, from engineering to “architecture, business, education, law, and medicine,(111)” that he distinguished from natural sciences. Sciences of the Artificial concentrate

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not on describing how things were but on arranging how things ought to be. Design also brings a shift from analysis to productive action, and Simon asserted these concerns are re-emerging as the rightful focus of professional education. Victor Margolin ends his book Design Discourse with a landmark bibliographic essay explicitly linking Simon’s work with rhetoric: “On the side of Theory, Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial . . . looked at the potential of a unified science of design, but he did so from a process view only, without examining the ideological and cultural dimensions of theory” (Margolin, 1989 p. 286). As important as Simon’s work was in articulating design, Margolin points out his work was just a start to recognizing the ideological and ethical implications of human-constructed artifacts, of the power of technologies, institutions, and environments to shape—to both limit and expand—human action. Margolin goes on to discuss Ehses and Luptin’s work in the illustrated Rhetorical Handbook that includes a dictionary of visual rhetorical tropes. Whatever limitations history may have revealed in Simon’s approach, his work remains inspirational in its breadth and clarity— defining design as action-oriented, rhetorically imbued, and ultimately a human enterprise. Experience architecture is an umbrella term, and many distinct subfields fit into it: information design, content strategy, usability, app development, user-centered design, project management, interaction design, information architecture, findability, and web development. This list is by no means exhaustive, nor is it simply a laundry list. These are places on a map we’ve learned to collectively gather under the moniker experience architecture. For experience architects, every new project is an opportunity to create interactions with and between places, artifacts, and technologies. The editors of this volume understand experience architecture through the process of building a variety of experiences for a wide range of users, and then accounting for strategic decisions with the stakeholders who determine whether these projects and programs are worth maintaining. We have administered information repositories like our academic program websites and Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), contributed to the architecture of commercial software, designed innovative curriculum like the Experience Architecture Program at Michigan State University, and created new scholarly outlets like Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy. We are also participating in the redesign of scholarly communities (notably SIGDOC) as well as academic conferences. But the most important and far-reaching experiences we participate in almost every day of our professional lives is architecting our students’ classroom experiences and the environments in which they learn to become professionals. We would not limit this to what

Introduction

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is called interaction design or instructional design, as these titles miss so much of the context and responsibility of the strategic moves we must make as architects, writers, and designers of learning places. It is also too narrow a conception of what is within the (techno-) rhetor’s purview. That said, we can see emerging, similar (yet different) work being done in educational technology under the banner of learning experience (LX). It is that continuous and rewarding pursuit of the emergent, the new—what our colleague Patricia Sullivan has recently called the constant of change1—that is what we are after. Based in the ancient knowledge of rhetoric, performed using emergent digital tools of the current internetworked age, experience architecture is timely. This pursuit of the always-emergent is informed by ancient knowledge and by ethical action, cautioned by what we know about the problems of systems-centered and modern design. That is, we simply cannot train professionals to be Experience Architects. Instead, we have prepared this text in order to support the education of Professional and Technical Communicators (PTCs) and other advanced students. Such education requires that students learn about the requirements and demands, as well as the rewards of and vision for a future where we recognize, value, and self-consciously reflect upon numerous professional practices, entering realms that respond to these sciences of the artificial, these realms in need of rhetorical intervention and requiring innovative work that extends beyond our traditional notions of user-centered and participatory design. How we define our work, our research, and our practice holds great meaning. Terminologies are swift to shift from user-centered design, to human-centered design, to user experience, to whatever new title emerges while this volume is in production, due in no small part to the demands of commerce and the whims of the market. This volume on experience architecture delineates its territories, in contrast, by being inclusive and aiming to supply foundational understanding for a new generation of professionals who will both anticipate and navigate the constant change that is our fluid context.

The Future of Experience Architecture Is Global It is important to note that experience architecture is an international pursuit, taking place around the world. While the majority of chapters are contributed from researchers and professionals working across the United States, we received proposals from France, UK, Norway, Canada, India, and Australia. In the UK, there are service design professionals, user-experience designers, and design ethnographers working to improve the design 1. In her 2014 keynote at the SIGDOC conference on the occasion of receiving the Rigo award, September 27, 2014, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

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of technologies, and in France and Germany, researchers link data with design. In Belgium, design is part of national identity with much to teach the world. Scandinavian design is here represented by Norway. Our authors represent a wide variety of approaches and traditions, and the collection is broadly international. The future of experience architecture is strong both as a body of knowledge and as a professionalizing identity. Further, and perhaps more importantly, the future of user-centered work and what Pele Ehn named usability culture is stronger still: the commercial viability (and quiet failure!) of so many products has been demonstrated by marketing user-centered and user-participant design. Apple remains a touchstone for measuring the value added to its products through design, as corporate entities in such diverse competitive scenarios as Disney and Delta Airlines try to measure the impact of user-centered engagement. Each of the authors in this collection traces a potential arc of the future of experience architecture. Yet, the power of its future is not in arguing over and deciding upon a single trajectory all its academic and practitioner adherents can follow, but rather to articulate our diverse successes, to study and determine what commonalities they share, and then re-articulate the practice of experience architecture. Informed as further co-creative extensions of the practice of experience architecture, the future of the field becomes a historical accretion of its most successful expressions over time. This collection of approaches, methods, and projects represents the kind of identity-building narratives such luminaries in the field as Whitney Quesenbery advocate. In her work on storytelling and narrative, she emphasizes not finding the single right answer but a variety of possible working solutions, “Every project is different, so the specific activities need to be adjusted, within an overall approach, to answer the questions each project poses” (Interview, 2012). Quesenbery leads us to conclude that there is no single future of experience architecture, but rather the discipline will mature and advance by providing numerous routes to a variety of solutions, in effect, articulating not a single answer but a diverse range of solutions that together show a rich collection of potential trajectories, all of which together are futures of experience architecture. Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric (Pittsburgh, 2013) imagines a more active rhetor “attuned” to the voices of culture. Articulating the chorus (chôra) as distributed, among the artifacts of the human-made world, or the anthroposphere, the rhetor need not wait as in Bitzer’s construction. Such active rhetorical arts require engagement with spaces and places as well as technologies that, with reference to Latourian thinking, act as allies in a network of people and things to strengthen one’s position. While the

Introduction

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rhetor never controls the situation, Rickert’s attunements allow rhetorically-trained experience architects to work with design and designers to encourage some actions and discourage others—raising further complications, particularly ethical conduct and knowledge-making, of epistemology. Sullivan, Grice, and Geisler, from part one of this volume, are important because of their contributions to rhetorical methodology. Sullivan explicitly connects Walter Ong’s work in audience analysis to usability research and indelibly links rhetoric to design, as in Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design (1996). Our focus honors these rhetorical foundations while moving forward. Experience architecture is grounded in the ancient arts of rhetoric applied to emerging contexts of experience architecture, defined as “the architecture of the systems both above and below the surface (i.e., architecture of interactions, visuals, content, structure, and policy)” (Potts, 2014). Ancient rhetorical concepts of kairos, techne, and metis join user experience concerns with interface, design, and usability to sketch a field of inquiry uniting the most ancient knowledge with emergent media, requiring constant revisiting and revising of research methods. Revision requires reengagement and reconceptualization. The opening chapter by Sullivan articulates this process as a tripartite waltz—beckon, encounter, and experience—and argues for the need for supple, plastic methods that do not become blind in their rigidity. While the book presents foundations and theories in the opening, these four chapters are inspirational and contextualizing rather than prescriptive and limiting. Similarly, the second part presents six methodological essays that situate knowledge-making practices fluid enough to respond meaningfully to the ebbs and flows of designing to support meaningful human experience patterned with enough recognizable repeating elements to inform future meaning making. Finally, the third part offers a wide variety of cases of experience architecture in action, presented to inspire practitioners and researchers to take on their own projects and articulate their own practices. Equipped with meaningful rhetorical preparation, the additive logic present throughout this collection (and this, plus this, also . . . ) is meant to inspire experience architects to act with reassurance and articulate new sites of research. That so many professionals and classroom teachers recognize the need for their intervention, the exigence for this collection is clear. Perhaps at some far-off date, another collection concerned with the limits and boundaries of experience architecture will be necessary, but that time is not now.

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Organization of Rhetoric and Experience Architecture Part 1 of Rhetoric and Experience Architecture presents longer field-defining essays of 6,000–8,000 words. It consists of four single-authored chapters and represents over a century of experience in rhetoric, technical communication, and user-centered design theory. The opening essays trace the development of user experience as a rhetorical concept by contrasting system-centered with user-centered design. Sullivan asserts the rhetorical dimension of user engagement as a central value of user experience architecture, while Grice articulates a bridge between workplace practice and rhetorical knowledge building. Geisler asserts key components of methodological inquiry in rhetorical experience design, while Sano-Franchini articulates a feminist ethics at the field’s core. Throughout, the first section articulates experience architecture as a rhetorical activity. Part 2 offers a variety of methodologies for doing research in experience architecture that are grounded in projects and cases. While these methods are deeply enmeshed with rhetorical practice, the focus shifts from the relationship of rhetoric to experience architecture to revealing what counts as knowledge in the field. Each of the chapters in the second section is committed to experience architecture as rhetorical inquiry, providing links to and development of the arguments presented in the opening section. While each presents examples and sites, the focus is on the doing of research, designed to allow readers to find answers to a variety of questions: Why insert further data collection here? Why insist on reflection? How do I get started? Is this the best site to conduct this research? What benefits will stakeholders accrue? Essays in the second section invite interrogation of research methods so that readers can begin building their own approaches. Friess develops a rhetorical introduction to building personas, while Howard and Christiansen push towards constructivism. Moore postulates unique characteristics of service design where citizens are encouraged to participate in decision-making. Pflugfelder returns to explicit discussion of rhetoric by contextualizing the utility of techne in the language of design studies. Mara and Mara employ ethnography to make knowledge, while Ryan returns discussion to the value of audience awareness, contextualizing thirty years of development in information design research. Finally, Ben Lauren’s articulation of Kairos as sensitive to both time and space bridges the knowledge-making methods of part two with the case studies of part three. Part 3 presents seven sites of experience architecture research, from virtual game worlds to churches, from crisis and health communication to memorials and amusement parks, in shorter descriptive chapters.

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Together, these cases reveal a rich variety of sites that exemplify the practice of experience architecture. These seven exciting examples cannot begin to exhaust the reach and appeal of the methods and perspectives but only gesture towards the rich opportunities a rhetorical approach to experience architecture supports and nurtures. Fagerjord narrates the process of filling churches across Europe with music and how these places reveal characteristics that sound designers can enhance for richer, more immersive experiences of place. Reimer traces the online community surrounding League of Legends and how an organization uses data to provide a better gaming experience for its customers. Rudy and Cassie McDaniel reveal Mozilla’s Webmaker as a site for teaching new literacy. Nostalgia, defined as bringing the past into the present, animates sites of memorialization in Kurlinkus’ chapter, while Walls and colleagues are engaged in production of activist tools, here articulating Fair & Square as an app designed to support the long search for social justice. Vie and her colleagues explore community communication built around badges earned in gaming spaces. Finally, Morris connects experience architects with Imagineers in amusement park design. Each case articulates a facet of experience architecture, describing a site or related group of sites that reveals key components of the rhetorical practice of experience architecture, thus establishing a broad range of sites for both professional practice and analytical study.

Conclusions Since we began using the phrase Experience Architecture, academics and professionals have told us of their “aha” moments: of putting work in usability together with an ecological approach to genre, information architecture, and document design to create a coherent approach to the complex work of the technical and professional communicator in emergent environments of work and play. They want to read, use, and assign this book. From these conversations, we believe the book would challenge advanced undergraduates in the growing numbers of professional and technical communication degree programs, would be core reading for masters-level professionalization programs, and regularly assigned to PhD students in writing studies, rhetoric and composition, digital humanities, and communication programs to describe the current state-of-the-art for technical and professional communication specialists, writing generalists, and writing program administrators. It is becoming more common to see the Experience Architect as a job title. More importantly, the core competencies of experience architecture are wrapped into the job responsibilities of a growing number of next-generation content and interface design positions in a widening array

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of industries. In our experience, even though the phrase experience architecture is making its way into employment materials, it is both broad enough and sufficiently theorized to support academic input from a broad range of participants. The field is a truly transdisciplinary pursuit: while interdisciplinary remixes invite participants to work together, they return to their disciplinary homes after collaboration. A trans-disciplinary pursuit promises no safety of return, and indeed, these academic origins may no longer be viable destinations as traditional disciplinary structures disappear. As academic programs focused on experience architecture emerge, participants come from numerous academic backgrounds. Similarly, faculty will emerge with varying backgrounds, from technical communication and rhetoric to social scientists trained in Internet research methods, to cognitive psychologists, design anthropologists, arts and design, and computer science. More importantly, however, experience architecture testifies to the rich variety of approaches as well as the diversity of epistemologies that ground meaning-making in emergent disciplinary formations. Experience architecture represents the breadth of current practice as invitation and inspiration for further discussion and development. While an emergent field needs to establish best practices, it also must learn from as wide a variety of practice and ways of knowing as possible, to inform the important discussion of boundaries, of reach, and of expansion. That is, as a community of interested participants, we first have to understand the wide variety of methods we use to make meaning and to establish credibility, which is why we insist that this emergent practice of experience architecture is necessarily wedded to the ancient study of rhetoric as we establish shared community practices.

References Burdick, A. (2012). Digital humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ehses, H., & Luptin, E. (1988). Design papers 5: Rhetorical handbook. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selber, S. A. (2013). Solving problems in technical communication. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kaufer, D. S., and Butler, B. S. (1996). Rhetoric and the arts of design. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Margolin, V. (1989). Design discourse: History, theory, criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Norman, D. A. (1998). The invisible computer: Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

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Norman, D.(2013). The design of everyday things (Revised and expanded edition). New York, New York: Basic Books. Potts, Liza. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. ATTW/Routledge Book Series in Technical and Professional Communication. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Ridolfo, J., & Hart-Davidson, W. (2015). Rhetoric and the digital humanities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Scott, J. B., Bernadette, L., and Katherine V. W. (2006). Critical power tools: Technical communication and cultural studies. SUNY Series, Studies in Scientific and Technical Communication. Albany: State University of New York Press. Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Tomlin, C. (2012). An interview with Whitney Quesenbery. Useful Usability. Retrieved from http://www.usefulusability.com/whitney-quesenberyinterview/.

Part 1: Foundations and Theories

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2 Beckon, Encounter, Experience: The Danger of Control and the Promise of Encounters in the Study of User Experience Patricia Sullivan

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his chapter confronts the paradox of control in research as it addresses user experiences that reside at the center of the rhetorical work done as a component of experience architecture. While the chapter acknowledges the importance of control for all species of research, it interrogates ways that a lack of balance between openness and control can hamper researchers’ understanding users’ experiences. The chapter recounts how key control mechanisms operate to sort experience into domains; identify roles users play; establish and maintain boundaries; and mine themes, metaphors, and analogies in order to model how a user’s experiences move and unfold. The chapter also acknowledges that some control is valuable to user research, but argues a better balance between control and open discovery can be achieved by focusing on doing, watching, logging, and reflecting. It also offers reasons why more loosely controlled encounters are needed in user experience architecture: online environments yield expanding types of user experiences, offer broader access to otherness, leverage the Internet’s ability to make the global local, and foster unexpected insights that may accompany more openness to encounters. In the Odyssey, Sirens’ voices beckoned sailors to wreck their ships on a rocky shore. Beauty led to danger and death. What a heady encounter. Odysseus, who fancied himself so clever that he could experience encounters without enduring their potential downsides, had his men lash him to the mast and block their ears. That way he could hear and enjoy but none of his men would respond to those dangerous songs and crash the ship on the rocks. Did he encounter the Sirens and voyeur their songs or sidestep a real encounter through the measures of control he enacted? My initial response is that his tale scaffolded a faux encounter, one reminiscent of the sort of encounters qualitative researchers sometimes structure into their research designs. In this chapter, I argue that encounters important to understanding user experiences are increasingly being controlled by research “rules” (in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method studies) that seek to “control” research moves in ways that restrict “beckoning” behaviors and to “lock down” encounters in ways the researcher can imagine before having any encounter or experience. If users’ experiences are to drive design, encounters

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should be less safe than our methods plan them to be. I begin by asserting that “encounter” is a routine user experience that runs counter to most researchers’ practices, even ethnographers, because it abandons both efforts to control a situation or event under scrutiny and also to shape researchers’ actions in ways that make them recognizable as research. Encountering users’ experiences without controlling them opens us to hearing/seeing beyond what we expect, beckons us to the new or unexpected, and in opening the events to others’ views and actions, we open new ways to experience. Exerting research control is not inherently problematic; sometimes it is needed. Why do efforts to control user research matter to user experience (UX)? One of the reasons it matters is that broadening our knowledge of user experiences enriches our abilities to understand users, use, and experience in ways that positively impact our capacities to design, develop, and refine the sorts of products, environments, and interactions that support users and their needs. When usability started in the 1980s (roughly at the time of the rise of personal computing—see Weiser, 1991; Dieli, 1989; and Ramey, 1989), it used the fact that independent labs’ “ease of use” scores and HCI’s interest in reducing interface errors to fuel its establishment. Its acceptance in personal computing was usually related to saving money. I was shown an internal proposal in 1987 that argued for increased testing on the basis that testing would take 10% of the resources that engineering enough new features would require to meet a product’s independent lab score for GAO (using Government Accounting Office purchasing standards). At this time feature creep was expected in software development, so when this company emphasized increasing its “ease of use” scores in order to meet the government’s minimum requirements for purchase, it chose frugality over features to grow its market share. In choosing frugality, it also invested in a dimension of usability that reduced errors for beginning users. In addition, decisions such as this one prescribed that improving “ease of use” is integral to testing connected to users and use. Thus, it is little surprise that error reduction opened a door to including users and their experiences at the same time as it limited the study of experience to activities that would improve “ease of use” scores. Soon usability had become anxious in its efforts to advocate for users (particularly end users), to legitimate its findings by making them as scientific as possible. This move prompted them to emphasize research controls for studies of user behavior and human-machine interaction. At times they even retreated to referring to the work only as ergonomic testing, interface testing, interface-error reduction, or user testing. I am not saying that controlled research we connect with science is problematic; on the contrary, I find it needed. I am proud of the work these testers

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have contributed to reducing errors in products, to modeling better interactions, and to forging sounder paths for navigating virtual spaces. What troubles me is a lack of space for research that proceeds along a path that is more open to the voice of another. Such openness to otherness is also needed perhaps even more today than it was in the past. I have long contended (Sullivan, 1989) that to achieve a deeper, wider, and fuller understanding of users’ interactions with built environments/products (so that we can better design and build them) we must be willing to let the other speak to us, move us, be free to disagree with us, and perhaps even that we should chance such encounters that might toss us onto the rocks. But two kinds of related actions have limited the spread and influence of encounters thus far—a tendency to quickly cordon user experiences into rigid domains and researchers’ investment in over-controlling user-experience encounters. Of course, encounters have not always been so underwhelming in their contributions. “Encounter” drew attention years ago (1987) in the opening of Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions. An ethnographer working at Xerox PARC, Suchman had studied the interface of an advanced copying machine by sitting in a break room and watching workers interact with the machine in order to copy and collate documents. Somehow, as ethnographers often do, Suchman riffed a cultural turn and presented the workers’ journeys as competing philosophies of oceanic navigation, pitting European navigators against the Trukese (a Pacific Islander group). In her metaphor-driven example, the Europeans relied upon setting a goal before they started their journey, then they planned a route to meet that goal, while the Trukese set sail and responded to whatever situation arose. These diametrically opposed approaches to navigation were meant to illustrate that interactivity had more than one direction (and set of moves) that it might profitably work. Yet, usability, user testing, technology-product design, and human factors workers of the time did not embrace the situation-driven navigation and interface work Suchman ascribed to the Trukese; instead they focused, in a goalbased way, on eliminating user and machine errors. From Suchman’s perspective, these sailors encountered navigation (and sailing) in dramatically different ways—so differently that their problems could not be mapped into the same space. She wanted usability to make space to encounter and learn from the Trukese. But perhaps the timing of her insight was not right. As I indicated earlier, goal-based or error-driven work was, and still is needed, but it also has been paint-by-numbers enough to open a door for the kinds of criticism that McCullough (2004) delivered as he avowed that interface designers have focused on mechanical usability and

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first-time use in the past, and that such activity must give way to interaction design that is more situated: ”Today we can no longer assume that mechanical efficiency is the root of usability, that more features will mean better technology, or that separately engineered devices will aggregate into anything like optimal wholes . . . We need to advance the science of computer-human-interface into a culture of situated interaction design.” (p. 22) Positions such as those voiced by McCullough fuel the rise of interaction design because they attack the older views of user experiences embedded in HCI as a science (focused on typical work or home-use tasks, targeted users who would buy/use the program in the test, test a limited time frame—usually initial use, and focus on identifying interface errors and/or navigation problems). Today, with the rise of the Internet and social and mobile computing environments, emerging user experience urges us to revisit how encounters may shape us and our interactivity.

How/Why UX Has Expanded Over the past two decades, the ways that users interface with products and processes have expanded to include devices and other things, and the expansion has called for a base of research that addresses the richness of experience as surely as it checks the correctness of user actions and interface responses. That expansion, which has been fueled by Internet use, social media, cloud computing, proximity mobile gaming, streaming video/audio/animation, ubiquitous environments, and mobile computing (to name some of the components of new and emerging user experiences), proffers richer and more natural experiences than were typical in most of the personal computing era. It beckons us to look more deeply into user experiences and to seek new ways to establish fuller portraits of how user experience is accumulated, understood, managed, and (when necessary) reshaped. It also inflects what it means to work as a technical communicator/UX designer. A recent blog post in UX Designer Magazine stated this rather pointedly: Here’s the good news: designers are really far from being obsolete. Quite to the contrary, you can see that the demand for UX designers is still on the rise, and everyone seems to be redesigning their digital products these days. . . . It’s time for us to grow up, because we have been part of the problem: we have helped to give birth to self-righteous web pages that assume they deserve to be watched and awarded just for the time we invested in crafting them. Now more than ever, in a world flooded with cognitive noise, the world needs simple, intelligent, integrated

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ecosystems of information. The sooner designers embrace this need, the better prepared we’ll be for the future. (Nouvel, 2015) Some of our user experiences are routine and cumulative, while others shape our emerging thinking and/or actions, and still others slow us down and force us to reflect (often because they contradict other areas of our experience and surface what Festinger called a “felt difficulty” that serves as an indicator of cognitive dissonance). The literature describing and investigating user experience provides a glimpse of how widely user experience is/has expanding/expanded. As July 2015 began, a search for articles in First Monday addressing “user experience” yielded 216 relatively recent ones that featured user experiences (remember, users are people and things) as such agents as: blind transit riders, tweeters, stadiums as studios, urban churches, cybercafes, smart phones, grindrs, four squarers, facebookers, wikipedia makers and users, piracy victims, digital objects, cyber volunteers, 3D printers, Chinese gold farmers, health information, devotees of Reddit, e-commerce initiators, napsterers, bloggers, etc. The variety of encounters they inferred far outstripped the possibilities for users’ domains and actions that were available in the early days of usability, which suggests even greater need for more emphasis on encounters in our study of user experience. The variety of users, their actions, and their addressed experiences in First Monday (a popular but still serious publication) alert us that studying user experience welcomes us once again to James West and Artemus Gordon’s Wild, Wild West. A 1960s steampunk television classic, Wild, Wild West followed the exploits of secret service agents charged with protecting President Grant, and the series’ creator, Michael Garrison, thought of the series as a kind of James Bond on horseback. Its plots usually included trains, horses, bad guys, damsels in distress, gunfire, cleverness, spying, gadgetry, and happy endings (or at least would allow West to win the day). But what the show really did was supply a kind of liminal western that contradicted Gunsmoke (had you been forced to compare them) at the same time as it quietly provided a different experience of the US West in the nineteenth century. It expanded and deepened viewers’ experiences of the period. The same sort of thing is happening in user experience today. Not only are our direct experiences expanding through our interactions with new environments, social configurations, products, people, and things, they also are expanding through indirect experiences, voyeurisms, dreams, and encounters. As it turns out, there is much more for user experience researchers to study than there has been in the past. So it comes as little surprise that growth in scope and richness for user experience encourages researchers to seek more procedural control over how that experience is revealed through their studies.

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The Control Paradox in the Qualitative Study of User Experience Researchers use control (or at least restraint) in their studies so that they can argue, if needed, that their work has been done in systematic ways that could be replicated with a chance of achieving similar results. Haswell (2006) stated this clearly in his widely cited discussion of writing research; he argued that studies, even qualitative ones, should be RAD (replicable, aggregable, and data-driven) in design, deployment, and make up. Each of his three common characteristics for studies imbricate control, and as he describes qualitative studies that meet his RAD classification, Haswell emphasizes these studies’ “systematic” qualities of gathering, sorting, and disciplining information (his examples cover genre, process, and discourse use), which also emphasizes that these studies embrace measures that control the research enough that it can be “replicated” (or repeated). Though his main argument focuses on how CCCC and NCTE have attacked and denigrated empirical research, more important for our purposes is that Haswell recognizes that qualitative research exercises control when it is at work. This emphasis on control functions paradoxically for many because they see the function of qualitative research primarily as finding and naming new issues (Lauer & Asher, 1988) or as narrating stories (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2008). Recently my husband reminded me of an experience he had with a track-and-field season highlight video program. They wanted him to include some footage of one of their athletes winning a heat at the Penn Relays in their banquet highlight tape. Technically it messed up their highlights in several ways—it was shaky footage, taken from hundreds of yards away, and lacking visually clear markers of where they were or what was happening— and it sat counter to his clips that sported a professional quality. But because they were adamant, he included the footage, and the track team cheered when it came up on the reel because they knew what it was, and they filled in the missing information that the poor video quality removed. He realized that their experiences and values led them to see beyond the projected images and to their memories of the event. Their experiences let them see differently than he did. If he had structured the video according to his professional values, it would have been more understandable to outsiders and been a more appropriate tape to archive their athletic achievements for posterity. He and other video professionals presumed that omitting the “flawed” footage would make a more successful communication design, but paradoxically, the experiences that the team valued made the “professionally flawed” tape perfect for them and their experience. In the above video example we notice that the video maker’s values so differed from those of his audience’s that controlling the video’s quality

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from his professional perspective would have precluded or erased an essential component of the target audience’s experience, and so if the video maker was also studying those users’ experience, he/she often would find that this video called forth a different experience for the track team members than it did for the maker-now-researcher because their “valuing eye” was calibrated differently (in this case with more emotion) than he expected it to be. What counted as representative or good did not align between maker (or researcher or designer) and audience (or user). And since the researcher normally controls all of the components and procedures of a study, even the airing of values, a study of making and using this video would have threatened to impoverish how fully the research understood the user’s experience.

Mechanisms That Maintain Control While the tracing of and the voicing of contrasting values is one way to expand our understandings of how control can be used in user experience research, a number of other control mechanisms are often deployed to: 1) sort experience into domains, 2) identify and interrogate roles users play, 3) establish and maintain boundaries, and 4) mine themes, metaphors, and analogies that assist in modeling how an experience moves and unfolds. In the designs we build for research we also use data collection methods, analytic tools, and methodological checks that systematize our work and help us maintain control of the findings. (1) Sort User Experience into Neat Domains

Events that produce, support, cache, or clarify user experience can seem workaday or even innocuous (and surely not fodder for most First Monday articles). Take an experience had by Hannah, a design engineer working remotely for a week while on a business trip. Her trouble starts when the WIFI connection drops. She has been using local WIFI to connect to the company network in order to access and download data from tests she has previously run on her office machine. She does this frequently at night and has never had trouble at her home near the plant. But now in another city, she suddenly has her portal shut down. A call to IT informs her that there is a patch, but it will not work on her machine as her security protocols are too constricting. The IT guy is intrigued because the company is invested in protecting her production, and so he works with her, but without total success. A day of frustration and diminished work is anticipated by Hannah, and achieved. We can quickly label Hannah’s user experience a work experience, and if we were studying work we may examine it further. But if we are seeking experiences that help us understand social media, we are unlikely to

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glance its way again. We won’t tap into her frustration or track her attempts to name and solve different problems or query her about how this incident maps onto other work experiences. Further, work stories give little value to an ordinary but unique experience; it is likely that a story such as this one would not be glanced at again. Once placed in the domain of work and also classified as work-aday but unique, Hannah’s account will not likely be referenced again because it will be deemed too isolated from typical work problems. While there is a branch of Organizational Studies that investigates sensemaking in organizations (following the work of Weick, 2010, which studies thorny workplace problems starting with the Bhopal disaster in the 1980s and using storytelling as a way to fuel sensemaking), most usability research has been undertaken to enlighten scholars how user experience operates by focusing on debugging oft-used process for workers at work. The literature therefore focuses on routine “on site” experiences rather than embracing an isolated user experience (high tech, high security remotely) that may—or may not— soon be the norm. Like the Internet itself, our user experiences are sometimes like a time machine in a stagecoach. If the domain of work is used to sort user experience, Table 1 relates some of the consequences. Of particular interest historically, the work domain has sustained the most scrutiny during the usability era, in part because it can be linked to actual tasks that workers need to perform daily. So, from early years of user studies, we have recognized users sometimes seem zany, and that realization has pushed us to seek means for controlling users’ actions in studies. We usually strive to strip out complexity and uncertainties attending actions and change. Computing cultures, with their focus on systems, have often seen users as problems, as error machines, as weak links, or as ergonomic challenges and have asked: how do we design to take into account human limitations? Regardless of motive, when an investigation of user experience is tied to work, the study focuses on reducing work-related error (Can X be done faster, or with fewer people, or with fewer mistakes?) or on learning to be more efficient (Can this revised process make typical tasks faster or easier for those who typically perform it?) (see Ehn, 1988; Bødker, 1991; Suchman, 1991; the journals Computer Support for Cooperative Work; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics; Journal for Computer Human Interaction; and the conference proceedings for Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference). Work studies have not entertained the study of encounters. Much of this work has presumed that workers act in highly predictable ways when actually “People (especially when they are learning) act in the darnedest ways.” Consider the classic tale of IBM’s first user manual for

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their personal computer, hand-written for the purposes of testing in 1980. That machine came with a 5 1⁄4 inch floppy disk that encased a gooey storage medium in a black plastic cover, with further data safety provided by storing the disk in a Mylar sleeve. Early in the manual, users were told to remove the disk from its sleeve and insert it into the computer. I bet you can guess what happened, and how it horrified the team. Almost every user pried apart the plastic and inserted the gooey center into the computer. Wow, that was so wrong-headed. Yet, from a certain perspective it made sense. Users acted in ways that both followed instructions and made sense to them, and their actions sometimes yielded unfortunate consequences. In the case of that early manual, placing the gooey medium into the drive broke the machine. This truth about users’ words and actions encourages us when we study to seek control—to minimize uncertainties when work cultures call for new kinds of technologies that better support the changes that are desired. This is a main reason that a focus on work helps to perfect interfaces or learn processes but does not tell us much about the emerging user experiences that UX wants to study. Table 1: User Experience Sorted by Domain Domain of Experience

Type of Experience

Name Used

Techniques

Culture

Work

routine (workaday)

Usability

user testing

western; goal-driven; knowledge making

edutainment/ socialty

Creative

design; interactive design; ubi comp

product design; info architecture

aesthetic

public culture

thorny probs

expert problem solving

Heuristics

built

life events, family, & consumption

out of box

situational or experiential

tune emotions

event driven; colonial/tribal

(2) Identify Roles Played

Roles adhere both to researchers and the researched in qualitative work, as the researchers in participant studies negotiate their roles vis-a-vis their participants (Pitman & Maxwell, 1992), and participants’ actions and identifications map onto dramatic roles they assume and enact. Identification of and analysis of the roles users play in the dramas that their experience provides (or suggests is possible) have functioned as mainstays for quali-

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tative studies. You find Goffman discussing role-playing frequently in his methodological treatises (in part because his take on sociology stresses interaction and dramaturgy). In Frame Analysis (1986), Goffman explains both the operation of roles and their connection to drama in this way: The theatre seems to provide—at least in Western society—an ideal version of a basic conceptual distinction, that between a performer or individual actor who appears on stage and the part or character he assumes whilst employed thereon. . . . In thinking about unstaged, actual social life, theatrical imagery seems to guide us toward a distinction between an individual or person and a capacity, namely, a specialized function which the person may perform during a given series of occasions. A simple matter. We say that John Smith is a good plumber, bad father, loyal friend, and so forth. If we sense a difference between what a Gielgud does on stage and what a Smith does in his shop (or with his family or at a political rally), we can express it by saying that Hamlet’s jabbing away is not real, is make-believe, but that a repaired pipe (or a vote cast) is. We use the same word, “role,” to cover both onstage and offstage activity and apparently find no difficulty in understanding whether a real role is in question or the mere stage presentation of one. (p. 128) By linking the dramatic uses of roles with the everyday (and multiple) uses of them, Goffman helps to surface their flexibility as central analytic moves in research. Years later, Laurel, a luminary in interface design and a software/interaction designer, has emphasized the importance of drama in interaction. Her Computers as Theatre (1991/2013) broadened the notion of roles past people and constructed characters played in a drama (though they were still included) to include the roles of time, change, and continuing encounter in interactivity. As she applies this idea to users and their experience, Laurel defines users as acting like audience members who are able to have a greater influence on the unfolding action than simply the fine-tuning provided by conventional audience response. [Take] . . . interactive fantasy . . . The user of such a system . . . is like an audience member who can march up onto the stage and become a character, shoving the action around by what he says and does in that role. (p. 26) Laurel is viewing the user not as a participant in a metaphor she labels “theatre” but as an actant in scenarios that conceptualize human-computer interaction itself. (p. 28) Laurel goes on to argue that users have the

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option to move along a continuum of participation and possible personas in relation to their roles. In making such a point, her words could be interpreted as ceding control to the researchers by allowing their analysis to assign one or more roles to their users. (3) Establish, Bridge, and/or Defend the Boundaries of User Experience

Another pivot point for researcher control is the place or environment that bounds users’ experiences. In addition to describing and interrogating a culture’s milieu, several tools are available to control how place fits into (or is dismissed as a contributor to) a user experience event or interaction. A prime tool for environmental work is boundary work. While many work boundaries, not all researchers approach the boundary work in the same way. Star, for example, whose study of the founding history of California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Star & Greisemer, 1989) introduced (and named) boundary objects as liminal objects or concepts that had enough shared meaning that these boundary objects can be acted upon even in instances that include considerable disagreement among collaborators. One boundary object Star and Greisemer made focal to their analysis was the field dressing procedures for specimens gathered for the museum’s collection. Because scientists, students, amateur naturalists, natives, farmers, and even trappers assembled these specimens and because these specimens also had to be field dressed in widely diversified climatic conditions, the instructions needed to include both common elements and room for process variation. The boundary objects needed to accommodate similarity and difference at the same time, a characteristic fundamental to boundary objects. In another, more politicized construction of boundaries, Sibley (1995) focuses attention on the mapping of boundaries that can work in institutions and physical sites to develop “zones of ambiguity” that also act in liminal ways to identify sites that overlap, as well as drawing boundaries once they are stable and policing the boundaries that are subject to multiple ownership claims. Depicting the overlapping (and often contested) zones via Venn diagrams, Sibley is able to portray situations in which multiple groups claim the same territory, and then, when one successfully controls the space, they must figure out how to police the space they claimed. At times, Sibley’s work is reminiscent of military strategic planning even though his motives seem descriptive more surely than they seem invasive. Another practice, “boundary spanning,” was coined by Schensul et al (1981) and made popular among educational ethnographers by Goetz and LeCompte (1984). It approaches boundaries not from seeking to find and describe or define them but by assuming they come along with environments, places, events, objects, and cultures and then working to bridge

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or dismantle them. “Boundary spanning,” write Goetz and LeCompte, “in some sense is similar to cultural brokering, insofar as ethnographers often act as intermediaries or go-betweens for several groups, each of whose actions and motivations need to be explained to the other” (p. 99). Boundary spanning is enacted through friendship moves made by the researcher who shares, listens, makes friends, and builds understanding. Such boundary spanning actions have long been embedded in ethnographic anthropology, and ethical interactions understood as the responsibility of the researcher. Ethical and logistical challenges of blurring boundaries are often undertaken to yield richer data. Further, initiating and sustaining richer discussion of cultural boundaries yields rich results, and rewards researchers who accept additional responsibility—with complexity enters the specters of control that figure prominently into how a group is portrayed in the final reporting of the research. Boundary work has successfully interrogated the edges of places and things, alert to disagreements among participants that disclose disharmony or disagreement among their views, activities, allegiances, or practices. By exposing such edges, boundary work has become more certain about the differences it sketches, more assertive about the environments it describes, and more in control of the boundaries it spans. Such surety helps in the categorization and management of novel user experience because boundary work seeks similarity and difference. Thus, when unusual activities accompany new user experience, the boundary researchers pose key categorical questions: Have I ever experienced something even remotely like this? Could I say this is an X? Or acts like a Y? And so on. (4) Analyze Themes and Metaphors that can Explain Interviews and Events

Themes and metaphors offer even more tools for use by qualitative researchers with their open coding of data (usually interviews or observation), and while many researchers see the identification of, systematic defense of, and even the reliability checks for coding as instruments of control, the creative use of themes and metaphors can help build new understandings of data, particularly UX data. Such coding of themes and metaphors includes semiotic analytic coding of the sort cultural studies does. Take Starosielski’s (2015) recent book Undersea Network (it investigates undersea cables that carry transoceanic data and missives) as an example. Though she claims to have assembled the book through travel and interviews, most of her analysis uses semiotic parsing of text, photos, and movies to build the themes of connection, transmission, disruption, and nodal narratives that she argues have been put in place over the years (and this is standard for cultural studies research). The

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arc she thematizes places narratives of connection (they often employ heroic vision or monetary support as keys to success where the politics might be linked to establishing global communication that follows along in the footsteps of the telegraph) at the center of early stories. In the second political era (roughly corresponding to the Cold War), narratives of disruption accompany cable problems and often are examined both for technical and political motives, prompting questions like: Can we link this cable’s being cut to fishing nets or was it targeted? Today’s political era has transitioned from nation states involving themselves in global communication to terrorists targeting global data, the data has morphed into internet data (undersea cables transmit 99% of transoceanic data), and narratives of transmission tend to lead to hiddenness rather than transparency because of the potential to disrupt the communication network. Starosielski ultimately argues that nodal discourse needs to be developed in order to gather the public participation needed to make this network less hidden and more transparent, and her argument is controlled through her use of themes and narrative analysis even though it does not disclose its procedures (humanities-based research normally hides its methods unless it is newer feminist work; see, for example, Hemmings, 2011). (5) Control Other Moves that May Creep into User Experience Studies

Control moves in quantitative research are assumed to be standardized and enforced by statistical analysis, but control moves also enforce more hidden standards in qualitative work, and in these studies they can block insights that are presumed to be the strength of case, ethnographic, and field studies. Take sampling as an example. There are data tables to guide sampling logic and procedures in survey work, but case studies build and deploy a logic for the number and type of informants they interview and sometimes also tighten control measures by randomly sampling a section of an interview transcript, coding that section, and then having the coding checked for reliability by another researcher. Such moves cinch up the control exerted by the researcher over the data that has been gathered by interviewing (or observing) the participants. In this way, discussing the qualitative work as listening (interview) or watching (observation) makes the data sound open, and treating it as selected through random sampling and checked for reliability makes it sound scientifically controlled. As qualitative research increases in status and use it systematically cedes more and more decisions about how to proceed to its research community, perhaps not fully realizing that along with the decisions come a control over the process that renders it more tight, predictable, and receptive to control by researchers and their methods of action. Such systema-

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ticity, often linked to a study’s demonstration of rigor or even its credibility (which is qualitative research’s version of arguments for validity), places more and more responsibility on the qualitative researcher to demonstrate control over the design and procedures of a study. Such control creep undermines some of the classic justifications given in response to why we should conduct qualitative research, namely to gather stories that we otherwise would miss or to discover themes, variables, and research questions in areas that are mysterious, new, or under-investigated. With regard to the study of user experience this work is seductive and troubling, if not downright dangerous, because it threatens to crowd the more open versions of qualitative study—ones that “take in” or “celebrate” new experiences—out of the realm of serious study, claiming such work is scattered or uncontrollable, or even not needed. In response to such potential danger, I suggest that when we are studying user experience that we be(come) more open to study of encounters. Opening up to Encounter(s)

Viewing user experience as an insider is difficult for researchers, as researchers have always struggled to convey “the other” in an accurate, rich, and empathetic way. Geertz, one of the most esteemed anthropological theorists of the other, discusses this problem as he is pondering empathy. In the third chapter of Local Knowledge, Geertz (1983) interrogates why it is important for an anthropologist to seek and represent a native’s point of view. He uses Malinowski’s Diary (which was published posthumously) to point out that Malinowski did not seek or honor native perspectives. Of course, there was a squabble when Malinowski’s Diary was published, and Geertz weighs in by saying, “The issue the Diary presents . . . is not moral . . . The issue is epistemological. If we are going to cling—as in my opinion, we must—to the injunction to see things from the native’s point of view, where are we when we can no longer claim some unique form of psychological closeness, a sort of transcultural identification, with our subjects? What happens to verstehen when Einfühlung disappears?” (p. 56). What indeed happens to our understanding when our ability to empathize disappears (or is materially reduced)? Geertz goes on to use his extended cultural encounters with three native groups from Morocco, Bali, and Java, taking care to point out their differing points of view and senses of themselves, their cultures, their experiences, and what gives them sustenance (with loose threads of unresolved differences between researcher and natives dangling still). Important to his accounting is an acceptance of the cracks and spaces that could not be fit into neat categories, differences that made the researcher and native values differ.

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While Geertz and most other ethnographers attribute cultural difference to point of view and values, there also are differences in experience that come into play when we add contemporary user experience to the mix of potential differences across generations and global cultures. Yes, “encounter” has not remained static in its meaning(s) (see Willis et al, 2002), particularly when we think of it in the ecology of user experience: emerging technologies make possible virtual encounters, virtual interactions enable encounters without physical presence, and virtual experiences nudge those once F2F encounters into new spaces. More recently, Butler (2001) reminds us that the unified subjects that Geertz and other anthropologists tended to presume to be revealed through F2F encounters are actually fractured, partial, and multiple. Using the work of feminists, particularly those who are feminists of color, she sketches and interrogates the ways that encounters no longer always indicate that there are unified groups that form a “we” or even a subject that makes a unified “me” or “I.” Instead, they offer evidence that “feminists as well must ask whether the ‘representation’ of the poor, the indigenous, and the radically disenfranchised within academia is a patronizing and colonizing effort, or whether it seeks to avow the conditions of translation that make representation possible: to avow the power and privilege of the intellectual along with the links in history and culture which make an encounter between poverty, for instance, and academic writing possible” (p. 87). Butler emphasizes this point by adding Cavarero’s (2000) more poetic phrasing, “No matter how much you are similar and consonant . . . your story is never my story. . . . . I still do not recognize myself in you and, even less in the collective we” (p. 92). And adding the new range of encounters made possible by emerging technologies to the partial possibilities of persons’ identities, it is not surprising that the possibilities for encounters are no longer straightforward. Encounters in Today’s Users’ Experience

When researchers are open to encounters, they expose user experiences more often than they control them. Techniques such as thick description, open representation without data reduction, exchange of and honoring of stories, and exchanges/gifting have been traditionally used by ethnographers to gather and present encounters with others who are unlike the researchers—and presumably the rest of us. New and emerging technologies have expanded our interest in encounters past the ecologies of other societies, social, personal, and political identities. Earlier in this chapter, I listed examples of user experiences that were supported by emerging technologies and studied in First Monday. These technologies have expanded into digital/

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virtual spaces that support encounters, interactions, interfaces, infrastructures, and so on. Figure 1 identifies techniques used with encounters and sorts them based on how much control they exercise in the collection of or analysis of the data related to the encounters. A story, for example, evidences less researcher control than an open interview (which can go either way, as liminal categories do) and both are more open (and less under the researcher’s controlling eye) than a credibility audit. Why is it important to open UX to research encounters, regardless of the danger posed to the research’s credibility? For the respect of others. For the creative possibilities it offers. For the new questions it harvests. Notice that when mapped in Figure 2, many of the studies try to exercise control over the users, their experiences, and any encounters that are studied. More work is needed in the general area where we see Ito’s work on anime videos. I’m not certain that achieving analogous work is easy, or always appropriate, but it can draw on indigenous research tools and on new technological data recording tools as well, to update some anthropological ones already in place. In a recent discussion of how to do research in a native way, Chilisea (2012) emphasizes how colonial assumptions and politics show up in inclusive ways in the research methods that researchers from indigenous cultures use. Storytelling and place-based techniques, which are oft used by indigenous researchers, both of which help these researchers give respect to others, urge her to be careful to recognize that “The story teaches against discrimination . . . [and that] the person is inevitably placed in relationship, through mutual friends or through knowledge, with certain landmarks and events. The researcher becomes part of circles of relations that are connected to one another and to which the researcher is also accountable.” (p. 113) Chilisea goes on to detail some of the relationship circles she examines, and in addition to relationships with people, these circles include relations with the environment/land, the cosmos, spirituality, and knowledge making. Important to the contrast is the point Chilisea quietly makes that relationships can encircle the edges we have constructed between researcher control and encounters with the researched. Circles and their relationships lead to deep and unanticipated insights that tight control misses (or obscures). These insights are important to research that emphasizes encounters with others (people, places, and things). Let me detail this point using examples of encounters (real or potential) with emerging technologies.

Figure 1: Types of Analysis for Encounters

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Figure 2: How Some Studies of New/Emerging User Experiences Balance Control and Encounter (1) New Projects Reveal New User Experiences

Life-logging software, which is built through databases that store and organize multimedia relating to a person’s life experience, aims to record parts (or even all) of your life using digital media. Inspired by Bush’s visionary “As We May Think” (1945), and using hardware and software that have matured over the past decade, not to mention becoming more affordable to pursue, life logging is increasingly popular (and diverse). While there are a number of alternative products to pursue this activity, the most notorious is My Lifebits, developed and tested by Gemmell and Bell. In their article with Luedens (2006), they argue that the next era of computing “is one in which PCs go beyond typewriters, calculators, and communication devices to capture, store, organize, and present a personal life-time archive that expands to include multimedia (images, video, sound) and then goes even further . . . No matter how many tools we add to this project, there always seems to be an inexhaustible backlog of new capabilities to add, and new questions to answer . . . MyLifeBits . . . has established a new benchmark for

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what we believe future personal computers must be.” (p. 95) Life logging allows users to interact with recorded events and memories so that everyone can establish denser and more accurate memory trails for their lives, and given our interest in encounters, it makes possible encounters with your former selves. Another quite different project, one that provides Wi-Fi infrastructure for poor households in urban neighborhoods, is underway with the cooperation and support of some urban churches that place wireless nodes in their bell towers. “The equipment is not noticeable. Having a wireless node in the bell tower hasn’t changed how I think of the space,” says Pastor Matthew Bode. He goes on to say, “Churches in their best moments are concerned about justice and access to resources. Any project, be it Wi-Fi or digital or some other project that allows people to have more access to resources that can help them move up in their life, the church should be involved.” (Byrum & Breitbart, 2015) Even though the network is not widely used yet, Pastor Bode and others are willing to host equipment and donate bandwidth for use by the community, which demonstrates how important the ability to connect to the Internet is seen to be. (2) New Technologies Open up New Kinds of Encounters

Many developers interested in ubiquitous computing are exploring location-based gaming in prototype and commercially available forms. Often the prototypes are researched to identify the types of experiences that will be most satisfying or “fun” to players. In Road Rager, for example, three types of rage actions are possible, Electro squeezer, which is easy to use; the Magic wand, which was hard to use; and Sludge thrower, which is harder than the Electro squeezer but “generally considered as the most fun to use.” (p. 38) (Brunnberg, 2004) At other times the experiences will be probed for how they affect or morph social interactions, as did Licoppe’s investigation of timid encounters among strangers who aim to play Dragon Quest 9, which includes a proximity mode of 20–30 meters; they are strangers to each other but plan to play it in a mall’s food court. Ultimately their plans do not work because they do not meet and are too timid to play without personal introduction. Baba sums up the missed play this way, “I have seen someone who might have looked like Rick-san, but I was not brave enough to go and greet you. I would like to play again another time.” (p. 2766) Licoppe calls this move timid because Baba refuses to acknowledge Rick physically, though she continues to send him electronic messages. Yes, there is encounter between Rick and Baba, but both conventions of society and those of social media

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impact the contours that are possible for these users. Would these boundaries stay in place for other users? It certainly is worth investigating. (3) As Experience Becomes More Complex, a Tightly Controlled Study May Become Less Rich

A long-lived (aka proceeding the current look and feel of the Internet) user practice comes to us as fandom. As is the case with many new interactive technologies, emotion and emotional involvement highlight fandom interactions, and assigning their activities not to the domain of “work” but to the classification of “amateur” facilitates a playfulness that is prized among players and seen as non-commercial by corporate gaming. Consider an example such as Ito’s (2010) that uses ethnography to discuss anime music videos (AMVs) produced by fandom groups in the US. He starts with an AMV history, and emphasizes the importance of encounters that happen among fans and also with the anime software and also with music. Fans are “borrowing” and “sharing” in an amateur and non–commercial mode that is synergistic with the commercial industry, but also defined in opposition to its norms and values. They embody an amateur, participatory ethic. Any financial motive on the fan side of the equation is explicitly frowned upon. Darius, an AMV maker and con organizer, describes how AMVs are a mechanism for people to start to get involved in a creative practice and a welcoming peer–based creative community: It is one way that people can educate themselves creatively and technically. . . . It’s basically people just having fun with each other and they aren’t trying to make a profit. People don’t try to sell AMVs. Nobody does that. It’s basically just giving, and oh that’s a cool show. . . . It is all a community type effort, village minded, whatever. I know that they are probably going to at some point try to regulate it. But the fact that people have the ability to create something, and do something on your own with something you have just bought, and to teach other people. That’s a wonderful power to have. (Ito, para 15) Ito’s work shows how amateur enthusiasm scaffolds learning and shares content and technological know-how in ways that pursue pleasure and play rather than financial reward. Consider a second example that studies how a shape-changing bench affects social behavior and atmospheres in-situ (Kinch et al 2014). The design team Kinch followed built a bench called coMotion that moved and watched people while they sat on it in three settings—a concert hall, an airport, and a shopping mall—presuming that the people would be surprised that the bench moved (and pushed them closer together) and expect-

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ing that the different atmospheres would shape the ways that strangers responded to the bench’s movements. They were correct that people acted differently in the spaces with the concert hall delivering the most open responses to this bench that pushed people closer to encountering each other. (4) Electronically-Supported Discourse Adds a Wider Reach

New rituals of mourning are supported by online social media sites, and this new scaffolding expands user experiences of grieving (just as analogous technology expansions extend other user experiences). Carroll and Landry (2010) examined memorials on MyDeathSpace and found people more responsive to wall posts on the dead person’s page than to obituaries. Then, when college students were asked, “In which ways would you respond to the following hypothetical situation? During a semester break, an acquaintance of yours from class dies in an accident. You learn this news through campus e-mail” (348), they were likely to contact mutual friends, visit the deceased’s Facebook page, or join a memorial group, but not to read an obituary. Collin and Landry find obituaries less appealing to young mourners who frequent social media sites and are developing other ways to mourn. Social media sites, Facebook in particular, are also contributing to other changes in expression and discursive convention. In the area of politics, for example, Marichal (2013) argues there is an “increased blurring of public and private life.” Marichal goes on to say, Facebook provides a useful space to ‘park’ feelings of alienation and disgust. Through signifiers like tone, punctuation, language or capitalization and length, users can express emotions in a way that they may not be allowed to in other venues . . . This emphasis on expressivity over deliberation is a hallmark of our modern politics. Over the last three decades we have witnessed an increased blurring of the private and the public. Candidates emphasizing their ‘one of us’ attributes but also citizens viewing the political solely through the lens of the personal. Thus, in these public rituals of memorializing and political talk, social media sites, in part because of their expanded features and affordances, are reshaping users’ actions and utterances in ways that reshape the experiences themselves. Such change surely offers potential for many more encounters.

Conclusion Why do we need to study encounters as part of user experience? One reason is found in the burgeoning of experience that is being created by the different ways that emerging technologies relate to users. We simply have more types of technological experience than we did even a few years ago (as the

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above examples and many others I could have referenced show). Another reason is that studying experience by emphasizing encounters allows us to be open to otherness, an openness that is particularly important in times of expansion. A third reason UX needs to study encounters has to do with global reach. Because the Internet almost seamlessly can connect you with other cultures and in doing so make the global local, encountering differences and being open to other rituals and ways of knowing prepares you to construct more empathetic products. Fourth, and quite importantly for researchers, opening research to encounters provides a respite from researchers’ perennial quest to control all factors and throws open the windows to experiencing new ideas, actions, values, and rituals (in place or in the making). Encounters open us to insights. It was of little surprise that the wily Odysseus tricked the Sirens out of their songs. He, like we, aimed to take in creativity and beauty without sacrificing all to do so. How we need to reconceptualize Odysseus’ experience? If a study is driven by doing, watching, logging, and reflecting, we can benefit from control without succumbing to its Siren calls. By fashioning a study that leans on encounters to be less controlling and voyeuristic than Odysseus was, and by shaping the users’ experience through talking, listening, doing, empathizing & respecting the others encountered, we build a broader understanding for user experience. Just as we should.

References Bødker, S. (1991). Through the interface: A human activity approach to user interface design. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101–108. Butler, J. (2001). Transformative encounters. Counterpoints, 242, 81–98. Byrum, G., & Breibart, J. (2015). Wireless organizing in Detroit: Churches as networked sites in under–resourced urban areas. First Monday, 18(11). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i11.4962. Carroll, B., & Landry, K. (2010). Logging on and letting out: Using online social networks to grieve and to mourn. Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society, 30(5), 341–349. Cavarero, A. (2000). Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood (P. A. Kottman, Trans). London: Routledge. Chilisa, B. (2012). Indigenous research methodologies. Los Angeles: Sage. Dieli, M. (1989). The usability process: Working with iterative design principles. Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on, 32(4), 272–278. Ehn, P. (1988). Work-oriented design of computer artifacts. Stockholm: Arbetslivscentrum.

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Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gemmell, J., Bell, G., & Lueder, R. (2006). MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything. Communications of the ACM, 49(1), 88–95. Goetz, J. P., & LeCompte, M. D. (1984). Ethnography and qualitative design in educational research. New York: Academic Press. Goffman, E. (1986). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. [Original work published 1974). Haswell, R. H. (2005). NCTE/CCCC’s recent war on scholarship. Written Communication, 22 (2), 198–223. Hemmings, C. (2011). Why stories matter: The political grammar of feminist theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ito, Mizuko. (2010). The rewards of non-commercial production: Distinctions and status in the anime music video scene. First Monday, 15(5). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/ view/2968/2528 Kinch, S., Gronvall, E., Petersen, G., Marianne, & Rasmussen, Majken Kirkegaard. (2014). Encounters on a shape-changing bench: Exploring atmospheres and social behavior in situ. 8th International Conference On Tangible, Embedded And Embodied Interaction (TEI’14), February, Munich, Ge. 233–240. Lauer, J. M., & Asher, J. W.. (1988). Composition research: Empirical designs. Oxford University Press. Laurel, B. (1991). Computers as theatre. Boston: Addison-Wesley. Licoppe, C., & Inada, Y. (2012). “Timid encounters”: A case study in the use of proximity-based mobile technologies. CHI 2012, May 5–10, Austin, TX, USA. 2759–2768. McCullough, M. (2004). Digital ground: Architecture, pervasive computing, and environmental knowing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Marichal, J. (2013). Political FaceBook groups: Micro–activism and the digital front stage. First Monday, 18(2). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i12.4653. Martin, B., & Hanington, B.. (2012). Universal methods of design: 100 ways to research complex problems, develop innovative ideas, and design effective solutions. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers. Nouvel, S.. (2015, June 8). Why web design is dead. UX Magazine. Retrieved from http://uxmag.com/articles/why-web-design-is-dead Pitman, M., & Maxwell, J. A. (1992). Qualitative approaches to evaluation: Models and methods. The handbook of qualitative research in Education. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Ramey, J. (1989). A selected bibliography: A beginner’s guide to usability testing. Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on, 32(4), 310–316.

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Schensul, J. J., Schensul, S. L., Gonzalez, M., & Caro, E. (1981). Community-based research and approaches to social change: The case of the Hispanic health council. The Generation, 12(2), 13–26. Sibley, D. (1995). Geographies of exclusion: Society and difference in the West. London: Routledge. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. Starosielski, N. (2015). The undersea network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Suchman, L. A. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, P. A. (1989). Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 32(4), 256–264. Teddlie, C., & Tashakkori, A. (2008). Foundations of mixed methods research: Integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches to the social and behavioral sciences. Los Angeles: Sage. Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American 285, 94–104. Weick, K. E. (2010). Reflections on enacted sensemaking in the Bhopal disaster. Journal of Management Studies, 47(3), 537–550. Willis, K. S., Struppek, M., Chorianopoulos, K., & Roussos, G.. (2007). Shared encounters. CHI 2007, April 28–May 3, 2007, San Jose, California. 2881–2886.

3 Experience Architecture: Drawing Principles from Life Roger Grice

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hat makes for a great user experience? Many factors, both planned and unplanned, can be part of the make-up, and their relative importance or memorability to the user can make all the difference in the world. When personal computers were relatively new, I was one of the first persons in my department to be given one. Of course, I was very happy and excited. So excited, in fact, that I started ripping boxes apart to get to the software and documentation packages that came with the computer. At the time, the software was delivered as a manual and a set of diskettes in a cardboard slipcase. Around this slipcase was a shiny, colorful label printed on stiff, glossy paper that identified the software. All of this was enclosed in clear shrink-wrap. In my eagerness to get to the software package, I pushed my hand through the shrink-wrap and swiped my hand upward to remove the shrinkwrap. But in so doing, I ran the side of my hand across the stiff, glossy paper underneath the shrink-wrap and got a very bad paper cut. Being more excited than thoughtful, I continued to unwrap the software package, getting blood all over the slipcase, the manuals, and the diskettes. Although this was more than thirty years ago, whenever I see packages of software from that era, or even think about them, I get a wicked stinging feeling in my hand— the lingering memory of my first user experience with personal-computer software. Would this problem have been caught by carefully considering user-centered design principles? Probably not. But did it affect my user experience? Most certainly yes. What could have been done to improve the experience? One approach might have been to consider not just the primary product—the software diskettes and documentation—but also everything that surrounded and supported that product. It is important to consider not only what we think users want but also what the users expect and what they actually need.

Expanding Our Focus to Accommodate Users’ Expectations and Needs If we consider the growth and evolution of how we communicate information—both technical and non-technical—to our users, we could note an evo-

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lution from technical writing to technical communication to information and interface design and development to user-centered design to user experience design. At each stage of the evolution, we can note the move from producing pieces of an experience that users must synthesize to an integrated experience designed to give users a complete, productive, and enjoyable experience. But such an experience is not likely to happen spontaneously; it must be built on a firm, systematic base—an experience architecture. If we look to the development of information for the web, there was a lot of information produced by professionals termed web developers or content developers before the concept of information architect crystalized and people were put in place not to develop content, but to develop structures, conventions, and templates to be used by developers. These information architects were responsible not only for consistent appearance, but also for consistent design, structure, and interaction patterns. Analogous to the way that building architects must design overall spaces before builders can construct individual rooms, so too did information architects develop “information spaces.” As we move from designing information to creating user experiences, we become aware of a similar need for experience architects to produce a sound and solid framework for user-experience designers. But what might they offer to the process?

Components of User-Experience Architecture There are many components to a great user experience. After a discussion of how we might define the user-experience problem space, I will focus on three of those components: • The need to build the user experience around people rather than around the product or process that those people will be using. • The need to actively engage people in their experience. • The need to shift our rhetorical strategy from logos, presenting in the seemingly most logical way, and ethos, relying on an organization’s reputation, to pathos, presenting in the way that most appeals to people and engages their senses. Following the discussion of these components, I will discuss ways that we could set forth architectural principles based on an understanding of the effectiveness of user experience based on observation and analysis of people in everyday life—both professional and personal. Before discussing these three components, we should first consider the problem space in which designers and users will be working and consider some of the finer points, the “little things,” that can go a long way in shaping the user experience.

Experience Architecture

User-Experience Architecture: Defining the Problem Space User-centered design efforts can frequently focus on a single, specific product or process, rather than considering the range of products and activities that users will engage in during the course of their product use. However, products that are individually usable may not fit together well, leaving users to fill in the gaps. Defining scenarios of use and use cases (Cockburn 2000) is one solution to developing a seamless flow of action and clearly defining the problem space in which both designers and users will function. If designed thoughtfully, scenarios and use cases can help designers ensure that users can get from one component of a process (or from one product to another) smoothly and without gaps in their thoughts and actions. However the focus of user-centered design might possibly focus more heavily on completeness and correctness rather than on the overall user experience. It is important that the use case developed ensure the seamless flow of action that is needed for a good user experience. To gain some sense of perspective, we might look to the design and construction of buildings and physical spaces. Some architected spaces have a main component, or at most a small number of major components— consider, for example, the Empire State Building in New York City. Other spaces may have surrounding, supporting features—approaches, ancillary features, etc. that provide a setting for the major components , providing aesthetic appeal and a sense of place and orientation—consider, for example, Rockefeller Center, a few blocks away from the Empire State Building. Rockefeller Center consists of a series of large office buildings, smaller shops, a central plaza, statues, and walkways (both outdoors and underground) to guide people around the complex and make their experience a pleasant and memorable one. Well architected spaces must also be considered in the context of their environments. For example, a building standing on its own may be designed to have utility and appeal, but may not have a sense of unity with its environment. Similarly, several buildings clustered together may each have individual appeal, but if no thought has been given to their inter-relationships, the buildings might not function well as a unit. (Consider, for example, the stores in a well-designed mall as opposed to a bunch of stores built at different times and by different organizations along a highway. Architects define the overall space; they provide the vision, define the scope, and provide the linkages among components, ensuring a sense of harmony and completeness while also ensuring the unity of the whole, physical space. Once the architecture is completed, building contractors can define and design individual buildings, and carpenters, masons, and elec-

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tricians can construct the rooms of the individual buildings within the overall architected space. We could follow this line of thinking to looking at the way websites and computer products are sometimes designed. Let us consider two very different possibilities. If user experience is not a major concern or focus in the early stages of product or website design, developers may focus on product design, the “what” of eventual product use, to get an early version of the product up and running. As plans evolve and designs are developed, user-centered design, the “how” of product use, may come to the forefront. Finally, at the higher, more abstract level, thought can be given to user-experience design and providing an excellent user experience, the “wow!” of product use. But if user experience is recognized as the major concern that it should be, a holistic approach to design and development can be instituted at the very start, and “user experience” can be built in from the very beginning. Just as in the 1980s, we began to preach that usability was something that needed to be built in from the very start and not something just added at the very end if there was time, so too user-experience needs to be built in to the process from the very beginning. Designers and developers can focus during the final stages on fine tuning the little details that can make the difference between an adequate user experience and a great user experience.

Sometimes It’s the Little Things That Count Attention to details—often very minor details—can make a major contribution to user experience. Shortly after the first Wal-Mart in our town opened, my wife was planning a shower for our daughter. On her first-ever trip to Wal-Mart, she found the perfect shower invitation, but there was only one package on the shelf, and she needed two packages. She asked the salesperson if there were any more available. The salesperson checked the stockroom, but there were none there either. She asked my wife if they could order her another package and took our phone number. A few days later, my wife received a call letting her know that the invitations had left the supply center and were on the way to our local store. A few days after that, my wife received a call that the package of invitations had arrived and were being held at the front desk with her name on it. It was a small purchase, probably about two dollars, but the service made a lasting impression on us. Wal-Mart probably earned thirty cents on

Experience Architecture

the transactions, but they also earned two loyal customers. It was a noteworthy user experience. 45

Figure 1. User-Experience Design, User-Centered Design, and Product Design

Build the User Experience around People (Rather than the Product or Process) As an example of the evolution from product design to user experience design, I will describe, as an example, the evolution of a course I teach at Rensselaer. For several years in the 1990s, I taught a course at Rensselaer called “Task-Oriented Communication.” The goal of the course was to teach technical communication students to focus their writing on helping users perform their work-related tasks, not to describe system or product functions. In the course, we studied audience analysis, task analysis, and environment analysis, and we produced documents to help our target audiences work effectively. This approach stood in contrast to earlier technical communication courses that focused on writing reference material and procedural descriptions that were built around product and system structures. Over time, the course evolved into a course called “User-Centered Design,” in which we gathered and analyzed user requirements as before, but instead of producing documents, we designed product interfaces and then designed and conducted usability tests to ensure that requirements were met and potential users would be satisfied. To enable the students to learn from each other’s successes and failures, I had all the teams in the class work on the same assigned project. Specifying that all groups work on the

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same project made for fruitful and productive discussions in class, but inclass presentations became repetitive—well-designed projects tended to be very similar. As the course evolved, I had students focus on developing user personas, as described, for example, in About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper et al (2007). To liven the course up a bit, I started providing the student teams in the class with personas I had developed, each team getting a different mix of cards. As a result, although all teams had the same initial project description, the personas they were assigned and the way they interpreted the needs of those personas as well as the projects they developed by the end of the semester were often markedly different. The persona cards distributed to each of the teams focused attention on the project we would be working on for the semester; in one semester, for example, we worked on a course-registration system to be used by students, staff, and faculty. Teams were typically given three or four cards at the beginning of the semester. One of their first assignments was to develop back stories for each of their personas to bring them to life and to provide a context in which each character would operate. The stories usually described each character’s family life, hobbies, life goals, and personality traits (e.g., patience, tolerance for frustration, technical ability, etc.). Each team also produced a descriptive analysis of the tasks that the character might typically do with the product interface being developed. With fleshed-out personas and task analyses/descriptions in hand, the teams went about designing the product interface. At some point during the semester, each team was given a “bonus”—an additional group of personas for an expanded audience for the project. Teams needed to go back to their initial analysis and determine what needed to be added, modified, or deleted to accommodate their expanded audience. As the User-Centered Design course evolved, I introduced elements of storytelling as described in Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks (2010). While the course had previously focused on requirements and testing, the evolved course focused on telling stories about how each team’s persona characters used the system being developed as part of their everyday lives. As might be expected, teams took very different approaches in developing their stories. Some teams developed stories that talked about how the persona characters went about using the product to achieve their goals—a somewhat standard scenario of use that was tailored to their specific audience. Other teams developed rather dramatic stories about how success or failure with the system affected the persona characters’ lives. Rather than describing use of the product, they focused on how their use of the product affected their lives.

Experience Architecture

Interestingly, some of the user stories went far afield from the actual use of the product. One group, for example, told of how a student’s misunderstanding of a class scheduler caused him to miss an exam and fail a course; another told of a prospective student so annoyed by a school’s web site that she chose to go elsewhere. They were keenly aware that a user’s experience went far beyond the time actually spent interacting with a program. Without my particularly noticing, the focus of the class had evolved from user-centered design to user-experience design. The course name was changed to “User-Experience Design,” and course content was expanded to include methods for observing the user experience (Goodman & Kuniavsky, 2012) and measuring the user experience (Albert & Tullis, 2013). Over the years, we had evolved to keep pace with the changing perception of the field. We initially considered a system view that focused heavily on users’ characteristics and tasks. But over time we came to recognize that while the systems and products that we were describing played a role in users’ lives, that role may not be the most prominent nor important part of their lives. But, on the same hand, we came to appreciate that memories of having a bad user experience with the product might affect those users greatly and have far-reaching implications.

Engage People Actively in Their Experiences Our most memorable, engaging experiences are generally those in which we played an active part. If we are passively engaged in an activity, we may well remember it, but the experience does not have the same impact and memorability as an experience in which we are actively engaged, an experience in which our choices and actions determine the shape and outcome of the experience. Consider the differences between experiences with earlier versions of websites with experiences with Web 2.0 websites. While memories of our uses of earlier websites may be vivid—after all, we were witnessing new, often spectacular technology—those memories were often of us observing information (often visual) or performing tasks (such as shopping or information retrieval) that we had done previously but at a much slower pace. Web 2.0, in contrast, permits and encourages active participation and contribution by users. Users do not just observe content, they create and modify content. The research findings described in Geisler (2014) cite examples of how websites can be designed to encourage this participation, participation that makes the websites engaging and the user experiences richer, more extended, and more compelling.

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Shifting Our Rhetorical Strategies from Logos and Ethos to Pathos 48

At first thought, architectural strategies for user experiences might seem far more closely related to product design and marketing strategies than to rhetorical strategies. But a strong rhetorical component underlies design and marketing. And the awareness of rhetorical techniques and possibilities can make us better equipped to create memorable user experiences. In the earlier days of computer use, people—both producers and users—focused primarily on issues of completeness of computer operation and support, completeness of solutions offered, efficiency of use, and usefulness of computer products. As in the early days of the automobile, users were expected to have some knowledge of product structure (automobiles or computers) and have the ability to fix minor problems and some not so minor. Making things work was an accepted challenge, and users were expected to be part of the solution. Expectations were relatively low, and users expected operations to be less than smooth. But if computers generated correct solutions, users were generally happy—or close to happy. The rhetorical appeal of logos (or logic) was what attracted, and kept, customers; they were impressed by the (digital) logic of computer operations and, by implication, the logical validity of results that computers produced. As computer use became more widespread and computers became more reliable, various producers came to be seen as more or less reliable, and thus desirable. In the early days of mainframe computers, computers were often called “Univac machines” by the general public, as a tribute to their perceived high quality and reliability. In time, IBM took center stage and was seen as the standard bearer for mainframe computer standards. In the early days of personal computers, IBM, Microsoft, and Intel were seen by many as the desirable, reliable brands, but people were starting to notice another company called Apple. Many, certainly not all, people put their faith in these brands and were happy to migrate to newer versions of products as they released, convinced that trusting in the manufacturers was the wise thing to do. As Apple gained in popularity because of their innovation and reputation for providing a positive user experience, people looked to Apple for new products and waited in very long lines to purchase new Apple products. The appeal of their brand was that strong. The rhetorical appeal of ethos (or credibility of the speaker or producer) was what attracted, and kept, customers; they were impressed by the reputation of company and, by implication, the quality of the products they produced. We could also consider another framework for judging the appeal of Apple products, as defined and described in Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (2005) by Donald Norman. Norman describes three

Experience Architecture

levels of appeal: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. The visceral level, our most primitive, “pre-wired” level of thought produces our gut reactions—we can frequently decide to like or dislike something at first glance. The behavioral level is an operational mode, often unconscious, in which we can perform the operations needed to use a product or follow a process to achieve our ends. The highest level, reflective, is the stage at which we can think about the actions we take and make choices informed by our needs. All three of these levels can come into play in judging or evaluating a project. But when we consider the success of products, such as many Apple products, it is the visceral appeal that often dominates. Apple commercials stress simplicity and user appeal; the physical design of products seems welcoming (consider a “little thing”—the rounded corners on Apple laptops). This visceral appeal is one reason why so many users of Apple products are so vocally loyal to the brand. But as computers became an integral part of everyday life, used for communication and entertainment more than many of the more traditional computer functions, it was not enough for a computer to produce correct results; it was not enough for a computer to have a well-known brand; people wanted a great experience while using the product, and they wanted to have that experience with as little an outlay of their own effort as possible. The focus of this experience was not just completeness and correctness; rather, it was on delight, aesthetics and visual appeal, and comfort. This is the rhetorical appeal of pathos, persuading by appealing to users’ emotions, making them the major focus of product use (or at least making them appear to be,) But how would we go about developing an architecture to support a positive user experience?

Developing a User Experience Architecture. Top-Down? Or Bottom-Up The choice to design a user experience architecture top-down or bottom-up is not always a choice we get to make. If we are creating an architecture for a completely new (or almost completely new) experience, we can start with a blank canvas and design with only the constraints of the desired experience limiting our design. However, user-experience architecture may be needed in situations where there are a number of existing components that must be used and brought into the final plan. In such cases, the architect is constrained in what can be done. (Think of legacy systems or products that need to be kept in new systems so that current users are not disadvantaged or blocked from doing what they have been used to doing.)

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Given the opportunity to design, develop, and craft a new user experience from scratch, user experience architects enjoy both great freedom, great responsibility, but also more constraints that might be apparent at first glance. While they frequently do have the freedom to design an architecture without the need to incorporate previously built components, they may be tightly constrained by the business needs placed on their architecture. What image does the organization want to project? Who will the users be? What are the constraints of time, cost, and availability of resources? User experience architects designing from the top down must present a clear vision of what the experience will be and what it will include, carefully and fully define the entire experience space, and develop unified experience themes to tie everything together. Once the architecture has been designed, the architect must diligently and diplomatically, but forcefully, ensure that the experience is built according to the rule and spirit of the architecture. Bruce Tognazzini (1992) vividly describes the efforts that Apple went through to ensure that the look and feel of Apple products was consistent and easily recognized by customers and potential customers. And while the effort was large, the rewards and pay-back were larger. Developing a User Experience Architecture from the Bottom Up

While developing a user experience architecture from the top down may seem like the most logical approach, there are significant examples of a bottom-up approach. Consider how the World Wide Web developed, for example. Most of the initial web-development work was done by individuals or small groups working to develop individual web pages or small websites. Developers used the skills they had and borrowed examples and templates from colleagues and created web pages in formats and styles that they found appealing or thought to be effective. Much of the initial creative work was doing coding, often with little concern, or awareness of, the larger body of the web. As the Web became more popular and more widely used, the need for design standards became apparent, and the role of web designers came into prominence. Standards for universal features such as navigation, page layout, and techniques for emphasis were developed, and coders—willingly or reluctantly—began to follow standardized design principles. It was not until several years later that the position of information architect was defined and popularized, and these architects became responsible for defining and enforcing standards that web designers would adopt and pass along to coders. Defining an architecture late in the game had the advantage that many conventions had been thought about and consensus reached; the dis-

Experience Architecture

advantage, of course, was that some of the conclusions reached were not the best or were incompatible with other conventions. Information architects were then charged with making connections, filling gaps in the architecture, and smoothing over rough spots. User experience architects working from the bottom up face many of the same challenges. Designers of different parts of the experience may have been working towards different goals—so, for example, one part of the experience may focus on speed and efficiency at the expense of aesthetics and comfort, while another part may operate much less efficiently but be pleasant to work with. While either goal may be a good one, the combination can be distracting and annoying to users. To look for guidance, we might consider as examples those websites, products, or processes that are widely acclaimed and have gained acceptance among the general population or among specific niche groups that we want to target.

Using Exemplars to Develop a User Experience Architecture When we look at the world around us, we find some companies that provide a great user experience that raises them above the rest—companies like Southwest Airlines, Disney, and McDonald’s come to mind. What, for example, does McDonald’s do that differentiates their user experience from, say, Burger King (without even looking at the creepiness of the King character in Burger King commercials). Burger King emphasizes the quality of their food and customers’ freedom to choose pickles, onions, and other toppings, and they often take gratuitous swipes at McDonald’s. McDonald’s, by contrast, promises fun, happiness, and a good time. When deciding where to take the family for a Saturday afternoon meal, the option of “getting to choose pickles or not” pales in comparison to “taking the family for a good time.” One approach to architecting a great user experience is to look to those who do things best, analyze what they are doing so well, and apply what we learn to the experience at hand. I have used this method both in the classroom and in organizations I work with. Here’s how it goes. 1. Have the whole group come up with organizations that they think

provide a great user experience. Depending on the age and technical orientation of the group, the list may include organizations used by the general population (Southwest Airlines, Disney, and McDonald’s), computer-oriented organizations (Amazon or Facebook), or small, specialized organizations known to and

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2. 3. 4.

5.

used by the group (the range of new social media applications that appear so rapidly springs to mind). If the group is large, divide the members into smaller groups (three or four people). Have each group select an exemplar company (preferably a different exemplar for each group, but do not be tyrannical). Have each group pick an experience that they want to architect or change. (Experiences that groups I’ve worked with have included recruiting events, database retrieval systems, social events, and registration systems.) Individual groups might choose different experiences to work on, or the groups might all choose the same experience to see how the experience is modified by the exemplar chosen. Let the groups work for a while, and then gather together to share thoughts.

As with any creative brainstorming activity, some of the solutions may be “way over the top.” So, for example, if a group chose Disney as their exemplar and a recruitment event as their experience, features they might choose to incorporate could include balloons, light shows, and animatronic robots. From a practical standpoint, balloons might be the only feasible item from that list. But if you were to ask, “What is the purpose of the light shows and animatronic robots?” the answer might be “To attract attention,” or “To provide interest,” or “To showcase who we are and what we can do.” Given that statement of purpose, the group can come up with feasible and affordable solutions. To attract attention, they could use attention-grabbing signage and decoration. Instead of an animatronic robot, one of the members could stand in front of the recruitment table and pass out fliers and talk to people who show interest. To attract more attention, the member could wear clothing bearing the organization’s insignia or color coordinated with the recruitment displays. When the groups get back together to present their results, members of other groups can offer suggestions or critiques to improve designs. If all groups worked with the same exemplar and experience, a useful follow-up activity would be to take the best features from each group and combine them into one “best of show” solution. This feature-combining activity might possibly present inconsistencies or contradictory approaches to be considered and evaluated, so a follow-up round of smoothing and polishing might well be needed. In making assessments, I found rating by semantic differentials to be more effective than more quantitative measures. For the semantic differential assessment, groups set up word pairs—“easy” to “difficult”, ”logical”

Experience Architecture

to ”confusing”, or ”aesthetically pleasing” to “unattractive”—and rate each architecture or design along each of these differential scales. Examples of semantic differentials for principles defined by Geisler (2014) can be found in Grice et al (2014).

Expanding Our Focus—Broadening our Horizons When we consider the evolution and development of the computer industry and computer use, we can see an expansion of our focus from program design to product design to user-centered design to user experience design. During this evolution, we moved from doing our activities as a cottage-craft people to working professionals with guidelines, practices, and standards. Product design has traditionally been the bailiwick of programmers, with communication specialists becoming increasingly involved as the field moved to user-centered design. We could posit that the move from user-centered design to user-experience design has pushed communication specialists even more to the forefront. Perhaps the most widely known and used set of heuristics in the field of human-computer interaction is the one developed by Jacob Nielsen (1995). Nielsen postulates ten heuristics for assessing the interaction design of websites: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Visibility of system status Match between system and the real world User control and freedom Consistency and standards Error prevention Recognition rather than recall Flexibility and efficiency of use Aesthetic and minimalist design Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors Help and documentation

As increasing numbers of people with non-computer backgrounds became involved with creating and using the web, attention shifted to communication aspects of it, and communication specialists looked at characterizing web heuristics (de Jong and van der Geest, 2000). But as the internet morphed from a vehicle for performing quick task-focused transactions to more of a social medium, attitudes towards efficiency, effectiveness, and even goodness changed. Previously, the goal of most websites was to get users the information as quickly and with as few keystrokes as possible. But in the realm of Web 2.0, the goal shifted from efficiency to engagement. Certainly sites like Facebook are not intended to

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have users get in and out as quickly as possible; rather, they are intended to engage users and keep them connected for longer periods of time. Towards this end, Cheryl Geisler and her colleagues designed and conducted tests to determine a set of heuristics and design principles for assessing user engagement (Geisler, 2014). The ten principles are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Design for diverse users Design for usability Test the backbone Extend a welcome Set the context Make a connection Share control Support interactions among users Create a sense of place Plan to continue the engagement

Clearly, this set of heuristics moves us from considering individual transactions to an assessment of a more complete user experience and can be well suited for assessment of user-centered design. But we need to move further if we are to consider user-experience design and user experience architecture. As we look at ways to assess the effectiveness of a user experience, we need to further expand and embellish our sets of heuristics. We also need to consider that a well architected user experience has more facets, or dimensions, than a conventionally architected user-centered system, even though the user-centered system might be well designed. By considering all the dimensions of the user experience and what factors make up those dimensions, we can better our chances of developing a full user experience with few, if any, noticeable gaps.

Considering the Dimensions of User Experience How do we develop a set of heuristics, or design principles, to cover the full set of options for the user experiences? How do we develop metrics to determine how well the architecture of a user experience matches those heuristics? If we reflect back on the development of information architecture, we can note that the profession of information architect developed after the profession of web designer, which, in turn, developed after the profession of web-page coder. Similarly for user-experience architecture, we can trace the evolution of the profession, from product designer to user-centered designer to user-experience designer, and note the concordant rise of heuris-

Experience Architecture

tics or design principles, from heuristics for product design to heuristics for user-centered design, and predict a course for development and refinement of heuristics for user-experience design. As a method for developing a set of user-experience heuristics, we might follow examples of earlier evolutionary developments. Certainly any set of heuristics we develop would have a connection to earlier sets of related heuristics; we would not fabricate a set out of whole cloth. An approach we could take would be to consider current heuristics and expand on what is there and then reexamine the needs of users based on their use of products and services and their expectations of what an ideal experience might be. The research project described by Geisler (2014), for example, developed heuristics and design principles by conducting usability tests based on Jacob Nielsen’s heuristics and using the results of those tests to develop a revised and expanded set of heuristics for a subsequent test. The new set of heuristics grew out of test results, test observations, and post-test discussions with evaluators. A similar approach could be used to develop heuristics to serve as a basis for user-experience architecture. A preliminary set of heuristics could be developed and then refined through use and observation. Similarly, metrics for assessing how well particular experiences measure up to a defined set of heuristics could be developed by expanding on current metrics and refining the set. In Grice (2014), for example, metrics are set forth as a set of semantic differentials for users to specify how strongly they agree or disagree with assessments of each heuristic. While this method might not produce a strong set of quantitative data, it might prove to be most useful in assessing an experience. The difference between a highly rated, memorable experience and a poor one might rest less on minor differences of time or performance than on a series of subjective facts that, taken together, make a major impact on users.

Conclusion While the field of user experience architecture is an emerging one, it does have deep roots in product development, information and interface development, and rhetorical theory. To develop user-experience architecture into a strong, well-principled profession that will drive the design, development, and implementation of great user experiences, we need to look both backward and forward. We need to look backward to understand how similar fields have developed in the past and learn from their evolutions and developments so that we can build on what has come before us. Perhaps more importantly, we need to look ahead to the future to develop a sense of how user-experience architecture can play a vital role in shaping the future experiences of individuals, of communities and organizations, and of society as a whole.

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Albert, W. & Tullis, T. (2013) Measuring the user experience, second edition: Collecting, analyzing, and presenting usability metrics (interactive technologies). New York: Morgan Kaufmann Cockburn, A. (2000). Writing effective use cases. Boston: Addison-Wesley Professional. Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronnin, D. and Noessel C. (2007) About face.3: The essentials of interaction design. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. de Jong, M., & van der Geest, T. (2014). Characterizing web heuristics. Technical Communication, 47(3), 311–325. Geisler, C. (Ed.). (2014). Designing for user engagement on the web: 10 basic principles, 2014, New York: Routledge. Goodman, E. & Kuniavsky M. (2012).Observing the user experience: A practitioner’s guide to user research. New York: Morgan Kaufmann. Grice, R. A., Bennett, A. G., Fernheimer, J. W., Geisler, C., Krull, R., Lutzky, R. A., Search P. Rolph, M. J. G, and Zappen, J. P. (2013). Heuristics for broader assessment of effectiveness and usability in technology-mediated technical communication. Technical Communication, 60(1), 3–21. Grice, R. A. (2002). Evaluating the complete user experience. In L. J. Gurak and M. M. Lay, Research in Technical Communication (pp. 149–64). Westport CT: Praeger. Gurak, L. J., & M. M. Lay (Eds.). (2002). Research in technical communication. Westport, CT: Praeger. Nielsen, J. (1995). 10 usability heuristics for user interface design. Retrieved from http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ ten-usability-heuristics/ Norman, D. (2005). Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. New York: Basic Books. Quesenbery, W., & Brooks, K. (2015). Storytelling for user experience: Crafting stories for better design. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media. Tognazzini, B. (1992). Tog on interface. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional. Wodtke, C., & Govella, A.. (2009). Information architecture: Blueprints for the Web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

4 Analyzing Activity for Experience Design Cheryl Geisler

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nce we see experience architecture as the design of user journeys, the choice of research methods opens up beyond the traditional methods of usability studies (Barnum, 2002; Goodman, 2012, Rubin and Chisnell, 2008; Dumas & Redish, 1993).1 As Norman and Verganti (2014) point out, traditional usability methods have a two-part structure that begins with the analysis of user needs and then follows an iterative design process to produce a design prototype that satisfies those needs. Geisler et. al. (2014) have argued that the focus of traditional usability on efficiency often overlooks what can make user experiences engaging. Norman and Verganti take the critique of user-centered research methods one step further to claim that usability research is limited to incremental innovation. Changes that improve performance, lower costs, or enhance appeal may arise out of user observations, but, they suggest, these observations will leave the broad strokes of the design untouched: Not only do the users of products have difficulty envisioning radical new meanings because of their total immersion in the current context and cultural paradigm, but the more that design researchers immerse themselves in the existing context, the more they too are trapped within the current paradigm. More radical innovation, according to Norman and Verganti, will require designers to go beyond traditional usability methods. Indeed, they suggest, breakthroughs may arise through two kinds of major changes: changes in technology or changes in the cultural meanings of a product. One example of such breakthrough innovation was that brought about by the Swiss company Swatch in the mid 1980’s. A generation earlier, the Japanese had revolutionized the watch-making industry with electronic watches; quartz crystal technology made the watch an inexpensive tool rather than a luxury product. Later, after more than a decade of decline, Swiss watchmakers fought back, this time not by altering technology but by changing the cultural meaning of the watch. Their watches were colorful fashion state1. The author would like to acknowledge, from the outset, the work of Rachel Abrams, Martha Newport, Kristine (Olka) Berry, and Nicole Robbins who have graciously agreed to share with readers of this chapter the activity analysis and resulting design that they created as students enrolled in Studio Design for HCI in the spring of 2003. Indeed I am grateful to all of my students in SD who taught me so many things about HCI design. 57

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ments, inexpensive enough for users to own several as wardrobe coordinates. According to Norman and Verganti, the entire cultural meaning of the watch was thus changed from handy tool to fashion accessory. In less than two years, more than 2.5 million were sold and the Swiss industry was back on its feet (Quartz crises, n.d.). While Norman and Verganti’s analysis of the limitations of traditional usability research’s ability to foster breakthrough innovation rings true, I want to suggest in this chapter that observational methods may not be as limited as they suggest. In particular, observations of culturally meaningful activity, observations that focus on the routines of everyday life, can be a source of more than incremental innovation. Shifting the observational process up a level, away from a specific product or prototype to the larger cultural activity in which the product is intended to be embedded, can open user experience design to more radical innovation.

User Experience Design as the Design of Routinized Activity The concept of effective user journeys anchors the work of experience architecture, but we need to recognize the central role that routine plays in those journeys. The experience of a new product or service has less in common with the once-in-a-lifetime journey of a Huck Finn down the Mississippi and more in common with our routine journeys—whether they be the ones we make from our driveways to our places of work each morning or the more abstract transitions we undergo as we pursue knowledge and connection online. When our goal is to design new products or services that transform the journeys that users make, the design process will need to be anchored in an analysis of the routines of their everyday lives. In the HCI literature, researchers interested in understanding the way that users adapt design artifacts to their local purposes and conditions have acknowledged the importance of everyday routines. Looking at non-traditional artifact use in the household context, Wakkary and Maestri (2007) documented a number of processes by which family members exploited the affordances of artifacts in ways not intended by their designers. These nontraditional uses might then be incorporated into everyday routines. A half wall in a kitchen, for example, by virtue of its flat surface, might be used as a resting place for objects. Over time, family members may come to use the wall as a temporary landing place for projects that needed to be moved off the kitchen table. Eventually, by being incorporated into family members’ project routines, the half wall itself becomes a visual reminder of current projects. Theoretically, much work has been done to understand the nature and importance of routinized behavior under the rubric of “practice.” A

Analyzing Activity for Experience Design

useful overview of this work has been provided by Reckwitz (2002), who draws together a family of theories with a practice orientation. According to Reckwitz, a practice is a complex collocation of bodies, objects, understanding, and desire, all tied together into a routine: a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood. For practice theorists like Bourdieu (1977), Giddens (1984), and Garfinkel (1967), routinized practice is the bedrock out of which social phenomena arise. From the perspective of experience architecture, practice theory as outlined by Reckwitz (2002) has the benefit of moving us beyond the simple efficiency of routines to a broader understanding of the role that routinized action plays in forming the social world. With this larger perspective, we can begin to appreciate the potential scope and impact of experience architecture as design that can affect not only the sequence of actions that we take, but also the way we move our bodies through the world, the way we understand our world, and the way we feel about that world. Such a broad understanding can begin to account for the kind of breakthrough impact that new communications technologies have had on our world in a way that the simpler concept of usability cannot.

User Experience Design as the Change of Routinized Activity Despite the utility of practice theory in helping us to understand what experience architecture might accomplish through breakthrough design, it does less well in accounting for the dynamic processes through which everyday routines can change. And change is essential for any understanding of how experience architects might alter the routines that people use to engage the world. If such routines could not be changed, the experience architect would have no leverage to innovate through design, no matter whether that innovation were incremental or radical. For a more in-depth perspective on change in routines, many in HCI have turned to activity theory (Geisler, 2003; Nardi, 1995; Engestrom, 1987; Leontyev, 1977). Activities are culturally recognizable sequences of actions through which humans aim to accomplish goals. Activities are mediated by artifacts that arise out of culture and that, in turn, transform culture. When designers seek to create new user experiences they, in effect, seek to transform activities by creating new mediating artifacts. Understanding how best to design these mediating artifacts requires understanding the activities into which they will be embedded. The differences between practice theory and activity theory are too varied and nuanced to do justice to in the scope of this chapter. Neverthe-

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less, as Miettinen and his colleagues (2012) point out, activity theory does describe a mechanism for the change of routinized action that is not well detailed in practice theory. Those seeking to design innovative user experiences do well to keep three basic activity theory principles in mind (Vygotsky, 1962; Leont’ev, 1978; Kutti,1995; Kaptelinin, et. al, 1999; Engeström, 2001; Foot, 2014). To begin with, activity is mediated. Through routines, mediating artifacts become intimately bound up with sequences of human actions, thereby linking the mind with its surrounding context. Material and symbolic tools become internalized through routinization and the development and use of tools as part of activity systems is the sum and substance of cultural transmission and change. When the Palm Pilot, the first major consumer technology, became a world-wide phenomenon in the late nineties, it was because users knit it into activity systems in which paper-based systems like the Filofax and DayTimer already served as a meditational means (Geisler, 2003). As the Palm Pilot example illustrates, designers of user experience capitalize on mediation in activity to create new and potentially transforming artifacts and invite users to incorporate them into their routines. The second principle from activity theory that plays an important role in user experience design is that activity is motivated. Humans use mediating tools and undertake the sequences of actions that make up an activity because they are motivated to accomplish some larger goal. In fact, there is a hierarchy of motivation and action that structures our behavior. At the highest level, activities are associated with motives, larger, culturally-significant goals that provide the answer to the question: Why? Why do we do what we do? One level down, activities are made up of a sequence of actions, conscious behaviors that we string together to move toward our goals that provide the answer to the question: What? What are we doing? At the lowest level come operations, behaviors that we engage in with only slight awareness of what we are doing, making choices that depend on the state of the world in ways that we are barely conscious of. These operations answer the question: How? How is it we do what we do? This hierarchy of motivation and action provides an account in user experience design for the difference between incremental and radical design. Design addressed to improving features of current products can be seen as addressing the level of operations, providing us with a new how, a new way to do something, as when we discover a new feature in our podcasting service. More radical innovation will address the level of actions, providing us with a new what to do as, for example, when listening to our podcasts becomes a new way to pass the time on the ride to work. Even more fundamental shifts may happen with the development of new technologies,

Analyzing Activity for Experience Design

such as we may be observing in the transformations wrought by social media, when new design artifacts may shift the reasons why we do things, as when, for example, we start finding motivation and reward in virtual rather than physical realities. The third principle from activity theory that impacts the work of user-experience design is that activities develop, both historically and individually. We change. When we learn new behavior as individuals, we consciously and often painstakingly put new actions together, consciously trying out new tools and actions in response to dissatisfactions we feel, ways that we feel we fall short of what we want to accomplish. In interviews with Palm Pilot users, for example, we found that people often adopted new time management technologies when they faced major life changes—a new baby, a new job, a new career step—that made them dissatisfied with their existing ways of doing things and set them searching for new tools that would better meet their goals. Good design responds to these motives and dissatisfactions, replicating existing mediation and extending our toolset to meet unmet goals. To sum up, experience design will be transformative, when it is responsive to individual motive and history, when it builds on and extends cultural history and tools, and when it alters patterns of activity and mediation. In the next section, we will take a look at how observational techniques can be incorporated into experience design in the service of this transformation.

Incorporating Observations in User Experience Design My thoughts on the role of observation in user experience design were developed in the context of a course, Studio Design in HCI, that I developed and taught as a capstone course in a graduate certificate in HCI at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1998 through 2005. As shown in Figure 1, taken from my lectures notes, the course began with a requirements analysis that asked students to incorporate both a literature review and observations of activity that I will describe in more detail below. Students then produced a conceptual design using object-oriented modeling. By the conclusion of the course, they were asked to complete a partial implementation and do some testing.

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Figure 1: Phases of project work in Studio Design in HCI. In my opening lecture, I laid out the twin goals of the course as producing HCI designs that “fit”—building on people’s current activities and replicating internalized tools—and HCI designs that “transform”—responding to people’s motives and dissatisfactions and extending their internal tools. Because the students could enroll both on campus and from a distance, I taught many working professionals whose everyday work involved them in HCI design. In my first semester, I found that teams who chose to work on projects directly related to their work often produced incremental designs of the kinds described by Norman and Verganti. Deeply immersed in their current design, they were “trapped,” unable to take a fresh view on a project, unable to shift the process up a level, away from a specific product or prototype to the larger cultural activity in which the design was intended to be embedded. To counteract this tendency, in following semesters, I encouraged teams to build the foundation for their requirements analysis in observations of what I called the untechnologized activity—an activity engaged in without the aid of emerging technologies. As we’ll see with the Cooking with Class team that I describe below, this meant going out and looking at real people trying to carry out the activities of their everyday lives, making observations “in the wild” (Hutchins, 1995; Hess et. al, 2012; Hinrichs and Carpendale, 2012). Rachel Abrams, Martha Newport, Kristine (Olka) Berry, and Nicole Robbins enrolled in Studio Design in HCI in the spring of 2003. Rachel worked as a UX designer for the travel website Site59, which was eventually bought by Travelocity. She is now on her own as a user experience designer and consultant at Rachel Ink. (http://www.rachelink.com). Martha, Kristine, and Nicole all worked for IBM at Research Triangle Park. Martha is now a Real Estate Broker/REALTOR® in Chapel Hill North Carolina. Kristine is IBM Systems Design Thinking Initiative lead. Nicole is a Senior Business Analyst at Railinc in Cary, NC. I wish to express my gratitude to

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each of them for allowing me to share their work as the Cooking with Class team in what follows. The work of Cooking with Class focused on meal planning. In the Spring of 2003, I opened the course with a lecture that used the Palm Pilot as an example of a transformative HCI, but it’s important to remember that many innovative communications technologies were still in the future at that point. Following the Palm Pilot in 1996, the iPod had been released in 2001 and the first networked Blackberry in 2002, but Web 2.0 and podcasting would not take off until a year after the course (2004), Twitter in 2006, the iPhone in 2007, and the App Store for iPhone in 2008 (AVG Technologies, 2015). To this day, meal planning and the associated grocery shopping remain one of the few areas “virtually untouched by mobile” (Lowenstein, 2014). One of the more interesting current apps, Paprika (http://paprikaapp.com) offers users ways to manage recipes, create menus, plan meals, and make shopping lists, but at the opening of 2003 when Cooking with Class began their work, not much was available. Using the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/), I was able to partially examine three of the five websites that the team mentioned in their state of the art review: • Aisle-by-Aisle offered Windows 95 users an application to create different kinds of lists (menu, recipe, regular, and short lists) and map them onto grocery store aisles. Users needed to input the recipes and either create or purchase store maps. • Meals.com is a recipe site still hosted by Nestle. At that time, it allowed users to browse a recipe center and then, in a Planning Center, create meal plans, a grocery list, or your own recipe box. • Finally, SimpleStupid billed itself as a “recipe resource for the home chef,” but also provided functionality to create your own cookbook and make a grocery list. According to the Cooking with Class team, writing in their requirements memo: Although these web sites have similarities to the HCI our team is proposing, many were not constructed with the user in mind [and] do not possess the range of features we had in mind: recipe searches, recipe box, coupons, variable serving sizes, conversion of ingredients to “store” measurements, consolidation of ingredients, suggestions for meals from leftover ingredients from recipes selected, and the option to add items to the shopping list that are not part of recipes.

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As we shall see, these features arose directly out of the observations Cooking with Class made of meal planning in the wild.

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Key to observing activity in the wild is identifying the appropriate activity to observe. Designers should begin by identifying who would be expected to use the design (participants), what they would be doing (actions), and why they would be doing it (activity). As I mentioned earlier, I have found it critical to focus on low-tech instances, instances where cultural participants have not yet adopted emerging technologies. For Cooking with Class, this meant seeking meal planners who used old-fashioned techniques for meal planning rather than the meal planning websites that were identified in their review. Cooking with Class observed three women in their late twenties doing meal planning. I have found that three is the minimum number of observations out of which analytic sense can be made. During each observation, three kinds of data were gathered: 1. Time-stamped notes recording participants’ actions, conversational

snippets, changes in mediating artifacts, expressions of emotion, and artifacts produced. 2. Copies or photos of artifacts used during the session including paper documents or electronic files consulted or written, physical or virtual tools used, and people interacted with. 3. A follow-up interview to confirm the typicality of the session and to provide a personal history of the activity, identifying any dissatisfactions with the activity and any plans for the future. The time-stamped and labeled notes for the session that Cooking with Class observed with Kristen can be found in Appendix A at the end of this chapter. The time-stamped notes of the sessions form the core of the analysis, displayed in temporal graphs like those shown in Figures 2, 3, and 5. I have described the process of constructing temporal graphs elsewhere (Geisler and Munger, 2002), but a crucial step in the process is the identification of a common set of actions across all of the observations.2 Defining an action as a set of acts by a distinct set of participants using a distinct set of artifacts and tools helps in this process. Any time that participants or artifacts change it is highly likely that the action has changed as well. 2. Careful readers will note that Cooking with Class uses a slightly different set of actions to analyze their three sets of observations, but the differences in labeling were not significant enough to affect their conclusions.

Analyzing Activity for Experience Design

Cooking with Class identified six mediated actions in their analysis: • Browsing recipes: looking through various recipe mediations to find meals to fix for the week Mediations: cookbooks, cooking magazines and online recipe sites • Consulting the kitchen: Going to the pantry, cupboards or refrigerator to see if items from the grocery list are needed from the grocery store Mediations: kitchen • Searching for definitions: looking up unknown words from the recipes in online dictionaries. Mediations: computer, Internet connection, Internet browser • Distractions: anything that takes the subject away from the planning activity • Coupon clipping: includes looking through coupons, clipping them, and adding those items to the grocery list Mediations: source of coupons, scissors, pen and paper • Adding items to the grocery list: transferring an item or items from the recipe mediation to the grocery list Mediations: recipe, pen and paper Each of these actions had associated with it distinguishing artifacts, most of which became crucial objects in their eventual design. For instance, Browsing recipes was associated with recipes across many different kinds of locations, including books, magazine, and online sites; and Consulting the kitchen involved participants in physical movement through the kitchen where they interacted with artifacts like pantries, cupboards, and refrigerators.

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Figure 2: Temporal analysis of Kirsten’s meal planning. The resulting temporal graphs, shown in Figures 2, 3, and 5, map this common set of actions on the vertical axis onto the timeline of the session, converted into percentages, on the horizontal axis. In Kirsten’s meal planning, shown in Figure 2, for example, the first 50 percent of her twenty-four-plus minute session was spent oscillating between Clipping Coupons and Distractions created by a dog and a baby (see Appendix A for labeled notes). As you can see by comparing Figure 2 with Figures 3 and 5, Kirsten was the only one who engaged in this coupon-clipping action. According to Cooking with Class, Kirsten was the only married participant and the only one with a baby; these facts may account for the distinct shape of her temporal graph, with its two stages, one of which is predominantly mediated by coupons and contains a high number of distractions.

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Figure 3. While Kirsten does use a recipe on one occasion (more than 80% of the way through her activity), recipes are far more important mediating means for Jen and Kelly. According to Cooking with Class, Jen was engaged and cooking for two and frequently entertains. As shown in Figure 3, in the thirty-plus minutes of her meal-planning session, she spent the first 25% of her time browsing recipes and then oscillated between browsing recipes and adding items to the grocery list with just a couple of distractions. The grocery list she produced, shown in Figure 4, contains a meal plan at the top (jicama & chili powder salad, Rick Bayless’ Chili, p. 49, roasted pineapple core, Mexican beers) and a shopping list at the bottom (1 can chicken broth, 2 lbs of ground beef [half beef/half pork], 1 lg. onion, etc.).

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Figure 4: Jen’s grocery list. Kelly, the third participant observed by Cooking with Class, was a single woman cooking for one who only planned a couple of meals a week, eating out or using leftovers for other nights. As shown in Figure 5, her fifteen-plus minutes of meal planning involved a twice-repeated cycle of browsing recipes, Searching for definitions, consulting the kitchen, and finally adding items to the grocery list, with only one distraction. Each of these two cycles was mediated by a specific recipe, first a seafood pasta and then a banana bread pudding.

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Figure 5: Temporal analysis of Kelly’s meal planning. A follow-up interview after the observations provides information concerning history, dissatisfactions, and plans that participants have with respect to the activity. Kelly, our single woman cooking on her own, reported developing her current system of cooking for only a couple of nights a week because she had discovered that otherwise she had too many leftovers and spent too much money. She is happy with her current process, though, she wished she could check off just the ingredients in a recipe that she needed to shop for. Kirsten, married with a baby, says she had adopted meal planning as opposed to simply buying what she had coupons for because she needed to plan ahead and get things done more quickly. She is dissatisfied with the selection of coupons, most of which are for junk food, and would really like to see coupons for just her own brands. She doesn’t use the computer because it is upstairs and away from the kitchen. Jen, engaged and cooking for two, reported that she used to spend too much money and make too much food. She now tries to be more frugal. She enjoys looking at recipes, though she wishes she had different ways of finding them. She also keeps a record of the meals she has made in the past. Two aspects of these observations are worth noting. First, three differently mediated ways of creating a shopping list appear to exist: from recipes, from coupons, and from a review of the pantry. That is, items on the shopping list might appear as the result of a selection of recipes embodied in a meal plan like that shown in Figure 4, but might also come from a recurring list of pantry staples or from a selection of available coupons. Each of

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the three participants used some mix of the first two methods; only Kirsten used coupons. Second, all three participants were constrained by the resources of time and money. Making the best use of their shopping time and dollars had, in fact, driven all three participants away from a pantry-based approach to grocery shopping toward a more recipe-planning approach: Kelly had been wasting too much food; Kirsten had more limited time because of the baby; Jen wanted to spend less on entertaining.

Designing from Activity Analysis Activity analysis can help the experience architect identify key requirements for the user experience in several ways. The common set of actions and their associated mediations become the starting point for design. In their final design, for example, Cooking with Class included webpages for browsing and selecting recipes, for constructing a meal plan, and for creating a grocery list, but they decided not to include clipping coupons, which was only done by one participant. Activity analysis can also help a design team to understand the important contingencies and opportunities. Watching Jen browse through cookbooks, cooking magazines, and online recipes helped Cooking with Class understand the complexity of recipe sources, leading them to imagine the need for partnering with recipe database websites years before meal-planning apps like Paprika and Pepperplate did so. Seeing the way that Kelly checks the kitchen pantry to remove items she already has in stock from her grocery list helps them to recognize the important role the kitchen pantry plays in meal planning and to foresee the impact of wireless on device usage in the kitchen. The largest impact of activity analysis on design comes through the development of driving narratives for design work. Research has shown the importance of narratives in driving the design process. In software engineering, of course, use cases are a standard method for bringing narrative reality into the design process (Jacobsen, et. al 1992, 2011; Cockburn, 2001). And, in our studies of design teams, we saw that the narratives created early in the design process constantly reappeared throughout design work, shaping myriad design decisions, both big and small, along the way (Geisler and Lewis, 2007). By grounding these narratives in observations of activity in the wild, activity analysis helps to insure that the emerging design both fits with participants’ current activity and has the potential to transform it. Synthesizing across their three sets of observations, Cooking with Class created two narratives in their requirements memo. The first was an

Analyzing Activity for Experience Design

untransformed scenario of meal planning as they had currently observed it, synthesizing across their three participants and drawing on their literature review: It’s the beginning of January, and Sidney and Paul have made a New Year’s resolution to lose some weight. They join a gym and start going regularly, but realize they also must begin eating healthier foods to reach their weight loss goals. Sidney is the meal planner, shopper, and cook for the family. Every Saturday morning, she sits in her kitchen and decides what meals to fix for their family of four, then makes a grocery list to take with her to the store that day. This Saturday, she spends extra time trying to find low-fat, healthy recipes for the week. She consults her recipe books and doesn’t find much there, so she goes into the office and looks at a few online recipe web sites. Since her family can be picky sometimes, and since she doesn’t have a lot of time to cook fancy meals, she has to search for a while. She finds some recipes she’d like to try to make, prints them out, and goes back to the kitchen. Using a pad and pen, she writes down what she’ll make each night. She adds all the ingredients she’ll need for each meal to the grocery list. As she’s making her list, she has to take time to convert the measurements of the ingredients into items she’ll buy. One recipe calls for a half-cup of chopped onions, so she writes down “one onion” on her list, thinking that would be enough. Then, she sees that several recipes call for onions, so she tries to add it all up in her head and changes her entry to “three onions,” hoping she guessed right. As she continues, she realizes that her parents are coming over for dinner one night this week so she’ll want to make twice as much food that night. She has to double all the ingredients listed for the recipe in her head and write those down on the grocery list. She puts the recipes aside and looks at her list. She checks the pantry and crosses out some ingredients that she already has. She adds a few items to the list, including cereal, milk, paper towels, and cat food—staples for her household every week. She wonders what she’s forgetting to add to the list. Sidney feels satisfied that she’s done and ready to go to the grocery store with her list, which took her an hour to make. She puts the list in her purse thinking that it would be awful if she lost it and heads out. Once she gets to the store, she regrets that she didn’t rewrite the

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list to categorize her items according to the areas of the grocery store, because she keeps going back and forth between produce, meat, and other departments and feels like she’s wasting even more time. “Eating healthy is a lot of work,” she thinks, as she remembers that she has to do this all over again next week. Notice how this scenario anchors meal planning solidly in the cultural trends of health consciousness and time consciousness. It includes the back and forth from recipe to kitchen pantry, mentions dissatisfactions with things like ingredient conversions and recipe scaling, includes adding staples to a recipe-driven list, and expresses the desire for a categorized shopping list. In their second and transformed scenario, Cooking with Class imagines the activity as changed by their proposed design. Rather than quote from it (see Appendix B), let’s take a look at the slightly edited version of the walkthrough of their partial implementation that they included in their final memo almost three months later. It follows their transformed scenario very closely: Sidney begins by logging on to the Meal Planning Central website to search for recipes that her family will like. She searches for “chicken” recipes that take “15–20 minutes” to prepare (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Searching for recipes in Meal Planning Central. She decides to check out the first recipe, so she clicks on it (see Figure 7).

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Figure 7: Search Results in Meal Planning Central The recipe for chicken a la king displays, and Sidney decides that it looks good for Monday night dinner. So, she clicks on the ‘Add to meal plan’ link (see Figure 8).

Figure 8: A recipe in Meal Planning Central

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Upon looking over the week’s meals, Sidney remembers her family is coming over Monday night, so she changes the chicken à la king serving size from four to eight and hits the “change servings” button. She clicks on “Grocery list” in the top navigation to see what she has to buy for the week (see Figure 9).

Figure 9: A meal plan in Meal Planning Central. She looks over her grocery list, which includes consolidated ingredients from her two recipes—chicken à la king and beef stew. The ingredients have been converted to store-sized portions and are sorted by where they are found in the grocery store (see Figure 10). She decides to add some more items. Sidney selects cereal from the frequent items box and types in another item, yogurt, in the free text field. She then clicks the “add to list” button (see Figure 11).

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Figure 10: A grocery List in Meal Planning Central

Designing for Fit and Innovation Careful observations, grounded in an activity theory framework, should at minimum produce a design that fits into participants’ routinized patterns. Looking back at the work of Cooking with Class over a decade later, it is easier to see how their design for Meal Planning Central fits into the activity of meal planning as they observed it. In particular, Meal Planning Central supported both recipe-driven and staple-driven grocery lists and exhibited many of the features used in the best meal-planning sites today: they included recipe scaling, categorized shopping lists, the ability to check-off unneeded ingredients, and so forth. What is less easy to judge looking back to 2003 is the way that Meal Planning Central can be viewed as innovative. Nevertheless, using the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) to examine the sites I surveyed earlier, a few comments about innovation can be made. First, and at the highest level, Meal Planning Central represented a departure in focus from

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what was out there at the time. Aisle-by-Aisle supported grocery shopping. Nestle created Meals.com to showcase recipes using their products. The creators of SimpleStupid billed their site as a “recipe resource.” While all three of these sites did support some meal-planning functionality, it was not their focus as it was with Meal Planning Central. With its simple navigation bar of Recipes/Meal plan/Grocery list (shown in Figures 6–11), Meal Planning Central echoes the structure of the best meal-planning sites of today.

Figure 11: Adding Staples to Grocery List in Meal Planning Central Meal Planning Central also includes some features clearly based in their observations and still not available in today’s meal-planning sites. Because it was so important to their participants, Cooking with Class allowed for recipe searches based on cost, both in terms of time and in terms of money (see Figure 6). Major recipe sites like Epicurious and Allrecipes still do not support these kinds of searches. The Cooking with Class team also included ingredient conversion. As a result, creating a weekly meal plan that called for one-half cup of on-

Analyzing Activity for Experience Design

ion in one recipe, one large onion in another recipe, and two small onions in a third recipe would consolidate the shopping item into something like “5 small onions.” On a recent Pepperplate shopping list, I found the entry “3 ½ lbs Eggplant + 3 Eggplants,” clearly suggesting that the algorithms for ingredient conversion and combination are still not available in today’s meal-planning apps. Granted, Meal Planning Central, unlike the alternative sites at the time or the one today, did not actually implement a fully functioning website/app. Had Cooking with Class handed off their design to be developed, we do not know what would have actually been developed. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the observations that Cooking with Class made, the activity analysis that they conducted, resulted in a design that not only fit within participants’ activity systems but also represented innovation.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that observational data can be used as part of the process in user experience design without necessarily limiting the outcome to incremental innovation. In brief, the experience architect can avoid being “trapped within the current paradigm,” as Norman and Verganti (2014) warns, by using an activity analysis that: 1. focuses observations on culturally meaningful activities, 2. chooses to observe the untechnologized versions of these

activities, and 3. includes a follow up interview focused on the participants’ history,

dissatisfactions, and anticipated changes. To analyze the resulting data, pay careful attention to the artifacts, create a common set of actions for the temporal graphs, and synthesize your observations into untransformed and transformed scenarios. These driving scenarios, deeply rooted in observations of routinized activity in a social world can, with some luck, lead to the kind of breakthrough impact that motivates all of us in user-experience design.

References Aisle-by-Aisle Grocery List Software (2003). Aislebyaisle.com. Downloaded from the WaybackMachine at http://web.archive.org/ web/20031230091000/http://aislebyaisle.com/ AVG Technologies (2015). A history of mobile apps, 1983– 2014 & beyond. Downloaded from https://prezi.com/ rwc6qmvqkrt-/a-history-of-mobile-apps/. Barnum, C. M. (2002). Usability testing and research. New York: Longman.

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Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. ( R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cockburn, A. (2001). Writing effective use cases. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley. Cunningham, L. (2011). Meal planning has never been so easy. Downloaded from Wellconnectedmom.com. Desjardins A., & Wakkary, R. (2013). Manifestations of everyday design: Guiding goals and motivations. Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition (C&C ’13), 2013, pp. 253–262. Dumas, J. S., & Redish, J. C. (1993). A practical guide to usability testing. Exeter: Intellect Books. Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133-156. Foot, K. (2014). Cultural-historical activity theory: Exploring a theory to inform practice and research. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 24(3), 329–347. Garfinkel, H. (1984). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Geisler, C., & Lewis, B. (2007). Remaking the world through talk and text: What we should learn from how engineers use language to design. In R. Horowitz (Ed.), Talking texts: How speech and writing interact in school learning (pp. 217–334). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Geisler, C., & Munger R. (2002). Temporal analysis: A primer exemplified by a case from prehospital care. In E. Barton and G. Stygall (Eds.), Discourse studies in composition (283-304). New York: Hampton Press. Geisler, C., Grice, R., Bennett, A., Fernheimer, J., Krull, R., Search, P., and Zappen, J. (2014). Designing for user engagement on the Web: 10 basic principles. London: Routledge. Geisler, C. (2003). When management becomes personal: An activity-theoretic analysis of palm technologies. In C. Bazerman and D. R. Russell (Eds.), Writing selves and societies: Research from activity perspectives. San Diego, CA: Mind, Culture, and Activity and Fort Collins, CO: academic.writing. Available at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/ selves_societies/geisler/ Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Goodman, E., Kuniavsky, M., and Moed, A. (2012). Observing the user experience: A practitioner’s guide to user research. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Jacobson, I., M. Christerson, P. Jonsson, and G. Övergaard (1992). Object-Oriented software engineering—A use case driven approach. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.

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Jacobson, I., Spence, I., and Bittner, K.(2011). Use case 2.0: The guide to succeeding with use cases. n.p.: Ivar Jacobson International. Kaptelinin, V., Nardi, B. A., and C. Macaulay (1999). The activity checklist: A tool for representing the “space” of context. Interactions, 6, 27–39. Kutti, K. (1995). Activity theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research. In B. Nardi (Ed.), Context and Consciousness (pp.17–44). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leont’ev, A. N. (1978). Activity and consciousness. Progress Publishers. Downloaded from https://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/activity-consciousness.pdf. Lowenstein, M (2014). Lowenstein’s view: Grocery shopping is an area ripe for mobile innovation. Fierce Wireless. Downloaded from http:// www.fiercewireless.com/story/lowensteins-view-grocery-shopping-area-ripe-mobile-innovation/2014–12–03 Meals.com (Feb 10, 2003). http://www.meals.com/MyPlanningCenter/ Default.aspx?Menu=5. Downloaded from WaybackMachine at https:// web.archive.org/web/20030210085510/http://www.meals.com/MyPlanningCenter/Default.aspx?Menu=5 Miettinen, R., Paavola, S., and Pohjola, P. (2012). From habituality to change: Contribution of activity theory and pragmatism to practice theories. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42, (3), pp. 345–60. Norman, D. A. and R. Verganti (2012). Incremental and radical innovation: Design research versus technology and meaning change. Design Issues, 30(1), pp. 78–96. Quartz crisis (n.d.). On Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Quartz_crisis. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices. A development in culturist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2),: 243–263. Rubin, J. & Chisnell, D. (2008) Handbook of usability testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests. Indianapolis: Wiley. SimpleStupid, the recipe resource for the home chef (April 11, 2003). http://simplestupid.com/. Downloaded from Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/20030408070942/http://simplestupid.com/ Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wakkary, R. and Maestri, L. (2007). The resourcefulness of everyday design. Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition, 163–172.

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Appendix A Time stamped and labeled notes for observation of Kirsten. 80

4:10:05 Clipping Coupons

Begins clipping coupons

4:10:31  

Notes no newspaper coupons

4:10:45  

Looks at some coupons

4:11:01  

Makes list of coupons on paper—looks thru existing coupons and writes items on list

4:10:58 Distraction

Talks to dog

4:12:46 Clipping Coupons

Puts coupons for babies r us aside

4:13:25  

Makes list for grocery store only

4:13:35  

Cuts coupon from flyer with scissors

4:13:59  

Goes through coupon book

4:14:05  

Writes item on list

4:14:20  

Cuts coupon

4:14:42  

Browses coupon book

4:15:16  

Writes down item on list that is on special

4:15:28 Distractions

Sings along to baby music

4:15:42 Clipping Coupons

Adds other item on special

4:16:15  

Browses

4:16:23  

Cuts bread coupon

4:16:34  

Adds item to list

4:16:46  

Cuts out coupon

4:16:55 Distractions

Moves baby’s toy

4:17:06 Clipping Coupons

Adds other coupon item to list

4:17:29  

Adds on special item to list

4:17:50 Distractions

Talks to baby

4:17:55 Clipping Coupons

Cuts a coupon

4:18:18  

Adds item to list

4:18:55  

Cuts out coupon for greeting cards

4:19:05  

Adds to list

4:20:38  

Cuts several coupons

4:20:50  

Adds them to list

4:22:28  

Cuts coupons

Analyzing Activity for Experience Design 4:22:40  

Adds to list

4:23:17  

Finishes with coupon book

4:23:38 Consulting Kitchen

Looks in fridge

4:23:50  

Notes needs milk, eggs, Promise—has list with her on island by fridge

4:24:20  

Looks through fridge drawers—needs broccoli, onions—staples

4:25:10  

Checks freezer for frozen veggies, chicken, shrimp, steak, lamb—always

4:25:30 Distractions

Answers phone

4:26:10  

Hangs up from husband

4:26:30  

Needs hot Italian sausage—adds to list

4:26:36 Adding items to grocery list

Adds a pork roast to list

4:26:56  

Recalls recipe where vine tomatoes needed

4:27:16  

Needs fresh ginger

4:27:18  

Tends to baby

4:27:35  

Checks cupboards

4:27:45  

Adds crackers and cheese to list

4:27:55 Consulting Kitchen

Keeps looking in cupboards

4:28:06 Distractions

Starts music for baby

4:28:26 Adding items to grocery list

Adds Slim fast shakes & snack bars

4:29:00 Consulting Kitchen

Looks thru cupboard

4:29:20  

Organizes cupboards

4:29:35 Adding items to grocery list

Notes falafel mix

4:29:45  

Adds cucumbers and dressing to list

4:30:05  

Adds pitas to list

4:30:24  

Adds superbowl items from head—chips and dip, wings, etc.

4:30:56  

Adds peanut butter to list

4:31:16 Distractions

Goes over to baby—picks him up

4:31:55  

Finishes cupboards

4:32:15 Browse recipes

Gets out new cookbook to choose a recipe

4:32:26  

Browses book

4:32:38  

Adds fennel for recipe to list

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4:32:01  

Wonders how you buy saffron

4:33:20  

Browses book

4:33:34  

Closes book

4:33:45 Adding items to grocery list

Flips paper to make Babies R Us list

4:34:04 Distractions

Gets up and rinses baby soother

4:34:14 Clipping Coupons

Looks thru baby coupons

4:34:31  

Adds baby coupon items to list

4:34:45 Consulting Kitchen

Gets up to look in cupboard for size of formula cans

4:35:15

Makes list detailed in case Todd (husband) goes to store

Clipping Coupons

4:35:48  

Notes paper’s coupon

4:35:55  

Adds pampers to list along with discount

4:36:18  

Browses babies r us coupon book

4:36:32  

Notes $5 off $25 or more

4:36:41  

Decides to use that coupon later- good thru April

4:36:55 Adding items to grocery list

Remembers to add coffee

4:37:05  

Looks over list to make sure nothing forgotten

4:37:23 End of planning

Done

Appendix B The transformed scenario created by Cooking with Class. It’s Sidney and Paul again with their resolution to lose weight and eat healthier. On Saturday morning, Sidney starts her meal planning by looking at a few recipe books, which aren’t much help. She then goes online and finds our proposed web site, Meal Planning Central. She gets excited when she reads that the site is targeted at those wishing to eat healthier. Since it’s her first time visiting the site, she fills out a form and gets a username and password that she can enter when she returns. Sidney begins by looking for recipes that her family will like, one that don’t require much preparation time. She searches for ‘entrees’ that contain ‘chicken’ and sorts the results by cooking time. She finds several recipes in the list that would be great to try, so she adds them to her weekly meal plan (They are also automatically added to her

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personal online recipe box.) She finds more than seven recipes that she likes, so she adds a few to her personal recipe box for later weeks. Sidney remembers that her parents are coming over one night, so she changes the serving size of one of the recipes to ’8’ instead of ’4.’ The web site recalculates the measurements for the recipe and then automatically updates her grocery list. She prints her weekly meal plan to post on the fridge and prints out her recipes. She then asks the web site to generate her grocery list, thinking how great it is that she doesn’t have to add up or convert any ingredients. She looks over the list and decides to add some more items but has to go downstairs and look in her kitchen to check on what she has now. She goes back to the computer and checks the items in the grocery list that she already has in the kitchen. The computer updates the list. Sidney then adds staple items to the grocery list, including milk, cereal, paper towels, and cat food. She finds three of these items listed as staples on the site, and selects them so they are added to her list. She types in the fourth item, cat food, and it is added to her grocery list. It is also added to the list of staples for next time. Sidney feels like she’s done, so she prints her grocery list and notices it is grouped by produce, dairy, meat, and so on, so she doesn’t have to run all over the store looking for things. And, it’s nice that the list is stored in the computer in case she loses it. She bookmarks the web site before heading off to the grocery store, thinking that eating healthier isn’t as much work as she thought it would be.

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5 Feminist Rhetorics and Interaction Design: Facilitating Socially Responsible Design Jennifer Sano-Franchini Writing: an on-going practice concerned not with inserting a “me” into language, but with creating an opening where the “me” disappears while “I” endlessly come and go. —Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other

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his chapter takes a pedagogical approach to theorizing where feminist rhetorics and interaction design (IxD) can, and should, intersect. In so doing, I treat the classroom as a unique site of praxis, a space where sustained inquiry takes place, and where we are able to visualize and observe what the theories we espouse look like in practice. In other words, the description of student/user interaction and experience I present here is illustrative of the generative potential of tri-figuring feminisms, rhetoric, and IxD. To position oneself at the intersection of feminisms, rhetoric, and IxD enables the rhetor to conceive of writing/designing as a meaning-making activity that takes place through interactions that are gendered, culturally-contingent, historically and discursively codified, and with implications for power and privilege. Moreover, feminist rhetorics and IxD is another way—alongside community literacy, civic engagement, and other social justice approaches—of enabling feminist rhetors to use rhetorical, feminist, and cultural critique to conceptualize and create robust, compelling, human-centered, and complex experiences across digital and physical spaces for attending to issues of inequality, particularly in public discourse. Feminist rhetorics and IxD, together, present a mode of making change by designing new relational circuits and experiences for interacting with ideology. More than twenty-five years ago, Patricia Sullivan suggested that human computer interaction (HCI) work—on word processing in particular—could offer useful insights for computers and writing, arguing, HCI’s “inextricable linking of system and people makes human-computer interaction valuable for those of us in composition studies” (1989, p. 2). Twenty years later, Rosinski and Squire (2009) discussed the affordances of using HCI approaches within the writing classroom, suggesting that such an approach can help students re-conceptualize the idea of audience as users interacting with a digital interface. Carnegie (2009) furthermore theorized how HCI takes place via three modes of interactivity: multi-directionality, manipulability, and presence. This chapter extends on these works, offer-

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ing a vision for designing at the intersection of feminist rhetorics and interaction design (IxD). Specifically, this chapter discusses a number of related questions, including: 1) Why should we consider feminisms and IxD together—what is generated as a result of this constellation? 2) How does the merging of feminisms, rhetorics, and IxD lead to more nuanced technologies, products, policies, and services that serve the needs of diverse participants in ways that are still radically feminist? To engage these questions, I begin with a discussion of the places where feminisms and IxD intersect, in an effort to articulate possible mutual contributions that may be made across the two areas of inquiry. I then go on to describe a technical communication course I taught in the Fall 2014 and Spring 2016 semesters that is illustrative of feminist IxD, including the course arrangement, two student-produced prototyping projects, my pedagogical approach, and student-articulated outcomes.1 Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of some of the challenges that emerged with this course, along with some concluding thoughts.

Methodological Intersections Feminisms and IxD are areas of inquiry that share a number of concerns and values, but that do not often intersect. Bardzell (2010, p. 1301) argued, “Feminism is a natural ally to interaction design, due to its central commitments to issues such as agency, fulfillment, identity, equity, empowerment, and social justice.” To this I add that feminisms and IxD have much to offer one another, considering IxD’s concerns for social justice and engaging wicked problems (Kolko, 2011) in tandem with feminist rhetorical approaches that suggest that we engage in critical imagination, strategic contemplation (Kirsch and Royster, 2010), and imagining radical futures. Furthermore, IxD fits well within the existing parameters of rhetoric studies, considering IxD’s emphasis on users, goal-oriented approaches, and problem solving—concerns that are useful for not only refiguring audiences as users (Rosinski and Squire, 2009), but also effectively helping student writers creatively engage complex, multimodal, and embodied writing tasks in emerging technologies (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, 2007). While both areas are concerned with issues of social and political justice, I believe feminisms and IxD together can lead to more socially and politically conscious digital production.

1. This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board at Virginia Tech, and consent has been obtained from all participants whose work appears in this chapter.

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For readers who may not be familiar with IxD, IxD has been defined by key figures in several different ways. For instance, in Bill Moggridge’s (2002) seminal Designing Interactions, Gillian Crampton Smith said:

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In the same way that industrial designers have shaped our everyday life through objects that they design for our offices and for our homes, interaction design is shaping our life with interactive technologies—computers, telecommunications, mobile phones, and so on. If I were to sum up interaction design in a sentence, I would say that it’s about shaping our everyday life through digital artifacts—for work, for place, and for entertainment. That is, interaction designers shape people’s lives through interactive digital technologies. Norman (1998) defined IxD similarly, as focusing on “how people interact with technology. The goal is to enhance people’s understanding of what can be done, what is happening, and what just occurred. Interaction design draws on principles of psychology, design, art, and emotion to ensure a positive, enjoyable experience” (p. 5). In other words, Norman is invested in the epistemological function of design—the process of shaping the ways in which users imagine possibilities and cognitively process and memorialize events. It is moreover notable that Norman is concerned with not just usability, but also the pleasure of users—was the experience enjoyable? Kolko (2011) later defined IxD as a discursive process and expanded the approach to include both digital technologies as well as other modes of technological experience, whether that be considering how users interact with building architecture, designed objects, or institutional infrastructures: “the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service, or system. This dialogue is both physical and emotional in nature and is manifested in the interplay between form, function, and technology as experienced over time” (p. 15). In other words, Kolko takes a broad understanding of both design and technology, where IxD is not applied to only computing technologies or digital media, but it is also a way that designers have thought about how users interact with urban spaces, designed objects, and in other contexts. In brief, I understand IxD as an approach to design that is attentive to the micro-level processes by which users physically, cognitively, and emotionally interact with designed objects and experiences. Furthermore, IxD takes into account the potential political, cognitive, and ideological impacts of designed technologies. What this means is that IxD approaches should be centrally concerned with issues of access and equity. Thus, both feminisms

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and IxD provide distinct approaches for understanding the writing process as an embodied, even political, act.

Wicked Problems and Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies Largely attributed to Richard Buchanan, a wicked problems approach to design thinking was originally conceived of by “Horst Rittel in 1960s as an alternative to linear conceptions of the design process, and which suggests that there is a “fundamental indeterminacy in all but the most trivial design problems” (pp. 15–16). Buchanan went on to define wicked problems as a “class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing” (p. 15). Kolko builds on Buchanan’s work, centering wicked problems in the context of IxD via what he calls “social entrepreneurship.” Specifically, Kolko defines wicked problems as “a form of large-scale social or cultural problem that is difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. These dynamic, system problems are bucketed as ‘poverty’ or ‘education’ [and, we might add, sexism]—large containers that fail to identify the nuanced nature of the actual issues themselves” (p. 18). Scholars in composition studies and professional and technical communication have engaged the idea of using a wicked problems approach for some time, especially in scholarship on environmental rhetorics and risk communication (Blythe, Grabill, and Riley, 2008; Marback 2009; Wickman 2014; Cagle & Tillery, 2015). For instance, in arguing for a fuller turn to design in composition studies, Richard Marback (2009) offered that a wicked problems approach can move us toward “a focus on designing as an ethical activity” (p. 399). Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber (2012) argued that the work of a technical communicator is, in so many words, a “problem-solving activity”—problem-solving “not by providing straightforward answers but by providing tentatively structured procedures for understanding and acting in complex situations” (pp. 3–4). Moreover, technical communicators do not solve problems for once and for all, but rather contribute to the process of solving them (5). A wicked problems approach to design thinking also meshes well with a feminist rhetorical approach, which, as Sullivan (1992) has articulated, brings with it an exigency of transformation: “As both an ideology and praxis, feminism not only reinterprets but seeks to change the dominant, patriarchal structures and categories that have rendered women’s activities and social relations analytically invisible” (p. 40). Thus, rather than being interested in centering gender and sexuality as a mode of conceptualizing

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identity per se (though these are certainly important and worthwhile tasks), I am interested in what our histories of gender and sex discrimination can offer for rethinking discrimination and inequality more generally, whether in terms of race, class, able-bodiedness, or something else. Feminist rhetorical methodologies, including what Royster and Kirsch (2012) have referred to as critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation, are useful approaches for engaging a range of wicked problems, including, but not limited to, sexism and other kinds of inequality. According to Royster and Kirsch, critical imagination is a method of reflexive and curious inquiry that suggests that we “engage dialectically and dialogically, to actually use tension, conflicts, balances, and counter-balances more overtly as critical opportunities for inquiry in order to enable a conversation, even if only imaginatively, and simulate an interactive encounter” (p. 72). As such, critical imagination does not try to clean up tension and conflict, but to center them as important spaces for creative output. Strategic contemplation “suggests that researchers might linger deliberately inside of their research tasks as they investigate their topics and sources—imagining contexts for practices; speculating about conversations [ . . . ]; paying close attention to the spaces and places both they and the rhetorical subjects occupy” (pp. 84–5). Moreover, strategic contemplation is a recursive, dialogical, and multi-vocal practice, wherein researchers and rhetors—and I would add, designers—“stop for a time and think multidirectionally, from the outside in and the inside out, not just about the subject of study but also about themselves as the agents in the process” (p. 86). In other words, I understand strategic contemplation as coalescing with what Kristin Arola has referred to as “slow composition”—an American Indian rhetorical methodology that argues for slowing down our composing processes so that we might engage reflexively with the material, place-based, and epistemological experience of writing or making, considering our own positions and subjectivities within matrices of power. Through the term social circulation, Royster and Kirsch refer to the feminist practice of attending to how language, ideology, and power flow through and across relational social circuits—social circuits that are always unstable and in flux. As they explain, this approach “enables us to see metaphorically how ideas circulate not just across generations but also across places and regions in local, global, and transnational contexts” (p. 101). Furthermore, “Noticing such ebbs and flows within ever-changing, often ever-broadening circles of interaction enables us to see how the past can reach into the present and how the close at hand might reach toward the distant and further away, thus helping all of us to imagine a future worth work-

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ing toward as a more inclusive enterprise” (p. 101). In other words, a social circulation approach means that we must not only account for how meaning flows through history, and landscapes, but also how those meanings are contingent on access and power, as well as the potential future linkages that might follow. This approach is thus complementary to interaction designer Jon Kolko’s (2011) approach of “designing with the fourth dimension in mind,” which, he says, distinguishes IxD from user interface design.

Feminisms & IxD Seminar Course Description

To provide some context, Issues in Professional and Public Discourse (IPPD) is the senior-level capstone course for the Professional Writing major at a mid-Atlantic, doctoral-granting, research-intensive university. Each IPPD is themed, and in this course, we explored how technical and professional writing influence, and are influenced by, public discourse through a focus on feminisms and IxD. Feminism is a compelling frame of analysis for teaching IxD not only because it has been pervasive in recent news and popular media, but also because, as Cheryl Buckley (1986) has stated, “Women have been involved with design in a variety of ways—as practitioners, as theorists, consumers, historians, and as objects of representation. Yet a survey of the literature of design history, theory, and practice would lead one to believe otherwise. Women’s interventions, both past and present, are consistently ignored” (p. 3). Furthermore, STEM fields, including computer engineering, have often been critiqued as predominantly white and male. While there have been efforts to better include the perspectives of women and other marginalized groups in the teaching of technology (i.e., FemTechNet), there are still few models for guiding students through feminist approaches to digital production. To help students understand what feminisms and IxD mean and what the course would be about, I provided the following framing questions that we interrogated throughout the semester (See Appendix A): What is the relationship between feminism and design? What does it mean to think about communication more generally from a design perspective? How can feminisms enable socially responsible and responsive approaches to design? What do current conversations about feminism and human computer interaction (HCI) look like? How can feminist perspectives support user research, design, problem framing, prototyping, and design assessment? These questions would be used to help students achieve several learning outcomes, which I will come back to in a bit.

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Course Arrangement

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The sixteen-week course was arranged into five overlapping units that would help students engage in critical thinking, analysis, and problem solving using digital technologies: 1) What is/are feminism(s)? 2) IxD Basics; 3) Feminisms and Design; 4) Feminisms and HCI; and 5) Praxis. The first two sections are meant to help students understand concepts important to the class. For the first three weeks, students were introduced to the course and to each other, and we began with the question(s): What is/are feminism(s)? Specifically, I was interested in introducing students to the idea of feminisms as multiple and plural, and I wanted to highlight an ethos that enables co-existence amidst tension and complexity. That is, by representing feminisms (plural) as multiple and complex, I hoped to help students understand that feminism is not the uni-dimensional movement it tends to be portrayed as in popular media, but that feminists sometimes hold opposing viewpoints, that there are complex issues that don’t have simple right/wrong answers, and, perhaps most importantly, that it’s okay to disagree with one another. To do so, I assigned bell hooks’s (2000) Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. I found this text particularly useful because of its accessible language, its clear definition of feminism—“a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (xii)— and because it addresses some of the common misperceptions of feminism. For instance, hooks counters the idea that all feminists are bra-burning lesbians—though it must be noted in discussion that there is nothing wrong with being a bra-burning lesbian. I then assigned readings that comment on the moment when bell hooks called Beyoncé a terrorist, providing multiple perspectives on the statement. Finally, I highlighted feminist issues in the workplace, especially in technology-related fields, including the gender pay gap, biased assessment practices, and parental leave. The second unit was spent introducing students to basic concepts in IxD, using excerpts from Don Norman’s (1998) The Design of Everyday Things, Bill Moggridge’s (2007) Designing Interactions, Steve Krug’s (2005) Don’t Make Me Think, Cooper, Reimann & Cronin’s (2007) About Face, Dan Saffer’s (2013) Microinteraction, and Jon Kolko’s (2011) Thoughts on Interaction Design. The third and fourth units were designed to help students consider where and how the seemingly disparate concepts of feminism and IxD might intersect. Unit 3 focused on the intersection of feminisms and design, and students read about feminist issues within art, urban spaces, and graphic design, including Cheryl Buckley’s (1986) “Made in Patriarchy,” and excerpts from The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (1998), Rothschild and Cheng’s (1999) Design and Feminism: Re-visioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things, and Weisman’s (1994) Discrimination by Design. The fourth unit focused on fem-

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inisms and human-computer interaction. Over the course of these four sections, students read widely in a range of genres, including scholarly publications, news and popular articles, blog posts and a Tumblr site, comics, textbooks, and videos. Students were required to write weekly 500-word responses to the readings, posted to our learning management system forum. We then discussed the readings in class, and each student took a turn facilitating discussion for one class session. The fifth and longer Praxis section (six weeks) focused on teaching students how to take the theories and ideas they read and discussed and apply them to a “wicked problem” of their choosing through a final prototyping project (See Appendix B for handout). For this project, students were challenged to work in small groups of 3–4 to design a conceptual prototype— for a mobile application, game, website, interface, performance, or something else—that they could justify as feminist IxD. I also explained that prototypes did not have to speak explicitly to issues of gender, but should consider feminism in some way, for instance, via inclusion and enabling participation of users who might not typically be included. In other words, their prototypes might aim to work toward any of the following feminist goals (this list is not intended to be exhaustive): • making “invisible work” visible; • challenging current conceptions of labor and interrogating how particular kinds of labor are valued; • facilitating “capacity building”; • developing a model for including diverse users in a specific conversation or making activity; • decentralizing hierarchies within a specific organizational context; • challenging sexism in a specific context; or • deconstructing binary thinking with relation to gender, sexuality, or other. To do so, students worked collaboratively using a range of technologies, including paper, pens, sticky notes, scissors, audio recorders, Balsamiq, and Adobe Illustrator, to creatively apply feminist theory and IxD principles toward solving their “wicked problem.” Students learned different methods of visualizing information and use over time, including affinity diagrams and concept maps, and they were introduced to strategies for learning about users, including think aloud protocols (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Affinity diagram for The DownLow, detailed below. To create this chart, Irene explains, “We made a massive chart with post-it notes that showed all of the categories and subcategories for our app.” Main categories include: relationships (What’s a healthy relationship?; reproduction (Where do babies come from?); sex (What IS sex?); personal care (How do you take care of your body?); anatomy (What does your body look like?); sexual preferences (Who do you think is cute?).

Jennifer Sano-Franchini

This approach represents a way of incorporating strategic contemplation in the classroom, engaging in a kind of “slow composition”—rather than having students produce a mobile technology from scratch over the course of a semester, we spent the semester thinking through a variety of complex issues before slowly working through the early stages of design. In a sense, the final project, which for some groups resulted in sixty pages of work, was essentially a big, recursive brainstorming/invention activity. This approach was new for some students, who asked about the process of creating the

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“final product,” most likely concerned about the time it would take to learn complex computing technologies to produce the applications. Students were assigned to submit five deliverables for the project: a project proposal including the work, methods, timeline for completion, and personnel responsibilities; the prototype using the technology or technologies of their choosing; an informal work-in-progress presentation meant for the groups to solicit feedback; an 8–10 page white paper explaining how the prototype works, as well as the rationale and implications of the prototype, drawing from feminisms and interaction design; and an individual reflection on the project. By the end of the semester, I was impressed by the innovative prototypes students had designed, including applications for facilitating civil discourse online; debunking double standards in popular culture; responsibly yet openly teaching young people about their bodies and sexuality; teaching students about career paths in non-gendered ways; and arranging meet-ups while negating bias, whether based on race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, age, or appearance. Each of these applications are robust examples of technology design that takes into account humanistic concerns, while also working to help students see how they are able to creatively come up with real solutions to complex problems. In the section that follows, I discuss two student-produced prototypes that resulted from the course.2 These prototypes are strong examples of how students are not only able to creatively apply conceptual theories from feminisms and IxD to solve wicked problems, but also cogently articulate a rhetorically persuasive rationale for these designs.

Two Student-Produced Prototypes: The DownLow and Equalipop The DownLow

The DownLow is a mobile application that was designed by one group of students who decided that they wanted to tackle the wicked problem of opening up conversations about sex within our culture. In other words, the immense task these students chose to address is the challenge of substantially shifting the cultural discourse around sex—no small feat. In their white paper, Irene, Carina, and Samantha explain that the group became interested in the topic of sex education “because we all feel that our sexual educations as children were lacking and we are continually shocked at how taboo the pics of sex and the body are within our culture.” In her individual 2. All students who produced these prototypes have provided informed consent. Pseudonyms are used in place of actual names.

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project reflection, Samantha explains, “this incorrect or incomplete knowledge meant that we grew up without really understanding our own bodies in a healthy way.” Irene added, “I think having a resource to consult, and not relying on the awkward, ambiguous definitions provided by parents, would’ve been very helpful for me as a kid.” In class, we had talked about the ways in which particular designs encourage women to feel ashamed of their bodies; for instance, sanitary napkin disposal bags send the message that women’s bodies are dirty—as if the trash needs to be protected from the napkin. We also talked about how the discourse on masturbation (or, lack thereof) is highly gendered, in ways that encourage women to feel ashamed of feelings of sexual desire and that can make men feel inadequate about their sex drives. We talked as a class about the design of sex education, with some students sharing their own experiences of sex ed. There was a moment when several students shared that in their experience, the boys were excused from class, and in some cases even rewarded with pizza, once it came time to talk about periods, ovaries, and child birth. To combat this wicked problem, the group designed “a smartphone/ tablet application called The DownLow that serves as a resource for children going through puberty” (see Figure 2). Moreover, the group wanted to present information about sex and the body in a way that was not mired in cultural judgment and that would “decrease the confusion and shame that some children feel when they begin to go through puberty.” The group chose to focus on topics that would be relevant to children going through puberty, like masturbation, sex, and body care, as well as providing a non-binary approach to gender, while also avoiding what they call “common pitfalls of sex education”: “twee or quaint language,” which can obscure biological facts; abstinence and moralistic undertones, which work as “scare tactics that do not help children learn about their bodies”; omitting uncomfortable topics like masturbation, which can send the message that masturbation is “wrong or abnormal”; and binary representations of gender, which can alienate non-binary children. The group defined their primary users as children ages 8–10, around the time many children start going through puberty and encountering sexual terminology they may not understand. The students note that parents and school programs may also find the application useful, as it provides a more open and perhaps updated approach to teaching their children about sex. During an in-class workshop of their design, I shared that even as a parent of a toddler, I’m a bit intimidated and baffled by how I will talk with my daughter about the topic of sex as she grows older, and would thus find this application useful.

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Figure 2. The DownLow prototype, using Balsamiq. Note the featured word of the week: uterus. The group explains that this feature is intended to “encourage children to look up a word they might not otherwise have thought to learn about.” Once users click on a particular topic, they will find a video, possibly a popular culture usage of the term, along with text describing the term and analyzing the popular culture usage. The women note two primary challenges in the development of this application, the first of which is engaging users: “None of us knew any 8–10 year olds well enough to consider asking questions about sex, so our user-testing was limited to asking parents and friends what kind of information they might’ve known when they were that age or what they would feel comfortable discussing with children,” which was appropriate, as parents were considered one of their target audiences. However, Irene notes, “if this app was actually going to be developed it would be important to test actual 8–10 year olds for appropriateness of content, ease of use, and engagement with the topics.” Samantha explained that she asked a female peer to test the application. She says, In talking to her, I realized how subliminal all of our ideas about sex really are. Although she agreed to participate, she was incredibly uncomfortable discussing the application in a public setting. Also, she had never heard of ‘non-binary’ genders or sexes. This really highlighted for me just how prevalent these assumptions are in our culture, but user testing also showed me how valuable incorporating other opinions into our design is. For instance, since she had never heard of several of these words, the organization structure of our app was, at times, confusing to her. She goes on to say that the group used her comments to make some changes to the app.

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The second challenge had to do with parental controls, which involved the rights of parents on the one hand, versus privacy, transparency, and open education on the other. In her individual reflection on the project, Irene writes, “I worry that parents of male children might turn off all the female anatomy definitions, further adding to childhood confusion of the kind discussed in class. On the other hand, I do see a lack of parental controls being problematic for some parents.” She goes on to rationalize that for the current prototype, the group chose not to include parental controls because it “seemed most in line with feminist principles of inclusivity and transparency. If the goal of the app had been pure marketability, it might’ve been a good choice to include parental controls, but for a project meant to experiment with feminist design principles, we thought it was prudent to ensure that children would have access to all app content.” Samantha concluded that “the development of The DownLow really required me to think creatively, realistically, and complexly. Debating which topics to include, how to include them, and where to include them forced me to take into account a wide audience with values that might be very different than my own.” Carina elaborated, “The process of making design and content decisions is extremely difficult as one must take into account their own design goals, their users’ goals, designing to be inclusive while also targeting a specific audience, and engaging users by providing a smooth and enjoyable interaction.” Both women point to the ways in which they thought in terms of complexity by going through the process of design. They highlight the difficulties of designing for multiple stakeholders with multiple investments in how sex is discussed. Equalipop

Equalipop is “an interactive application that calls for open discussion of sexism and misogyny in pop culture” by “debunking double standards” in popular culture. That is, the wicked problem this group chose to address is the problem of sexism and misogyny in popular culture. In her individual reflection, Lisa explained, “it is frustrating to see people being treated differently and negatively for repeating the same actions as someone else.” Equalipop works to “debunk double standards” through a feature called the “Daily Double Standard” that presents users with two images that, when placed side-by-side, represent a double standard in popular culture (see figure 3). As Charmaine put it, the group “aimed to create an application that was entertaining, but thoughtful.” The example the students provided was that of Solange Knowles assaulting Jay-Z in an elevator, alongside Ray Rice dragging his wife out of an elevator after he had assaulted her. The aim of this comparison was to show how the discourse and recourse sur-

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rounding these two incidents contrasted, with implications for how we talk about violence in relation to gender more generally. Moreover, the students were interested in bringing together double standards across cultures that are stereotypically gendered as feminine (pop music) and masculine (men’s sports). In their white paper, the group explained that they believe consumers of popular culture should be encouraged to reflect on moments of sexism and double standards in popular media. Their target audience is young adults ages 18–30 with an interest in pop culture.

Figure 3. Equalipop prototype showing front page, with the Daily Double Standard and the first mode of user interaction: a yes/no rating system. “When a person sees the two examples next to each other, they will be able to ask themselves questions as to why one is wrong and why the other is acceptable.” This group’s self-defined goals for their design were to: reveal sexism and misogyny in popular culture; highlight the double-standards present within popular culture; appeal to both men and women; and create a space for open dialogue on issues of sexism and misogyny in popular culture, including news and other current events, music, movies, television, celebrities, and sports. Besides using examples from across popular culture, the group describes how they thought through issues of gender inclusivity in their logo design (see figure 4). Some peers in class noted that the name of the application seemed a bit feminine, so the group worked to use a neutralizing font, tagline, and color scheme that they felt was not overly gendered.

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Figure 4. Logo Design for Equalipop: Debunking double standards. The group encouraged and facilitated user participation on five levels: reading the Daily Double Standard, deciding on whether or not they agree that the Daily Double Standard is indeed a double standard and voting based on their decision, commenting on the Daily Double Standard, leaving feedback on user comments, and blogging via Equaliblog (see Figures 3, 5, and 6). Thus, users are able to interact with the critical issues of the content, and engage in a dialogue with each other in ways that can be more passive as well as more active. Equaliblog, for instance, is intended for users “to submit their in-depth discussions related to double standards, feminism, or inequality in pop culture.” The group explains that they felt “it was important to have a forum for users to discuss issues in more depth.” As such, the process of building Equalipop facilitated for the group what Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2012) have referred to as a key role of the technical communicator: to “create civil social spaces for stakeholders to engage in productive discussion.”

Figure 5. Equalipop prototype showing a second mode of user interaction: popup commenting feature.

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Figure 6. Equalipop prototype showing a fifth, and more substantive mode of user interaction: Equaliblog. The wireframes above show how users are able to start a blog post. Drawing on Bardzell’s “Feminist HCI,” the group offers, “feminism has far more to offer than point out instances of sexism after the fact” (1308). Moreover, “feminism has enormous potential to affect design practice directly, helping us to generate concrete new design directions and new approaches to studying users” (1308). As a result of this project, Jessica said, “Developing EqualiPop and writing our white paper involved extensive ‘connections across multiple texts, objects, and bodies’ (course objective 3). We used several course readings to develop EqualiPop—especially readings involving sexism, pop culture, interaction design, and designing for ‘everybody.’” Lisa explained that she was encouraged to expand her repertoire of double standards, considering also the double standards that impact those who are different from herself. Moreover, this project, too, raised complex ethical questions regarding the relationship between developer-user, and issues of power within that relationship. For instance, Lisa wondered, “Is it ethical to ‘manipulate people into thinking the picture would reveal one thing’ and ‘mess with people’s heads.’” She explains, “I thought it would be a good idea to try and describe a situation and make it seem as if the situation is about a woman. Then when the person taps to reveal the picture to see what the double standard is explaining, it would actually be a [man].” She says she “thought

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it would be fun to mess with people’s heads like that,” but reasoned that “it would be unethical and very biased.” Even with different levels of user interaction, both The DownLow and Equalipop are examples that demonstrate creative, robust, and socially responsible design thinking that resulted from combining feminist rhetorics and IxD.

Pedagogy In this course, I took a three-prong pedagogical approach that emphasized the following features: 1) drawing critical connections, 2) scaffolding experiences, and 3) multidirectional learning. These features are described in more detail below. Drawing Critical Connections

Because the ability to draw connections is a crucial skill for critical thinking, I stressed the importance of making connections across readings, ideas, and popular and personal events throughout the course. As a result, students effectively discussed how feminist values and concepts were relevant not only to contexts described in assigned readings, like gender in the workplace or in art history, but also the Gamergate controversy, representations of sex assault on college campuses, and women athletes, including why our institutions’ highly ranked women’s soccer team is not nearly as celebrated on campus as its less successful football team, while still emphasizing how, in each case, conceptions of gender are rhetorically influenced though communication design. This emphasis on drawing connections facilitated students’ ability to speak to points that they found most interesting in an engaged and nuanced way, and to help students carry those ideas with them through the semester. Perhaps more significantly, however, this approach also empowered students with the agency to innovate and create new knowledge—rather than being asked to demonstrate coverage of existing ideas, students were guided through a process of combining a set of compelling ideas and responding to those ideas through design. Scaffolding Experiences

Secondly, I focused on purposefully scaffolding assignments and activities such that they would facilitate students’ ability to consider complex ideas deeply and from multiple angles, and use those ideas to develop their own theoretical frameworks that they would then apply in a variety of ways. Essentially, I see this as what Kolko describes as designing with the fourth dimension in mind: this fourth-dimensional pattern of use entails “under-

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standing how time plays a role in the use of a product,” by designing through the long term consequences of use. For example, early in the semester, we as a class brainstormed a list of feminist ideas, values, and goals based on our readings and internet research in a Google Document. Students were then asked to apply that feminist theoretical framework to our classroom space. Specifically, they used the framework that they came up with to describe what they believed a feminist classroom would look like, both in terms of physical space and ethos, and we talked about how we could make our own course a “feminist” course. Students then took that same framework to write a feminist rhetorical analysis of a cultural object of their choosing, which included aprons, music videos, and games. As we began talking about the relationship between feminism and design, students worked in small groups to design a feminist space of their choosing, leading to sketches of what they imagined a feminist grocery store or public restrooms would look like, and discussions of what made that space feminist. Next, students drew on our class-produced feminist framework alongside class discussions and readings to collaboratively develop a list of one hundred “wicked problems” relevant to feminism (see Appendix C). We then used this list that we created as a class to group students for the final project: students identified problems that they were most interested in addressing and were grouped based on these interests. After each small group identified the one wicked problem they were most interested in tackling, they were challenged to use an IxD ideation approach of coming up with one hundred solutions to that wicked problem (see Figure 7). Students’ final prototyping projects would be a materialization of one of those solutions. Through this long process and through a series of scaffolded activities, students were able to critically apply feminist and IxD concepts in multiple learning activities that built upon one another, both for analysis and creative intervention. Multidirectional Learning

Finally, I highlighted multidirectional learning, where students were not only learning from texts, the instructor, each other, and the designed experiences of the course, but the instructor also learned from all of these elements, and the course and assigned texts were modified, revised, and/or reconceptualized based on the people in it (see Figure 8).

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Figure 7. Ideation session: First page of one hundred solutions to the wicked problems of opening up conversations about sex.

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Figure 8. Diagram of multidirectional learning. For instance, we all worked to create a feminist space of mutual respect and inclusivity. Students contributed to this space by engaging in open dialogue about sometimes difficult topics, oftentimes validating competing points of view while also bringing in their own experiences and backgrounds. I worked to facilitate a respectful and inclusive classroom by deploying a feminist pedagogy that understands students/users as important sources of knowledge. For example, as we discussed issues like gender inequality, I quickly saw that there were students who were better able to model respectful yet critical disagreement than I, and I worked to learn from them. Rather than giving students my “answers,” I guided students through the learning process on their own terms, mostly by standing to the side and acting as a facilitator, while still working toward our stated learning outcomes. At the same time, I strived for transparency, setting clear parameters, providing examples whenever possible, and providing feedback early and often. In addition, the curriculum was adapted according to the needs and concerns of its users (students). After meeting the students and learning a bit about their interests and backgrounds, I opted to add course readings that dealt with issues of hegemonic masculinity, gender and the military, and anti-feminism, including the Women Against Feminism Tumblr site. Later, because our time in the course was limited, I provided students the option to vote, using a Google poll, for whether they preferred a tutorial on Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop.

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I also taught by role-modeling behaviors, in order to help students learn how to engage in the kinds of activities they were being asked to do: I facilitated class discussion before asking each student to take a turn facilitating discussion. I collaborated with the entire class to build a feminist theoretical framework using Google Docs before students developed their own frameworks to write a feminist rhetorical analysis, and to collaboratively design a feminist space and an application prototype. I also modeled, in my teaching, what I referred to as feminist project management by emphasizing inclusivity, collaboration, and decentralizing hierarchies, explaining how it might be applicable to other professional settings. Furthermore, I argue, the pedagogies described here are examples of feminist IxD enacted via educational experience. Student-Stated Learning Outcomes

Using the course arrangement and pedagogical strategies described in the previous sections of this chapter, this course was designed to shape a particular feminist- and IxD-informed learning experience. Through this pedagogical and designed experience, students reported having achieved several learning outcomes. Specifically, students articulated that learning in seven key areas: 1) ability to draw connections across feminisms and IxD, 2) reconceptualizing design in robust ways, 3) critically engaging technology, 4) ability to develop problem solving strategies and application of theoretical concepts, 5) collaboration, 6) understanding writing/composing as ideological/political, and 7) drawing applications between feminisms and IxD to professional goals (see Table 1). These seven areas have been extracted from students’ final reflective forum posts; toward the end of the semester, students were directed to respond to any one of the following prompts that encouraged them to continue to draw connections across what they were learning: • Connect what you learned in class throughout the semester to your (professional) identity or approach to professional writing. • Connect what you learned in class throughout the semester to your future goals, whatever they might be. • Apply what you learned in class throughout the semester to a current event/debate/topic.  • Describe how you achieved the stated learning outcomes over the course of the semester, and what you hope to do with what you’ve learned. What is notable, then, is how students articulated the seven learning outcomes in response to a prompt that was quite open-ended. Furthermore, these student-stated learning outcomes overlap with—and extend be-

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yond—the program-stated learning outcomes provided at the beginning of the semester. I suggest that we consider how these student-stated learning outcomes are potentially indicative of outcomes for merging feminist rhetorical methodologies and IxD more generally.3 Several students reported that through the course, they learned to draw connections across feminisms and IxD—two areas that seemed incompatible when they entered the course. For instance, “I had never thought of applying feminist ideas to the design of software or interactions with software and hardware, though now I can’t imagine why. I think most of the reason I had never thought of design as a feminist field or as a place to apply feminism is because I separated issues of use and access from feminism. They weren’t connected in my mind until we explored ideas in IxD in the second unit.” Another student articulated feminist IxD as emphasizing the importance of socially-responsible design, while another realized that she had been doing feminist IxD without calling it as much, giving a name to concepts she’d already been implementing in her professional work. Students also explained that they learned to re-conceptualize design in robust ways, while others made statements that demonstrated a critical engagement with technology. For example, one student remarked, Through my internships and other classes, design has always been something that should sell a product, make money, or attract the target audience. However, this class has shown me that design can mean so much more. Design can be inclusive, but it can also be discriminatory. I have always loved design, and this class made me realize the power that design holds. I learned that technology and design create frameworks through which people view the world and conceptualize ideas. I wanted to go into marketing before I took this class, but now I am considering working for a non-profit or a more socially responsible company. I want to design and create content that will impact people in a socially responsible manner, instead of just designing content that will help a company sell more products. Another student mentioned, “The concepts I gained from this course are already show-ing up in my designs” through a more robust and inclusive way of conceptualizing users. 3. Even though I am proud of this course and the work students produced, I believe it is important to note that there are, of course, ways it could be improved. I encountered several challenges in designing the course—challenges that may be applicable outside the classroom as well. Namely, I would rethink issues of time management, prioritizing user research even more than I did, and actively encouraging students to reflexively locate themselves in their work.

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One of the other most valuable things I learned in this class is how to approach problems in my work. It is easy to point out issues, like sexist writing or ableist design, but it is not so easy to critique them in ways that give them a platform to start fixing the issue at hand. This class really highlighted the need to not just point out problems, but to really work for feasible, realistic solutions. I feel like this will be a really valuable tool in the workplace, because it will allow me to not only help others with their work, but also to work on my own projects from a framework of solving problems instead of trying to minimize them. Several students also cited how much they valued the collaborative, discussion-based aspect of the course: “Working in groups allowed productive conversation, but it also further exposed each and every one of us to, [. . .] new perspectives. I never really thought about women having problems in the video game industry, or how important it is to support our women’s sports teams.” Another student described her process in detail: I feel like the class discussions helped the most to teach me about feminisms. The readings were useful prompts for discussion, because after reading I would think one way, but then going into class discussion allowed me to see how everyone else in the class viewed or was effected differently by the same piece. I think that allowing different view points to be heard, addressed, and discussed really helped me to form a wholesome view of feminism, while allowing me to recognize and be conscious of the way the others might think. Perhaps as a result of these sorts of collaborations, at least two students say that they have become more cognizant of issues of sexism and bias in their writing. Finally, several students drew connections between feminisms and IxD to their professional goals. For instance, “It was incredibly helpful for me, especially as I graduate in less than 20 days, to talk about the career-related topics in feminism. The gender pay gap, the male-dominated technology field, and women’s issues in the workplace are all valuable topics to discuss—especially when you’re about to enter the workforce. These discussions have affected my professional identity by giving me a little more confidence and perspective to tackle possible workplace/job search issues.”

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Conclusion Based on the experience of designing and teaching/facilitating this course, and looking back at the materials students produced months later, I argue that drawing feminist rhetorics and IxD together has much potential for moving the two areas toward mutual and complementary goals of developing solutions for wicked problems. Specifically, feminist strategies of critical imagination, strategic essentialism, and social circulation has much potential for serving, too, as IxD terms of engagement. IxD has certain inclinations that line up well with feminisms; however, I argue that taking a feminist IxD approach means consciously and intentionally drawing and learning from the history of gender inequality in designing interactions. By bringing a feminist lens to IxD, for instance, interaction designers may be afforded greater dimension as they conceptualize users in ways that are inclusive and as they think through use over time in ways that are ideologically and politically reflexive. In rhetorical studies and professional and technical communication, the construction of meaning can be conceptualized as a challenging ethical problem with varying results for diverse stakeholders. IxD offers another robust, viable, and pragmatic approach for realizing feminist goals of equality and inclusivity. Finally, I offer that bringing feminism, rhetoric, and IxD together might help us to approach the adjacent problem of the exclusionary conceptions of professionalism in a corporate capitalist economy.

References Bardzell, S. (2010). Feminist HCI: Taking stock and outlining an agenda for design.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1301–1310. N.p.: ACM. Buckley, C. (1986). Made in patriarchy: Toward a feminist analysis of women and design. Design Issues, pp. 3–14. Blythe, S., Grabill, J. T., and Riley, K. (2008). “Action research and wicked environmental problems: Exploring appropriate roles for researchers in professional communication.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 22(3), 272-298. Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design issues, pp. 5–21. Cagle, L. E., & Tillery, D. (2015). Climate change research across disciplines: the value and uses of multidisciplinary research reviews for technical communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 24(2), pp. 147–63. Carnegie, T. A. M. (2009). Interface as exordium: The rhetoric of interactivity. Computers and Composition, 26(3), pp. 164–73.

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Cooper, A., Reimann, R., and Cronin, D. (2007). About face 3: The essentials of interaction design. John Wiley & Sons. Guerrilla Girls (1998). The Guerrilla Girls’ bedside companion to the history of Western art. New York: Penguin. hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. London: Pluto Press. Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selber, S. A. (Eds.) (2012). Solving problems in technical communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kolko, J. (2010). Thoughts on interaction design. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Krug, S. (2005). Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to web usability. India: Pearson. Marback, R. (2009). Embracing wicked problems: The turn to design in composition studies. College Composition & Communication, 61(2), p. 385. Moggridge, B. (2007). Designing interactions (Vol. 1). Cambridge: MIT press. Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. New York: Basic books, 2013. Rosinski, P., & Squire, M. (2009). Strange bedfellows: Human-computer interaction, interface design, and composition pedagogy. Computers and Composition, 26(3), 149–163. Rothschild, J., & Cheng, A. (1999). Design and feminism: Re-visioning spaces, places, and everyday things. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Royster, J. J., & Kirsch, G. E. (2012). Feminist rhetorical practices: New horizons for rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Saffer, D. (2013). Microinteractions: Designing with details. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. Sullivan, P. A. (1992). Feminism and methodology in composition studies. In G. Kirsch and P. A. Sullivan (Eds.), Methods and methodology in composition research. pp. 37–61. Sullivan, P. (1989). Human-computer interaction perspectives on word-processing issues. Computers and Composition, 6(3), pp. 11–33. Weisman, L. K. (1994). Discrimination by design: A feminist critique of the man-made environment. Champaigne, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wickman, C. (2014). Wicked problems in technical communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 44(1), pp. 23–42.

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6 Personas as Rhetorically Rich and Complex Mechanisms for Design Erin Friess

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t its core, experience architecture is about enabling designers to create rhetorically grounded experiences that are useful, usable, and desirable. By “rhetorically grounded,” I mean experiences that are rooted in the wants of the audience, the expertise of the designers, and the needed functionality of the experience. The creation of such rhetorically grounded experiences requires an equally rhetorically grounded process in which those experiences are developed. However, the process for the development of those experiences is not necessarily rhetorically balanced. Frequently, the process either leans toward a “designer as god” model (in which experience development stems from designer impetus) or a “data as god” model (in which experience development stems from user-derived data). What experience architecture requires is an untilted, more balanced model in which designer expertise and user data together inform designed experiences. A rhetorically balanced process for developing experiences is certainly no easy thing. However, bringing the increasing popular tool of personas (Cooper, 1999) into the process may allow for a more balanced rhetorically grounded process for the development of experiences. Personas, which are fictional representations of actual end users that are developed only after intensive user-based research, could possibly function as a mechanism to merge the expertise of the designer with the data of the user and balance the process for experience development. Therefore, in this chapter, I will explain in further detail the imbalances that potentially exist in XA processes and then discuss how the persona may be a tool experience architects can incorporate into their development process to rhetorically balance their processes.

Design Processes: Trying to Find the Rhetorical Balance For the past thirty years, the field of design has embraced the notion of engaging with users during the design process. The initial push to mine users for information during experience development was, in many ways, an attempt to realign a process that was arhetorical. Prior to the inclusion of users in the design process, the system-centered approach to design positioned the designer as god: what designers wanted in an experience was put

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in an experience (Johnson, 1998). As others have noted, this over-reliance on the expertise of the designer is highly problematic for the success of the experience. Landauer notes designers’ “intuitions about what will make a system useful and usable for the people who will be using it are, on average, poor” (1995). Norman supports that claim by stating: “Even the best trained and best motivated designers can go wrong when they listen to their instincts instead of testing their ideas on actual users. Designers know too much about their products to be objective judges” (1988). Thus, design shifted away from the “designer as god” model and instead adopted a user-centered design (UCD) process, which supported the notion that research should be conducted with real people who are likely to use the product and that the results of the research should drive the design solution (Gould and Boise, 1983; Gould and Lewis, 1985). This adoption of a UCD approach gave a voice to the users of the interface—the rhetorical audience. By grounding solutions within audience needs, UCD essentially transformed design from an arhetorical process that only emphasized the product and the designers to a rhetorical endeavor in which the audience (the users) and their needs were as critical an element to the design process as the rhetor (designer). However, over time, UCD became subsumed by what Johnson calls the “ubiquity paradox”: the growth of UCD meant that knowledge of the UCD spanned contexts, disciplines, and functions, but that growth also meant UCD was treading closely to becoming a “label for marketing,” placing the term itself in danger of being “render[ed] hollow at best and meaningless at worst” (2010). In that growth, some took UCD and user data to be the miracle salve to product and experience woes. This reliance upon user data can be illustrated within the experience of Google’s former lead visual designer, Douglas Bowman (2009). At Google during Bowman’s tenure, every decision had to be grounded in data derived from users. When a Google team couldn’t decide between two shades of blue, a test was ordered on forty-one shades to determine which shade performed the best with users. Additionally, Bowman was asked to empirically defend whether a border should be three, four, or five pixels. According to Bowman, at Google, data became “a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring decisions.” Indeed, he ultimately found that a “design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” was unsustainable, and he left the company. Ultimately, user-based, data-driven design as Bowman reported at Google reveals that UCD isn’t just a process that involves user interactions to guide designer decisions, but a process in which user-derived data dictates outcomes, a process in which design decisions are entirely based upon

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the quantifiable data gathered from users. This represents a process that is just as arhetorical as the system-centered approach that ignored users. In the system-centered design process, the users had been denied a voice and were given one through UCD. Now, as Bowman’s example illustrates, data was god. With such reliance on user-derived data, the experience design process had once again become an arhetorical endeavor, this time by silencing the designers themselves and giving the sole voice of design to the user. Thus, it is apparent that designers have struggled to maintain a rhetorical balance—to what degree should designer knowledge and expertise or data derived from user interaction inform design solutions? Should decisions stem from the data produced from users or from innovations developed by the designer? Indeed, as Gajendar points out, “users do not always know what they want, or how to express their desires clearly” (2012). Relying solely on user data could possibly eliminate inspired solutions because the end users simply did not elucidate them. Nonetheless, seeing user data as a divining rod that would lead companies to clear solutions for design challenges, the field of design has leaned more and more heavily on basing decisions and solutions upon data collected through user-centered means, be it audience analysis interviews, usability testing, diary studies, or focus groups. In a previous study, I examined such an arhetorical design process, and I found two major implications (Friess, 2010). First, such a reliance on user-data makes the design process logos-centric. Logos (the argument within the communication itself) is one of the three rhetorical appeals defined by Aristotle, along with pathos (the emotional state of the hearer) and ethos (the character of the speaker). According to Aristotle, arguments (such as a design decision) must be presented after considering all the available means of persuasion. While a large amount of user data may support the logical appeals of the argument, user data cannot inherently support the ethical or pathetic appeals of the argument. By limiting the acceptable appeals only to logos, the design process becomes arhetorical; indeed, it perhaps becomes a dialectic pursuit. Second, such a reliance on user data at the expense of the designer’s voice can lead to a loss of rhetorical agency. Rhetorical agency, according to Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, is “the capacity to act . . . to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized and heeded by others.” As I stated in the previous study, “in a rhetorical design process, designers would have the power to contemplate the persuasiveness of their own intuitions, the anticipated user experience, and the user data to inform their product design” (2005). However, in such a logos-driven system, designers only have user data at their disposal and are stripped of their rhetorical agency. Lack-

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ing rhetorical agency, designers, who may have personal experiences, extensive training, or a spark of previously hidden insight, have no capacity to act beyond what is dictated by the data. User data is, no doubt, an invaluable tool for designers and a critical component of design decision-making. Yet, an over-reliance on user data is just as detrimental to the rhetoricity of the design process as ignoring users completely: “Bracketing emotion and character to the sake of user data does not make a design process ‘more’ human centered” (Friess, 2010). Indeed, we need designers to be empowered to “assess the pathos and the ethos of . . . data to contextualize it” (Friess, 2010). What is not needed is, as Bill Moggridge describes, an automaton capable of processing data but incapable to advocate “a subjective, empathetic approach to design” (2007). What is needed is an intervention that can allow both designers and users to have their voices heard, enabled, and respected during the design process. One such mechanism may be personas.

Personas: A User-Centered Mechanism for Design Process One way in which a more rhetorically balanced approach of user-centered design for experience architecture may be achieved is through the use of personas. The term personas was coined by Alan Cooper in his 1999 work The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Personas “are not real people,” but “hypothetical archetypes of actual users” that, while imaginary, “are defined with significant rigor and precision.” According to Tharon Howard, “a persona is a distillation of data which has been collected through a variety of ethnography, survey, user testing, and other empirical research techniques to produce an ‘archetypal’ image of a particular user” (2015). In other words, personas are “amalgams of and representations of a certain set of potential users” (Friess, 2010). Personas have been previously noted for the potential ability to bring empathy to bear on the design process (Adlin & Pruitt; Miaskiewicz). Putting together valid personas can be a daunting and intensive task. First, designers conduct fieldwork, typically in the form of interviews or observations, with a selection of users. Once the data is collected, the designers assess the data to identify themes, patterns, and commonalities. With those patterns in hand, the designers then develop the actual persona(s). Each persona is given a reasonable name, a realistic photo, and a set of goals. Additionally, the persona is given a narrative that contains “a vivid story concerning the needs of the persona in the context of the product being designed” (Miaskiewicz and Kozar, 2011, p. 419). Instead of working with a requirements sheet that is divorced from a human element, personas embed the needs of the product within a seemingly real character. Personas are then placed throughout the workspace on posters and handouts

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(and even on mouse pads and other less traditional items) to inform design decisions (Pruitt and Grudin, 2003). From initial audience analysis to the completion of the persona, fully fledged data-driven personas often take 1–4 months to create (McGinn and Kotamraju, 2008; Neiters et al, 2007; Pruitt and Grudin, 2003). Personas were originally proposed as a mechanism to meet UCD’s objective of keeping user needs at the forefront of the design process and to enable improved design decision making, but as they have matured, personas have also been purported to aid in communication, enhance identification with users, and prevent the need to revise the product at the end of the designing process (Miaskiewicz and Kozar, 2011). However, according to Miakiewicz and Kozar, despite the apparent adoption of personas by the design community, “the present literature on personas fails to research consensus on the significant and universal benefits of incorporating personas into the design process.” Indeed, while several studies show that designers generally like the notion of personas, it’s difficult to ascertain the degree to which personas are actually used and how they affect design decision making (Miaskiewicz and Kozar, 2011; Friess, 2012; Blomquist and Arvola, 2002). I believe the benefit of personas within the design process is subtler than being able to discretely determine whether personas improve decision-making. It may be that the use of personas within the design process permits a space for the voice of both the user and the designers. Personas may enable the needs of users to be encapsulated in a manner that allows designers to draw readily both from the user needs and the designers own tool belt to enable rhetorically grounded design outcomes. In the next section, I will review how personas could benefit the design process from a rhetorical standpoint.

A Closer Look at Personas in Action While personas have many potential benefits, I believe that personas allow the voice of users to be heard without sacrificing rhetorical appeals or the designers’ rhetorical agency. Thus, personas may enable a rhetorically grounded pathway into design. In order to make this argument, I will assess the persona use of a group of designers dedicated to the concept of data-driven personas to determine how rhetoricity comes to bear on their design interactions. The group I observed was a team of designers at a top US design firm dedicated to the concept of data-driven personas within the design process. This firm had used personas as a critical element of the design process for over a decade at the time of the observation. These designers were in the initial stages of developing an interactive medical device for a client. I ob-

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served this group and recorded the decision-making sessions of the group for one week. I observed and recorded all official face-to-face team member interactions. The main team consisted of four members, which included two women and two men. One member had been at the firm for nearly a decade, while the newest team member (while quite experienced in the field of design) had joined the firm the previous week. I observed forty hours of work and interactions (including individual work, face-to-face comments, and critiques on proposed solutions) and recorded seventeen hours of decision-making sessions that took place over nine meetings. Prior to my arrival, two team members spent several weeks in the field. In that time, they interviewed and observed users and discussed expectations with stakeholders. With that data in hand, the same two team members combed through the data to notate commonalities and themes through pattern analysis. They then developed a list of common characteristics to develop a proto-persona. The two team members then spent a week teasing out the differences among the personas and adding detail to make each persona fully fleshed out and defined. At the end of their persona development work, the two team members had created eight personas (including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and medical techs). Each persona was carefully given an appropriate name, an image, a defining quote, an occupation, and a short yet thorough narrative that included the personas’ goals, their responsibilities, and their anticipated interactions with the device. The personas were “packaged” into a twenty-page, full color document that was given to both the clients and other members of the team. Because the designers did not have a dedicated meeting space (they would move rooms based on availability and technological needs), the personas were not printed on posters and hung on the wall but were printed on handouts and often placed on the conference room table. The week I observed the team was the first full week the entire team was involved in the “sprint.” The week prior to my arrival, the full team reportedly only spent about one hour together, in which the two team members who created the personas discussed the findings from the user data, explained how the personas were put together, and walked the remaining members of the team through the eight personas. I then assessed the recordings of the team’s decision-making meetings for their invocations of the personas the sub-group created. The full results of this team’s persona usage can be found in Friess, 2012; however, two findings are of particular import within the discussion of a rhetorically grounded pursuit of design. First, although the team linguistically invoked personas infrequently in their decision-making sessions (in only 3% of their conversational

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turns), it appears that those team members who were involved in the creation of the personas had a better understanding of both personas and, ultimately, the end user than those team members who were merely recipients of the personas. Indeed, those team members who actively created the personas used personas in 82% of the turns that contained personas. Furthermore, those usages revealed a complex understanding of the needs of the users. For example, one of the designers who created the personas said in one meeting, “Well, Michael isn’t going to do it that way. Georgia might, but not Michael because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he hasn’t done this in quite some time. He just needs to be able to turn it on and for it to work.” This statement deftly balances the needs of two distinct users, a balancing act that would be much more difficult to accomplish without the benefit of the linguistic, cognitive, and conversational tool of personas. Additionally, even in statements that invoke personas directly, the statements made by the members who developed the personas were more likely to mimic the qualities of the personas than members who didn’t develop the personas. For example, one member who created the personas stated, “Well, yes, if it’s, like, a super novice user, but not-so-newbies will want access faster and won’t want to wade their way through icons and menus on a touch.” In this sentiment, the team member has essentially invoked a persona who needs feedback from the device in order to operate it, as well as a persona who wants the device to not get in her way of accomplishing a task. Second, personas appear to be highly persuasive for this group, even if they are used relatively infrequently. On a few occasions, a simple reference to “let’s not forget [the personas] Michael and Georgia” quickly and effectively refocused the conversation. Furthermore, the designer who mentioned the persona almost always had their rhetorical claim taken up by the design team. Thus, these two outcomes suggest that personas could be a design mechanism that enables a rhetorically grounded design process. More to the point for this analysis of rhetorically grounded design processes, the designers are able to balance both user needs and designer insight. In the previous example, “Well, Michael isn’t going to do it that way. Georgia might, but not Michael because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he hasn’t done this in quite some time. He just needs to be able to turn it on and for it to work,” the designer is able to refocus the discussion, refute a claim by another designer through the use of persona-packed user-data, and make a pathetic argument for a particular design solution based on the needs of Michael. Thus, designers who build personas directly use personas in their decision-making, but appear to also keep the needs of the users in mind even when they aren’t directly referencing personas. Further, when perso-

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nas are linguistically invoked, they hold within them a tremendous amount of persuasive effect.

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This previous study showed that personas can be used critically within the design process to enlighten designers to user needs while also empowering designers with a user-informed rhetorical agency. Two questions emerge from this study. First, is the use of personas a better rhetorical tool than relying on unpackaged user data? Although it isn’t entirely clear, designers who use personas routinely report to like to use personas (Friess, 2012; Blomquist and Arvola, 2002; Massanari, 2010). By packaging data patterns into personas, the data isn’t a simple and singular data point, but a theoretical person who engenders empathy from designers. According to Massanari, “the creation of a narrative around each of these personas somehow solidifies the identity of the user in the designer’s mind in a way that typical user research does not” (2010, p. 408). By having data represented by real people, personas demand attention and respect, like real people. As Massanari states, “personas can attune [the designer] to particular user needs and perhaps focus design decisions in a way that just referring to ‘users’ as a generic group may not” (2010, p. 408). In other words, data collected from users is logos, clearly defined, decontextualized, and unequivocal. But data presented as a persona is pathos, contextualized, relatable, and equivocal. With logos, as Google found in their forty-one shades of blue testing, there is one solution that performs (however minutely) better, thus only one solution is ever considered by designers in the decision-making process. With pathos, there is an array of solutions that could satisfy the needs and goals of the personas. The pathos provided by personas allows not for a one dialectical solution to the design problem, but many possible solutions to provide for a rhetorical solution. Designers, armed with user data and pathos stemming from personas, are restored their rhetorical agency and, thus, their ability to design not just to meet the user’s needs but to delight the user’s experience. Secondly, if personas enable a more rhetorical design process, how can we make it a coordinated part of the design process? My previous study showed that knowledge fueled by personas may seep into design decisions even if the personas themselves aren’t linguistically invoked. However, those designers who show that knowledge throughout the design process were those designers who actively took part in the persona creation process. Those designers who didn’t create the personas almost never invoked the personas and showed little aptitude for user needs in other statements with-

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in the process. Therefore, perhaps the first task is for all designers to actively engage in at least some part of the persona creation process. Even if a designer can only take part in a small portion of the persona creation, it may be enough time to garner the “buy-in” that is needed for personas to work effectively (Blomquist and Arvola, 2002). But if it’s not possible for all the designers to build the personas, some actions can be taken to help prevent personas from just fading away during the actual design process. According to Muldar and Yaar, personas should be “explicit at every step in the process whether it’s . . . defining the scope of a project or making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, visual design, testing, and so on” (2006, p. 213). They suggest that designers should give regular refresher presentations to “remind veterans of their existence and to introduce them to new folks,” leave persona documents in places such as the conference room and the break room, or to begin every meeting with a quick reminder about the personas (2006, p. 214). By using the personas as a touchstone to user research, designers keep the user needs at the forefront of design (a staple of UCD) while also enabling personas to be a tool they can wield within a rhetorical decision-making space.

Design as a Rhetorical Endeavor Design, as a critical element of experience architecture, must be a rhetorical process, one that equally attends to the voice of wants and needs by the user and the voice of experience and insight by the designer. In the past, the vision of the designer was accentuated at the expense of the needs of the user. In recent years, the voice of the user has edged designers themselves out of the design space, to the extent that Hoekman suggests that the key to design is to “understand users, then ignore them” (2010). Such proclamations may shift the goals of design, but they do little to rhetorically balance the design process. Ultimately, a successful designer “is one who does a great job understanding every stakeholders’ needs and wants, finds the sweet spot where they all over lap, and crafts a design that ‘lives’ in that sweet spot” (Gajendar, 2012). Persona-driven design may be one way to begin to ensure that the design process is rhetorically balanced. Personas developed from intense fieldwork are data-rich and functional. Data, instead of sitting unread as an email attachment or in an intranet wiki, becomes embodied by a persona, who looks like a real person, has the goals of a real person, and has the struggles of a real person. Furthermore, with a persona, designers have the capacity to make decisions based upon data that allows for logical appeals in the decision-making argument, but also allows them to draw upon pathetical appeals as well. The goal of design is to create useful, usable, and desirable solutions. Personas may ultimately allow designers to

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find that rhetorical “sweet spot,” where designers can create a data-driven (but not data-dictated) solution that meets users’ needs for a useful and usable solution yet also enables designers to create a desirable solution that may be beyond what users themselves think possible.

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Adlin, T., & Pruitt, J. (2010). The essential personal lifecycle: Your guide to building and using personas. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Blomquist, A., & Arvola, M. (2002). Personas in action: Ethnography in an interaction design team. Paper presented at the NordiCHI ’02, Arhus, Denmark. Bowman, D. (2009). Goodbye, Google. Retrieved from Stopdesign.com. Campbell, K. K.. (2005). Agency: Promiscuous and Protean. Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, 2(1), 1–19. Cooper, A. (1999). The inmates are running the asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams. Friess, E. (2010). The sword of data: Does human-centered design fulfill its rhetorical responsibility? Design Issues, 26(3), 40–50. Friess, E. (2012). Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Gajendar, U. (2012). Finding the sweet spot of design. interactions, 19(3), 10–11. Gould, J. D., & Boies, S. J. (1983). Human factors challenges in creating a principal support office system: the speech filing system approach. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(4), 273–298. Gould, J. D., & Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300–311. Hoekman Jr, R. (2010). Designing the obvious: A common sense approach to Web & mobile application design. London: Pearson Education. Howard, T. W. (2015). Are personas really usable? Communication Design Quarterly Review, 3(2), 20–26. Johnson, R. R. (1998). User-centered technology: a rhetorical theory for computers and other mundane artifacts. Albany: State University of New York Press. Johnson, R. R. (2010). The ubiquity paradox: further thinking on the concept of user centeredness. Technical Communication Quarterly, 19(4), 335–351. Landauer, Thomas K. (1995). The trouble with computers: usefulness, usability, and productivity. Cambridge, MAMIT Press. Massanari, A. L. (2010). Designing for imaginary friends: information architecture, personas, and the politics of user-centered design. New Media & Society, 12(3), 401–416.

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McGinn, J. J., & Kotamraju, N. (2008). Data-driven persona development. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Miaskiewicz, T., & Kozar, K. A. (2011). Personas and user-centered design: how can personas benefit product design processes? Design Studies, 32(5), 417–430. Moggridge, Bill. (2007). Designing interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mulder, S., & Yaar, Z. (2006). The user is always right: A practical guide to creating and using personas for the web. N.p.: New Riders. Nieters, J. E., Ivaturi, S., & Ahmed, I. (2007). Making personas memorable. Paper presented at the CHI’07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Norman, D. A. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books. Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (1986). User centered system design: new perspectives on human-computer interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003). Personas: practice and theory. Paper presented at the Designing for user experience, San Francisco.

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7 “Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design Heather Christiansen and Tharon Howard

Introduction

I

f you want to start an argument among usability and user-experience professionals, ask them to define and distinguish the differences between the terms usability and user experience. Indeed, just asking for a definition of UX alone will locate you in a contentious space. In an international survey conducted by Lallemand, Gronier, and Koenig (2014), the study’s authors asked professionals what they would consider to be an acceptable concept and scope for UX. They provided five different definitions of UX and asked respondents to choose between them to see if there was consensus in the field. Lallemand, Gronier, and Koenig found that the most accepted definition was also the broadest; most people surveyed chose Hassenzahl and Tractinsky’s 2006 definition of UX as “A consequence of a user’s internal state (predispositions, expectations, needs, motivation, mood, etc.) the characteristics of the designed system (e.g. complexity, purpose, usability, functionality, etc.) and the context (or the environment) within which the interaction occurs (e.g. organizational/social setting, meaningfulness of the activity, voluntariness of use, etc.).” What’s most interesting here isn’t that the broadest, most sweeping definition received the majority of the votes— what’s really revealing was that only 31.1% of the respondents agreed that it was best. The other four definitions received support from 25.2%, 20.1%, 16.6%, and 7.0% of the respondents. Based on these findings, it wouldn’t be a stretch to conclude that the definition of UX right now is still a moving target. What’s more, if the term UX is a moving target, then it follows that what can be considered a UX research method must also be in a state of flux. As a result, our goal in this chapter is to bring some clarity to this situation by offering a research method that will demonstrate a definitively UX approach to experience architecture. For usability professionals who were working through the 1990s, this lack of a clear consensus about our field and our research methods is nothing new. In their Journal of Usability Studies article “Overlap, Influence, Intertwining: The Interplay of UX and Technical Communication” (2011), Ginny Redish and Carol Barnum describe the beginnings of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) back in 1993, and as the title of their ar-

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ticle suggests, the field of usability studies was an odd combination of dappled disciplines ranging from cognitive psychology’s use of think-aloud protocol analyses to graphic design’s analysis of visual communication strategies to technical communication’s emphasis on using process models to ensure that users (formerly “audiences”) were at the center of the design process. This interdisciplinary, variegated nature of the approaches to usability meant that there were at least three different ways that the term usability could be interpreted. As Whitney Quesenbery, a past president of the UPA, has pointed out, usability professionals could never be sure how their clients were interpreting the term usability because it might be used to describe: 1) the characteristic of a product as in “this is a usable interface,” 2) a research method as in the sense of “usability testing,” or 3) a product development process model as in “user-centered design” (UCD).

Throughout the 1990s, not only was the term usability a moving target, but usability testing research methods were also plagued by methodological immaturity. Rolf Molich’s (1998) famous CUE studies and his search for professional legitimacy in our field illustrate how methodologically naïve we were in those early days of usability testing. Molich provided different teams of usability professionals with the same research question and data, asked them to conduct their standard “usability testing” procedures, and then compared the research findings and recommendation reports. Even though they had the same data and starting points, Rolf found that the findings and recommendations were often radically different from one research team to another. Molich concluded that the failure to replicate findings between usability researchers conducting essentially the same study was convincing evidence of the field’s immature and erratic approach to the study of usability. Today, however, thanks to professional organizations like the UPA, resources like Usability.gov from the US Department of Health and Human Services, and online communities like UTEST, usability testing has grown beyond merely subjective responses and anecdotal feedback produced by focus groups and less rigorous forms of market research. Over the past twenty years, these and other organizations have legitimized usability as a profession and have helped “usability testing,” through think-aloud protocol analyses, become widely recognized as a scientific mode of inquiry. Which brings us back to the question with which we began—that is, what is the relationship between usability and user experience? And perhaps more importantly, why does it seem everyone is jumping off the “good ship Usability” and climbing onto UX? Why, after over two decades of effort, did the UPA change its name in 2012 from the “Usability Professionals

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Association” to the “User Experience Professionals Association” (UXPA)? Can “user experience” simply replace “usability” as this name change would suggest, or if the terms are not interchangeable, then what are the implications for research methods of changing to the term user experience? In this chapter we address these issues, first of all by critiquing the suggestion that the terms usability and user experience are interchangeable. Although the UXPA’s name change in 2012 may suggest to some that usability and user experience are transposable, we will demonstrate that they actually represent a paradigm shift between what Howard has called accommodationist vs. constructivist binary (forthcoming). The accommodationist/constructivist binary argues that in the late eighties and early nineties usability testing and UCD approaches to interface design were dominated by an “accommodationist” perspective in which technologies were crafted in order to accommodate users’ needs and goals. As a result, the research methods that focused on usability tended to capture the “low hanging fruit” of bugs that users experienced in interfaces and digital productions. After the dot-com crash in 2001, the paradigm eventually shifted to what we call “constructivist.” Rather than accommodating technologies to users, this constructivist approach seeks to “interpellate” users into a subject position that provides users with an interpretative framework that allows them to successfully experience the interface. Unfortunately, however, the constructivist approach currently lacks the clear research methodologies found in accommodationist approaches to usability, so user experience and interaction designers who approach design from a constructivist perspective lack the equivalent of, say, the protocol analysis research method which informed much of the accommodationist approach. As a result, constructivist approaches to the design of experience architectures lack a solid empirical foundation upon which to make informed decisions about their design. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to offer a research method that takes a constructivist approach to experience architecture. More specifically, our goal is to better understand how and why users are interpellated into a specific brand community and to identify the types of social roles they played in the process of becoming a member of the group. We do this by examining how an individual is brought into a “specific way of life” or what Bourdieu called a “habitus.” In order to gain an idea of what a habitus looks like, we apply an interviewing methodology adapted from the field of marketing and consumer research. This method, called “existential phenomenology” involves a phenomenological style of interviewing and allows the researcher to ask questions that provide data from the first-person point of view regarding a user’s lived experience with a particular brand or company. We have adapted the method by incorporating a system of data coding that is commonly utilized in the

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field of usability testing in order to mine the collected data for important themes useful to designers. Before discussing the method, it is necessary to address the shift in perspective that seems to have occurred from traditional usability testing to user experience design. Because of this shift, research methods must adapt in order to collect the data necessary for experience architects and UX designers. Without new methods and ways of learning about users, an immense amount of valuable user data may slip out of reach. This data is surely necessary to design engaging and persuasive experiences and products.

The Accommodationist Approach In the late eighties and early nineties, the technology market was primarily driven by what was affectionately called a “feeds ‘n speeds” mentality. Purchase decision triggers for computer sales were primarily motivated by how many MHz and how much RAM a system could provide or what functionality was offered by a software package. However, as more and more chip manufacturers and software products became available on the market, increased competition forced companies to distinguish their products beyond simple functionality claims. Speeds ‘n feeds were no longer enough, and savvy computer buyers began looking at the ease of use of the systems as an important consideration in making purchase decisions. An obvious outgrowth of this was the need to conduct usability studies that would help product designers understand how to accommodate their technologies to meet users’ needs. To add value to a product’s existing functionality, a major goal of usability testing in those days was primarily to validate whether the designer’s “mental model” of how the system’s architecture functioned was compatible with the users’ mental model. As Brenda Laurel showed in her ground-breaking book The Computer as Theatre from 1993, the logic (or architecture) that drove computer interfaces was often the product of the very specialized knowledge, training, and expertise that belonged to software engineers. This specialized knowledge and understanding of the ways that architectures were “supposed” to operate created a mental model for engineers that often failed to align with the users’ mental models of the product. By having specified, targeted users on the system perform “normal” tasks with the system and “think-aloud” as they performed those tasks, usability-testing professionals could validate whether or not the product designers’ mental model for the system matched or was at least compatible with the users.’ Where the users’ and designers’ mental models failed to match and a breakdown in the usability of the product emerged, the usability testing professional could document the problem, enabling the product’s design-

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ers to address the problem by accommodating or adapting the technology to meet the users’ needs or goals. Although usability testing was then and continues to be an extremely successful approach to product development, there were several unexpected consequences that emerged throughout the nineties. One of these was that usability professionals began to see their role in the product development process as “user advocates.” Because they sought to find ways to explain to product developers why users were unable to take advantage of the technologies being developed so that developers could “repair” the systems, many usability professionals began to develop an ethos that put them at odds with software engineers, graphic designers, marketers, and other members of product development teams. As user advocates, usability professionals saw their role as empowering users by giving them a voice in the product development process that would ensure that their goals and needs were accommodated. However, from the perspective of software engineers, what usability testers were doing was poking holes in their work and documenting their “mistakes.” For them, when a usability testing professional chose to wear the “user advocate” hat, usability testing was no longer a collaborative effort to develop a usable product; it devolved into a “bug-fest” intended to show all the usability failures, errors, and mistakes the designer had made. Designers complained that usability testing stifled creativity. By forcing them to “appeal to the lowest common denominator” in a market demographic, graphic designers complained that usability testing led to plain, flat, or even ugly interface designs. Software engineers complained that usability testing was too costly because it slowed the development process down by forcing them to use an iterative design process where they had to wait for a usability review to validate their designs before they could continue to build a product’s functionality. In his famous critique of usability testing, Alan Cooper spoke for many software engineers when he remarked in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Any process based on observation must take a back seat to acts of creation. Programmers create. The usability discipline tacitly hands the reins of control to the programmers, saying, “You build it, and then I’ll test to see how well you have done.” But in this fast-moving, hightech world, after it is built, it ships. Post-facto testing cannot have much influence on the product. (1999, pp. 207). Cooper went on to complain that usability testing seemed to him like using sandpaper to build furniture. It could smooth out the rough edges in a final product, but he claimed it doesn’t help you “turn a table into a chair” (p. 207). In other words, from a programmer’s perspective, usabil-

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ity testing might show that the product’s design failed to accommodate the target users’ mental models of a product, but it doesn’t necessarily help the programmer to understand how to adapt the system’s architecture to match the users’ mental models. Of course, many usability professionals would argue that Cooper is overstating the case here and that think-aloud protocol analyses can actually provide important critical insights into users’ mental models that do provide product developers with clues to how to radically redesign interfaces. They would also argue that Cooper is only talking about think-aloud protocol analysis when he talks about usability testing, but usability testing has other research methods at its disposal, such as card sorting, contextual analysis, or diary studies that can all be used to collect information about users before a prototype exists. But what’s more important to note here is Cooper’s attitude and his antipathy for usability professionals. Although usability professionals might complain that his characterization is unfair, the fact is that by the time of the dot-com crash of 2001, Cooper’s view that usability professionals were not “creators” and that they did little to influence the major directions that a product’s design might take were fairly pervasive among software engineers. For usability testing to remain relevant in industry, an alternative to the accommodationist approach was needed.

The Constructivist Approach It is difficult to point to an exact moment when the constructivist shift from usability as an accommodationist to the more expansive user-experience approach took place. For many, the evolution was gradual, and the shift merely reflected a change in the umbrella term that described what usability professionals do. For example, the UXPA website states: UXPA was established in 1991 as the UPA (Usability Professionals’ Association) when Usability was considered to be an umbrella term for what our members do. In 2012 the name was changed to UXPA to reflect the change in members’ job titles to User Experience (UX) and to continue to represent their breadth of work. (https://uxpa. org/about-us qtd. on May 24, 2015). However, in his forthcoming work “Accommodationist and Constructivist Approaches to Academic-Industry Partnerships in a Usability and User Experience Facility,” Howard argues that the shift from the accommodationist usability approach to the constructivist UX approach occurred as a result of the changing economic forces resulting from the dot-com crash of 2001. He argued that the lean economic times resulting from the recession forced usability professionals to abandon studies that merely captured the

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“low hanging fruit” of bugs that users experienced in interfaces and digital productions. During the decade from 2001–2010, he observed that

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More frequently we were doing needs assessments where we would describe the functional, organizational, environmental and even aesthetic needs of our clients’ customers. We were also providing personas of our clients’ customers in order to help them make decisions about the kinds of features that their products should or shouldn’t offer. But most importantly, we were studying the customers of our industry partners in order to help our clients make informed decisions about how design interfaces that created user experiences which persuaded users to engage in specific types of behaviors. (forthcoming) This change in the goals of the types of research studies being conducted actually represents far more than simply changing the “umbrella” term used to describe what usability or user-experience professionals do. It represents a 180-degree shift in direction because—whereas the original goal of the usability tester was to serve as a user advocate who could help product developers learn to accommodate their technologies to the mental models of their users—the goal of constructivist designers is to create mental models that enable users to adapt to the technologies. In other words, rather than constructing technologies adapted for users, this approach seeks to construct users by providing them with interpretive frameworks that give them predictive power over an interface. Of course, when we say that we are “constructing users,” we don’t literally mean that we’re creating a new person or that we’re engaging in some form of cognitive engineering. Instead, we mean that we are constructing user experiences that persuade users to adopt specific social identities. This act of persuasion is perhaps best explained by the term interpellation, which was coined by Louis Althusser in 1971. Althusser described the way human beings are “hailed” or assimilated into social positions by means of social cues. When someone walks up to a stranger, for example, and extends them a handshake, they are interpellating that person. They are, in effect, asking him or her to play the role of a business associate, a colleague with whom they can enter into a conversation. Alternatively, if that same person extends their hand in a way that signifies that they want to “slap a high-five” with the person, then they have interpellated that individual into a different social role, that of a hip friend who values pop culture. The key point here is that how the interpellation occurs persuades the “user” to engage in different behaviors and to identify with different values and interpretive frameworks. Interpellating someone with a formal business handshake leads to different expectations of the conversation

“Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design

that will follow than interpellating someone using a high-five slap or a fistbump. We know we can expect a more jovial and informal interaction from the social role we play when we receive a fist-bump. The reason that our values and expectations are invoked by the roles we play when we are interpellated can be explained by what Pierre Bourdieu called the “habitus” in his work Pascalian Meditations (2000). As Bourdieu explains: Social agents are endowed with habitus, inscribed in their bodies by past experiences. These systems of schemes of perception, appreciation and action enable them to perform acts of practical knowledge, based on the identification and recognition of conditional, conventional stimuli to which they are predisposed to react (p. 138). Habitus is a critical component of constructivist design because, as Bourdieu demonstrated in his classic study of French society, Distinctions (1986), the habitus not only provides the interpretive framework through which users interpret the world around them and drives the choices they make, but habitus can be understood empirically. In Distinctions, Bourdieu demonstrated empirically how French citizens’ aesthetic tastes in art and music were products of their social positions. He proved through his research studies that aesthetic choices are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus. Upper-class individuals in French society, for example, have a preference for classical music because they have been exposed to and educated to appreciate it. The working-class, on the other hand, have an equally refined and cultivated habitus for pop music, but because they haven’t been socialized into the habitus appropriate to the classical music, they are unable to interpret their surroundings and make appropriate choices. Or to put this in terms of interface design, one might say that, when confronted with classical music, they become “lost in cyberspace” and lose all predictive power over the interface because they don’t have the appropriate habitus to guide their choices. To study habitus empirically, Bourdieu introduced the very important concept of capital. He expanded on the traditional notion of capital as economic resources that an individual has available and included many other types of capital. These include: • Economic capital—control of cash & assets • Social capital—social networks & group membership • Cultural capital—knowledge & experience with art, film, music, literature, and other cultural artifacts • Educational capital—training and experience (both at school and home) that provides access to the first three types of capital

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• Symbolic capital—ranks, formal honors, or objects of “conspicuous consumption” that show class status • Linguistic capital—ability to speak the language of the discourse community or the language of the “in crowd” These types of capital are critical to a constructivist approach to UX design because they provide insights into the variables that UX professionals need to investigate in their research designs. 130

The Problem with Personas In our efforts to conduct research from the constructivist point of view, we have considered a variety of already existing UX and UCD methods, yet none have provided the appropriate insights. One user-centered method we examined is the use of personas. Popularized by Alan Cooper in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum (1999), personas are described as hypothetical “archetypes” of actual users. Personas are frequently discussed as a tool to be used in product design where their “greatest value is in providing a shared basis for communication” (Pruitt and Grudin, 2003). In other words, personas can be used to help a variety of people in various roles (designers, marketers, writers, usability testers, etc.) explain and understand specific design decisions. Personas provide “a psychologically compelling approach to communicate information about users to development teams” (Chapman & Milham, 2006). While personas have gained popularity over the last decade, the method is not without its challenges. Numerous scholars have voiced their critiques of the method, including Chapman and Milham in their article, “The Personas’ New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments against a Popular Method.” Chapman and Milham’s first critique of personas is that the methods for developing personas have “differed significantly across advocates” (Chapman and Milham). For example, Cooper writes that personas are developed from limited information available to the design team, whereas Pruitt and Grudin argue that they are formed from a much larger base of data collected by research on the design team. Chapman and Milham also take issue with the fact that it is impossible to determine if personas are accurate. It is often unknown how many users a particular persona describes and whether or not those users are the most important users to the product design process. Because they aren’t clearly the products of solid empirical research and because they can’t be easily validated, Chapman and Milham observe that members of a design team don’t hesitate to dismiss or ignore personas that they find inconvenient or problematic. Indeed, as Erin Friess has shown in her “Best of CHI” research study from 2012, personas are not easily adopted by and used by all members of the design team.

“Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design

In her ethnographic study of a major US design firm, Friess found that personas were only “included in 3% of the conversational turns within decision-making meetings” where members of the design team were discussing the product’s final architecture (2012, p. 1216). Further, she found that the designers who created the personas were the people most likely to use personas in design discussions, accounting for 85.3% of all the times that personas were mentioned (p. 2016). Other members of the design team mentioned the personas occasionally, but the bottom line here is that personas were not used as intended. These are but a few of the critiques issued against the personas method. If personas are not an entirely stable ground upon which to develop accurate and reliable descriptions of end users—what is? We attempt to answer this question by proposing a method adapted from the field of marketing and consumer research. Obviously, marketing research is closely aligned with UX architecture research since it attempts to discover what consumers desire and condemn in order to design a product or experience that will appeal to a target audience. When designing an experience—whether it be a website, a smartphone, or a theme park—designers and architects strive to remain true to the purpose and function of the experience, while also considering how users will interact with the product or experience. Because of this, it is important for experience architects and others in the field of UX to obtain a thorough mental image of their users so that they may design social roles that are familiar and usable. This can be more aptly achieved by gaining an understanding of the brand or company’s actual habitus—not personas, which represent limited descriptions of hypothetical users. Instead of designing a product or experience and then altering it to accommodate users’ wants, desires, and needs, we suggest that the target audience of users be identified and researched in order to design social roles, which empirical evidence shows users are actually playing into experiences. While personas seem like a good choice of method for performing such research, we would suggest that the challenges mentioned in the previous section provide reason to continue the search for a more appropriate method. Also, while personas focus on providing archetypal descriptions of specific users, our adapted method seeks to provide a description of the habitus, which provides insight into the identity of the company or brand instead of potential users. Defining a habitus is broader than defining a persona, but by defining a habitus, the focus is on the identity and attributes of the company or brand, not on the user or potential customer. This is not to say that insights from the individual users are not considered when imagining the habitus. Individual accounts are useful in identifying interpellative cues and other details that can be incorporated into interface

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design and aid in the effort of “hailing” users into defined social roles. One criticism of personas is that they can become too specific and thus, are less likely to represent an actual user—they are representations of hypothetical users who may not actually exist. Analyzing the habitus that actual users ascribe to will provide a description with which multiple personas may associate. Thus, this shift in focus from persona to habitus allows experience architects and user-experience designers to better understand the identity of the company or brand and aids them in developing experiences that are specific to that habitus. Such designs elicit user comments in line with, “That is so Apple” or “That is such a Disney way of doing things.” The focus is on the identity of the company or brand, not necessarily on individual users.

Adding to the Experience Architecture Toolbox: Developing an Adapted Method In order to gain perspective on a particular company or brand’s habitus, we suggest implementing a method adapted from the field of marketing and consumer research called existential phenomenology. Existential phenomenology has its roots in philosophy and entered the field of consumer research in the 1980s due in part to Howard Pollio’s creation of the Center for Applied Phenomenological Research at the University of Tennessee (Murray). It was here that Craig Thompson began working with Pollio to promote in-depth interviewing and storytelling as important methods for assessing customer experience. Thompson and Pollio explained that existential phenomenology utilizes the interview as a powerful tool to gain a deeper understanding of a person’s experience from the first-person perspective (Pollio, Henley, and Thompson). It does not focus on the abstract generalizations from consumers, but rather, it seeks to explicate the consumer’s lived experience in the world (i.e., their specific interactions with products). In this view, the person and the environment in which the experience took place are not separate entities to be explored. Instead, a phenomenological interviewing method uses a holistic strategy to “describe human experience as it is lived” (Thompson, Locander, and Pollio, p. 136). For our current research, we are adopting the general premise of this phenomenological approach, but adapting it to focus on elements that benefit experience architects. We see this method as an additional tool in the experience architect’s toolbox. Similar to the use of personas, this is likely not a stand-alone method, but could be used alongside and in conjunction with other methods. Our current research is motivated by a desire to provide a reliable, informative way to learn about users and how social roles can be constructed into experiences in order to provide users with a desirable and meaningful

“Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design

interaction. The goal is not to construct individual users themselves, but to construct roles with which users identify (i.e., the habitus users adopt when using a product or interacting with an interface). This method can be applied to a variety of brands, products, and company types in order to begin identifying their habitus and the preferences of their users and customers. The focus of the research rests on the notion of brand communities and answering questions concerning how designers can create engaging experiences with which members of the brand communities already identify. In terms of subject selection, interview participants are selected in accordance with the phenomenological method by judgment sample. This means participants are selected based on their knowledge of and involvement with the specific brand or company. To identify participants in the judgment sample, a point-of-contact is established, and the contact makes recommendations based on his or her local knowledge of who would make an appropriate participant. Because the method of existential phenomenology focuses on the depth of data gathered, not the breadth, a high number of participants is not needed—perhaps as few as five or until participants begin offering the same information and patterns of information are repeated. In addition to adopting this phenomenological approach to interviewing, we are also incorporating the observations from Bourdieu regarding different types of capital and how those different types of capital inform the habitus. We are incorporating these types of capital by using them to form interview questions. Questions are open ended to encourage conversation and focus on economic, social, cultural, educational, symbolic, and linguistic capital. The structure and focus of the interviews are what makes this method unique. Instead of a traditional phenomenological interview, this method goes a step further by asking questions that relate to specific types of capital that contribute to the makeup of a habitus. In other words, the goal is to identify which types of capital contribute to and have the most influence on the habitus and identity of specific brand communities. Below are examples of interview questions designed to address the main forms of capital that contribute towards the notion of habitus. In the examples, “X” is used where a brand or company name would be inserted. Economic

• Describe the financial position of people who tend to identify with X. • How important is financial/ economical standing to X? Explain your reasoning. Social

• Tell me about a time you interacted with someone who works for X.

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• Explain how you communicate with other members of the X community—consider social media, online communication, faceto-face interaction, and other forms of communication. Cultural

• Tell me about an experience that is uniquely X. For example, “That was such a typical Apple experience.” • How do you know that someone is a member of the X brand community? 134

Educational

• Thinking of people associated with X, how would you describe their educational background? • Tell me about a time you had a pleasant (or unpleasant) experience with X. What was that experience like? Symbolic

• Describe the identity of X. What does it look like? What/ who does it involve? What does it represent? • What symbols, colors, or other visuals have you encountered that are uniquely associated with X? Linguistic

• In your experience with X, describe how people speak to and communicate with each other. • If there are certain words or phrases that are commonly used, describe them including who uses them, when, and why. Once interviews are performed, recorded, and transcribed, they are first analyzed individually to produce a summary of each participant’s experience and to establish open coding categories. In this particular example, we were working to redesign a website for a small university in the Southeast that we gave the pseudonym Rigorous Education University (REU), and we interviewed members of the REU brand community. By analyzing each participant, a description and detailed understanding of their lived experience in relation to the brand community is revealed. For example, summaries for a few of the participants from our current research are provided below. • Participant 1: An employee of REU who is concerned with how the brand is being portrayed to an outside audience. She describes the brand as being known for hardworking students, high-quality academics, a beautiful campus, and serving others. She is most concerned with issues related to symbolic capital (how REU is

“Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design

represented to others), social capital (the relationships between community members), and educational capital (the purpose of the brand is to educate). Concerning REU’s website, she commented that “it’s more about evoking the emotions than it is throwing stats at someone.” This alludes to her efforts to interpellate others by showing the brand community experience through images and stories with an engaging narrative. • Participant 4: A student at REU with a highly critical view of the brand. She recognizes that REU is making efforts to include those who don’t fit the stereotype that it is known for (economic capital), but she feels that the efforts aren’t strong enough. Participant 4 differs from most other students in race, economic position, and educational background and she is constantly reminded of it and feels excluded. The exclusion is done primarily by other students within the REU community. Participant 4 commented that employees and professors are very encouraging and friendly. She appreciates the beauty of the campus, but often feels excluded from social connections. In her view, economic and social capital are the most important—all other forms of capital stem from having high amounts of these two. • Participant 6: An employee of REU who views it as a “prestigious, top-tier, liberal arts university.” He has a critical view of the brand and sees it as having an identity problem. Instead of owning up to what makes the brand distinctive and unique, Participant 6 feels that REU is too concerned with trying to be like other competitor brands (strong value on symbolic capital). Participant 6 feels that there is nothing wrong with REU’s brand and that it is strong and superior to others, it just needs to learn how to “own” that identity. He stressed symbolic and educational as the most influential forms of capital when communicating the REU brand. • Participant 8: A student at REU who views the community’s reputation as a rigorous academic institution that values diverse viewpoints and experiential learning. She comes from a different economic, educational, and racial background than the stereotypical REU community member; however, she feels that REU is the ideal place for her because it welcomes diversity and varied viewpoints. She commented that she does not feel different from her peers and that she feels she made the best choice in attending the university. She has a very positive view of the brand and is a curious learner. To Participant 8, educational and economic capital are not important when gaining access to the REU community, although both tend

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to grow as a result of joining the community. She placed the most importance on social and cultural capital.

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These individual analyses are valuable in that they provide a high level of detail and insight regarding the lived experiences of community members and how they relate to the brand. A broader image of the brand community’s habitus is shaped by learning about each individual. Analyzing the interview transcripts collectively reveals themes and details of the brand community’s overall habitus, whereas examining the interview transcripts individually reveals unique and specific insights into the nuances of the brand’s overarching habitus. As the raw data collected from interviews begins to form a detailed description of the brand community being researched, common themes will emerge. For example, certain forms of capital may have been talked about extensively or they may have been disregarded by the interviewees as elements of low importance to the brand community’s habitus. In other words, the primary purpose of asking questions regarding the six main forms of capital is to learn which elements contribute most to the formation of a specific brand community’s identity and habitus so that designers can exploit that information in their final designs. For example, our current research focuses on three brand communities that have unique identities and that produce three very different products. Brand Community #1 was the previously discussed Rigorous Education University; Brand Community #2 is a direct sales company we renamed “New You Skin Care” that sells high-end, luxury cosmetic products; and Brand Community #3 is an apparel company for which we chose the pseudonym “Love and Serve Apparel” because its identity is primarily driven by a focus on the brand’s core values and lifestyle. After conducting the interviews and analyzing their transcripts, the number of comments related to each form of capital were tallied for each community and the percentage of comments related to each form of capital was compared to the whole. The forms of capital that were most prevalent were considered to hold higher importance with the community. Figure 1 illustrates how the three brand communities differed in the importance they place on certain forms of capital:

“Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design Symbolic

Social

Linguistic

Educational

Economic

Cultural

7.4%

25%

29.2%

19.2%

22.4% 34.7%

22.9%

10%

25.2%

9.8%

13.2% 9%

13.6%

Brand Community #1

19.5%

4.7%

15.5%

Brand Community #2

14.4%

4.3%

Brand Community #3

Figure 1: Comparison of capital prevalence across all three brand communities. Based on Figure 1, we can see that the habitus of Brand Community #1 is mostly concerned with symbolic capital (the way they are perceived by others and their reputation) and cultural capital (the community’s heritage, traditions, and ways of being). The habitus of Brand Community #2 is mostly concerned with social capital (relationships with others) and economic capital (money and economic status). Finally, Brand Community #3 is mostly concerned with cultural capital. Knowing this, experience architects can design with these forms of capital in mind and incorporate interpellative elements and cues into the interface that appeal to a brand community member. Further analysis of the interview data is done using two coding strategies that likely produce overlapping information, although one approach may reveal an insight that the other does not, so while some of the resulting information may be redundant, it is still of value to be thorough. First, the traditional existential phenomenological approach uses temporal sequence (arranged into a coherent story), narrative framing (arranged according to key meanings), and dialectical tacking (arranged according to critical events) to organize the data collected. For example, Siemens and Kopp made use of this traditional phenomenological coding strategy in their article on online gambling environments. First, they analyzed each individual interview transcript and interpreted each as a single case (temporal sequencing). Next, they sought overarching themes across interviews related to key meanings (narrative framing) and critical events or actions taken by each gambler (dialectical tacking). Doing so allowed Siemens and Kopp to realize two themes related to the online gambling experience: that the involvement of social pressure and self-monitoring causes online casinos to feel safer for the gamblers and also, how gamblers held themselves accountable (mentally or physically) while gambling differed in an online casino compared to a physical casino. These themes provided insight as to why people behave dif-

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ferently when having an online gambling experience versus an experience at a physical casino. As mentioned, our method deviates from the phenomenological method in regards to coding the data. This adaptation allows the method to provide a more thorough analysis of the data with the intention of being more fruitful for experience architecture and UX research. Thus, in the second type of coding strategy, the transcripts are broken into participants’ distinct comments or what Flower and Hayes have called “episodic boundaries.” Comments are then coded into what Grant-Davie calls “open coding categories.” The open categories are attributed to common themes that appear within each interview transcript. Thus, because Bourdieu’s different types of capital inform the questions that are guiding our interviews, open coding should reveal common themes, most likely related to the six types of capital. Finally, each of the open categories are then reexamined for “axial coding categories” according to grounded theory (Grant-Davie, 1992). These axial categories are patterns and relationships that emerge from the data that were not predicted by the researchers’ hypotheses and theories. The intention is that this treatment of the data will yield a rich description of the brand community’s habitus, which designers can then use to invoke the social roles users will play during their experience. While the use of these two coding strategies may seem redundant in a sense, it is this close and thorough analysis of the data that will reveal myriad valuable themes, connections, and relationships that will allow for a thorough and accurate description of each brand community’s habitus. Ideally, transcripts should be analyzed and coded by multiple coders in order to achieve inter-rater reliability scores of .07 or higher. As an example of what this style of analysis can do to the raw interview data, we return to the example of Rigorous Education University mentioned earlier. Aside from revealing the most valued forms of capital associated with REU’s habitus, analysis also revealed “interpellative roles” that can be designed into an interface in an effort to “hail” individuals into the brand community. During analysis, it was discovered that there were four main audiences of the REU community: students, employees, alumni, and parents. Episodic units related to these four audiences and the roles that they currently play within the community were identified. In total, 170 units provided insight into the student audience, 62 to the employee audience, 35 to the alumni audience, and 6 to the parent audience. The coded comments were analyzed and existing roles associated with each audience were identified. It is important to note that these existing roles are ones that current REU community members either play or project that others play.

“Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design

These existing roles provide valuable information that helps shed light on the common cues that interpellate people into the community. The cues serve as signals that designers can incorporate into the interface design to encourage people to play a certain role. For an example of the revealed existing roles and their common interpellative cues, the results from analysis of 170 episodic units coded as “student” produced these roles and cues: Existing Student Roles

• The Legacy Student: typically high income, white, Christian, conservative background, second (or more) generation college kid, always looks presentable (hair and make-up done) • The Typical Student: often middle-class, in school with loans or federal aid (majority of students) • The First Generation Student: typically lower income background, in school on a scholarship, first generation college kid Common Interpellative Cues 1. Driven, hardworking, high achieveing, curious, motivated to ask

questions, open-minded 2. Service-focused, a desire to help and serve others, cognizant

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

of the world around them and want to contribute, hospitable towards others Competitive educational background, either public or private school Not competitive with each other—support each other Entrepreneurial, start non-profits Highly involved (clubs, organizations, attending speakers/ events) Form quality relationships with other students and faculty, closeknit Pride in their alma mater, school spirit, pride of place Social media savvy, but appreciate face-to-face interaction

The rich data culled from the interview transcripts and described above can be used in a number of ways to design or enhance the user experience. For example, this data could be helpful in creating descriptive personas because it is detailed enough to provide information on an individual or specific audience’s preferences and personality traits. It could also be used to inform the design of a journey map or customer experience map because it allows the researcher to better understand the individual’s lived experience. It is simultaneously exciting and overwhelming to be confronted by such a large amount of rich data. This is one of the benefits of performing phenomenological interviews. While the data has much potential and could

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be employed to suit the needs of other constructivist research methods— which is certainly something worth exploring—our current project uses it to inform the development of roles that people would be interpellated into as they interact with a brand community’s interface. Again, the intention of this method is to identify themes related to the brand community’s habitus, and also, to identify themes related to why and how individuals identified with and became associated with the brand— this includes insight in to how users can be interpellated into social roles when interacting with the brand’s interface. By analyzing interview transcripts individually and then collectively, the overarching habitus of the brand community can be envisioned. The individual experiences of each participant and the useful interpellative cues they provide are also revealed. These cues are valuable because they can help designers better understand the kind of content or elements that will guide users to interact with an interface in a certain way. Collecting this data will aid in the construction of a visualization of the habitus and is intended to provide a useful illustration for experience architects and UX designers.

Future Applications of the Adapted Existential Phenomenology Method in UX It is our hope that this adapted method incorporating existential phenomenology and grounded theory will prove fruitful in the field of experience architecture and user-experience research. Previous UCD methods, such as personas, have attempted to paint an image of the user, but have been unable to provide a wholly accurate account. The method described above may not be a total solution, but it is a step in the right direction regarding learning about users and the habitus in which they exist. It is also important to introduce the concept of habitus to the world of XA and UX. Some methods focus on the individual user, but not on the space, culture, social, and aesthetic elements that affect the user. That is what identifying the habitus of a particular brand or company seeks to address in order to provide the insight designers need to construct social roles for users to adopt. It is our intention that this adapted method will become an additional “tool” in the user experience architect’s toolbox in order to design products that are not just usable, but an experience to connect with and enjoy.

References Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes toward an investigation. In B. Brewster (Trans.), Lenin and philosophy, and other essays (). New York: Monthly Review.

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Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Chapman, C. N., & Milham, R. P. (2006). The Personas’ New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments against a Popular Method. Proceedings from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 50th Annual Meeting, pp. 634–636. Cooper, A. (1999). The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams. Flower, L. & Hayes, J. (1981). The pregnant pause: An inquiry into the nature of planning. Research in the Teaching of English, 15(3), 229–243. Friess, E. (2012). Personas and decision making in the design process: An ethnographic case study. ACM CHI ’12. Archival Research Papers on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1209–1218. Glaser, B. & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago: Aldine Publishing. Grant-Davie, K. (1992). Coding data: Issues of validity, reliability, and interpretation. In G. Kirsch & P. A. Sullivan (Eds.), Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hassenzahl, M., & Tractinsky, N. (2006). User Experience—A Research Agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology, 25(2), 91–97. Howard, T. Accommodationist and constructivist approaches to academic-industry partnerships in a usability and user-experience facility. In T. Bridgeford & K. St. Amant (Eds.), Academic-Industry Relationships and Partnerships: Perspectives for Technical Communicators (157–177). Lallemand, C, Gronier, G, & Koenig, V. (2014). User experience: A concept without consensus? Exploring practitioner perspectives through an international survey. Computers in Human Behavior, 43, 35–48. Laurel, B. (1993). Computers as theatre. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Molich, R. (1998). Comparative evaluation of usability tests. Paper presented at Usability Professionals Association conference, Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://www.dialogdesign.dk/tekster/cue1/cue1paper.pdf Murray, J. B. (2011). Understanding existential phenomenology as method. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas. Pollio, H. R., Henley, T., & Thompson, C. J. (1997). The phenomenology of everyday life. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003). Personas: Practice and theory. In Designing for user experiences.

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Redish, J., & Barnum, C. (2011). Overlap, influence, intertwining: The interplay of UX and technical communication. Journal of Usability Studies, 6(3), 90–101. Thompson, C. J., Locander, W. B., & Pollio, H. R. (1989). Putting Consumer Experience Back Into Consumer Research: The Philosophy And Method Of Existential-Phenomenology. Journal Of Consumer Research, 16(2), 133–146. UXPA. About us. https://uxpa.org/about-us qtd. on May 24, 2015. 142

8 Experience Architecture in Public Planning: A Material, Activist Practice Kristen Moore

Introduction

A 

s others in this collection demonstrate, experience architecture has far-reaching potential. Indeed, when experience architects pursue projects that aim towards a more participatory culture, their rhetorical prowess can bring about great change. In this chapter, I extend experience architecture methodologically, making a three-fold argument: • First, I suggest that local planning contexts can and should benefit from experience architects, drawing on several public planning research projects; • Second, I suggest that these planning contexts require new methodological approaches that attune the experience architect to place, the local communities/public and their particular sociotechnical networks and provide a heuristic for centering XA projects on place; and • Finally, I propose a place-based methodology for experience architects who work on place-based projects.

Public Planning, Engagement, and Experience Architecture For five years, I’ve studied public engagement and public planning in a range of contexts: from transportation planning in small towns and midsize cities to urban planning in small cities and large metropolitan areas. These planning projects align with the work of experience architects, who can and should invest in urban and transportation planning projects. The situated design of public planning, however, presents unique challenges. These challenges have been understudied, particularly as they relate to experience architecture. Most public planning projects are interdisciplinary, and so the work is distributed across urban planners, architects (of the brick-andmortar persuasion), and engineers. Many public-planning projects seek to involve citizens in the design and development of roads, cityscapes, community parks, and/or rail infrastructure. This involvement, often termed public engagement, is designed to seek citizens’ knowledge about the community, to build additional knowledge regarding the project, and to optimize the

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lived experience of citizens as inhabitants. Inasmuch as public engagement seeks to design user-centered infrastructures for citizens, then, it is experience architecture. Although some terms (public and engagement) and their synonyms (civic, community, participation, and involvement) have been used variously in the fields of rhetoric and writing, public engagement (or involvement, participation) refers to the effort (either mandated or not) to involve the effected community (Bryson, Quick, & Crosby, 2012). In the projects I have studied, this task is sometimes assigned to planning firms, other times to engineers, and other times to consulting firms that specialize in public engagement specifically or communications more broadly. The extent of public involvement can range from merely informing the citizens of the project to fully empowering citizens to decide what happens (Arnstein, 1969; IAP2, 2007; Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2006). That is, the term public engagement can describe a continuum from activity that resembles public relations to deep dialogic and participatory process. In its optimal execution, I argue that public engagement builds processes for inclusive and dialogic participation in decision-making about the infrastructures that make up the community. Public engagement falls within the purview of experience architects because 1. Public engagement focuses on designing opportunities

for participation; 2. Public engagement is both a material and rhetorical process that

determines the design of a sociotechnical artifact; 3. Public engagement (can) promote(s) a more ethical and just decision-making process in the community; 4. The success of public engagement relies on creating experiences that prompt participation from specific stakeholders. Experience architecture aligns with Potts’ (2014) preference for participants over users and with Salvo’s (2005) and Simmons’ (2007) ethical imperative for empowering participants. Not all experience architecture scholars privilege these aspects, but if we are to remain relevant and if we hope to devote our work to the greater charge of social justice, then public engagement as experience architecture provides a rich opportunity for scholarship and practice.

Experience Architecture in Local Communities Introducing public engagement as experience architecture also brings a new perspective to experience architects whose work is in the public sphere or in local communities. As others who’ve engaged in public approaches to

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XA have attested (see, for example, Grabill, 2003; Blythe, Grabill & Riley, 2008), designing for communities or local publics is hard. Local publics might be thought of as more accessible, more concrete, and therefore a more stable and known set of users than, say, users of a mobile technology used globally. But local publics are more diverse and complex than they initially appear. When experience architects design for local communities, then, this diversity and complexity must be folded into their methodology, and so I propose a place-based methodology for experience architects who undertake architecting for local communities. Place-based methodologies begin with the assumption that place, with all its cultural, political, and material complexities, matters; rather than see participants in an experience architecture project as users, place-based methodologies commit the experience architect to seeing participants as meaningfully entrenched in a particular locale. Although this claim might seem obvious, a place-based methodology has yet to be articulated for experience architects; neither have the implications for practice begun to be articulated. That is the purpose of this chapter. This methodological approach comes from my research and work in transportation and urban planning, where experience architects aim to design participatory decision-making processes that then allow for the design of cities, transportation infrastructure, and/or some combination of the two. For example: In a small Midwestern town, a steering committee was established to design and build an extension of an existing road. The Orlando Extension1 would require the purchasing, paving, and reconstruction of both farm and industrial areas. Because the Orlando Extension was partially funded by government money, the project required citizen input. Vortex Communications—a public engagement firm—was hired to involve citizens in the design of the extension. The final project would eventually redesign the city’s traffic flow, expand the transportation infrastructure, potentially redistribute economic growth, and change the lives of citizens—particularly the farmers, whose land would be bought up in order to fulfill the project. In this case, the Vortex Communications consultants aimed to design a participatory process that involved as many citizens as possible, that ensured citizens were included in decision-making, and that result-

1. This and all proper names in this chapter are pseudonyms per Institutional Review Board requirements.

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ed in a design plan that met the needs of citizens. This, I argue, is experience architecture. Let me explain. User experience designers have traditionally undertaken the design of products, technologies, or other artifacts. Microsoft designs software; Apple designs an iPad; a Bed and Breakfast designs a website. As an extension or expansion of usability testing, user experience design engages with a user-centered approach to the development of products that expands beyond error-focused, GUI-User foci. Instead, user experience designers take into account the ecology of user concerns (Still, 2010) and develop a more holistic approach to usability that bridges culture and technology (Johnson, Salvo, & Zoetewey, 2007)three scholars - all Sullivan’s students - reflect on the history and development of usability testing and research. Following Sullivan, this article argues that usability bridges the divide between science and rhetoric and asserts that usability is most effective when it respects the knowledge-making practices of a variety of disciplines. By interrogating trends in usability method, the authors argue for a definition of usability that relies on multiple epistemologies to triangulate knowledge-making. The article opens with a brief history of the development of usability methods and argues that usability requires a balance between empirical observation and rhetoric. Usability interprets human action and is enriched by articulating context and accepting contingency. Usability relies on effective collaboration and cooperation among stakeholders in the design of technology. Ultimately, professional and technical communication scholars are best prepared to coin new knowledge with a long and wide view of usability” (Johnson, Salvo, & Zoetewey, 2007). But experience architecture broadens the scope of user experience design even more. Experience architects: • Design for participation; • Design interdisciplinarily; • Design with both materials and rhetoric; • Design for knowledge-making. I’ve extrapolated this list from Potts’s (2014) articulation of experience architecture, which she uses interchangeably with user experience design (and other usability terminology). Some of these tenets hold over from earlier forms of usability/user-experience design, but they also expand expand the scope of user experience into experience architecture. For example, though most usability involves designing with materials and rhetoric, not all traditional usability designs for participation or knowledge-making. The list here is particularly salient for developing a place-based methodology that grows out of urban and transportation planning; indeed, Potts’s (2014) ex-

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perience architecture allows us to broaden user experience design in important interdisciplinary ways. In local, place-based studies, an experience architect must add one more design challenge to the above list: Experience architects design for local communities. As I discuss at opening, this challenge requires a placebased methodology, which attunes the experience architect to the local culture, its history, its embedded conflicts, and its knowledge-making practices. Such attunement allows for local participation, localized experiences, and local impact. I argue that the potential local impact of place-based experience architecture implicates experience architects in more than just user advocacy; rather, experience architects are well positioned as social justice activists.

Representing Local Communities Public engagement focuses on design in two ways, the end goal and the process. The end goal is to design the city or infrastructure; the process is the design of the public participation. It is in the design of the participatory process that experience architects can most effectively architect for participation and knowledge-making. In making this argument, I suggest two conceptual revisions to more traditional forms of experience architecture, revisions that can increase the success of local, place-based work: the sociotechnical network must be re-seen and the design work must be seen as intercultural communication or design. These revisions are necessary for XA to be appropriately framed as a place-based endeavor. Local Communities as Sociotechnical Networks.

Discussions of place and space have long dominated theoretical discussion in rhetoric and writing (see, for example, Reynolds 2004), but here, I take a fairly pragmatic approach to defining place. Rather than conceptualize it, I’ll talk here briefly about the ways a place-based methodology requires a revision to experience architects’ approach to the networks in/with which they’re working. In Potts’s (2014) case of social media use in disaster response, for example, the sociotechnical network inhered to a particular flexibility—indeed, that was the beauty of the XA approach she witnessed: through the flexible and participatory infrastructure of social media, citizens engaged in knowledge-making, stabilizing particular data points through circulation. In developing experience architecture for local communities, experience architects contend with a socio-technical network that is differently— that is, materially—stabilized in communities. To design a methodology for XA in this network, then, we need to approach the sociotechnical network

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differently. Hommels (2005) explains that cities, and I’ll argue all localized communities, can be described as socio-technical networks characterized by their embeddedness and their persistent traditions. Like all socio-technical networks, communities are networks, built upon infrastructures with varying levels of obduracy, to use Hommels’ term. Community infrastructures are materially embedded in (literally) concrete ways. “Harvey makes a distinction between infrastructure networks that are ‘highly’ embedded in space and networks that are less embedded,” and this distinction is useful for experience architects working in local communities. “Transport networks,” as Hommels explains, “are highly embedded because the capital these networks embody consists of pipes, cables, roads, and so on that form the physical structures of modern cities” (p. 29). In localized community projects, then, experience architects require a methodology that recognizes and responds to the embedded infrastructural network into which they enter. Hommels further describes obduracy in terms of the enduring traditions, the cultural context that affects the development of any socio-technical network. In drawing attention to enduring traditions, Hommels explains that the local community (city) as a socio-technical network is shaped, stabilized, and reshaped in conjunction with long-term cultural contexts, including historical decisions. This second characteristic invites experience architects to consider the communities they enter more completely. Hommels’ analysis of the city as a socio-technical network demonstrates that place-based work—in cities, in communities, in a geographic place—introduces constraints easily overlooked if not considered methodologically. Local Communities as Intercultural Sites

For scholars in technical communication, intercultural communication has often been aligned with international or global work (Jones, Moore, & Walton, n.d.). However, if we aim to work effectively in communities, experience architects must also anticipate diversity and interculturality even within local sites. This runs contrary to traditional approaches to understanding users, which, as Schriver (1997) explains, traditionally follows one of three trajectories: classification-driven (using pre-existing demography), intuition driven (using experiences to develop personas), or user-feedback-driven (integrating users into the process). The feedback-driven model approaches the methodological foundations of a place-based experience architecture, but it fails to consider the socio-technical aspects I introduced above. Integrating feedback from users does not necessarily consider the cultural, contextual, and/or embedded infrastructural aspects of the user experience. In place-based, local communities, experience architects cannot reliably depend upon classification or intuition to determine the char-

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acteristics of their users, nor should they. In place-based experience architecture, citizens’ cultural identifications are deeply embedded in their daily practices, and constructed through immutable traits (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) and sociocultural traits (class, trade/vocation/employment, religion, etc.). Though it’s beyond the scope of this article to flesh out these elements, I introduce the concept of intercultural sites to suggest that experience architects must consider local sites as inhering multiple cultures. Anticipating multiple cultures aids in the construction of inclusive projects in local communities, and it prompts experience architects to resist traditional approaches to user characterizations. Integrating new sociotechnical networks into our experience architecture frameworks requires that the user-as-participant becomes a user-as-participant-and-citizen. Johnson (1998) forwards a similar argument in his articulation of user-centered design, arguing for user advocacy as a central part of user-centered design. Because power is unequally distributed in communities, the experience architect is challenged to advocate for citizens but to recognize which community groups might not equitably be represented in decisions and to advocate for more inclusive processes (see Simmons, 2007). In order to do this work, local communities must be considered culturally diverse—not homogenous—with an awareness not only of the dominant public but also the counterpublics who may potentially be marginalized and/or silenced. Here, I forward a place-based methodology that assumes all community sites are intercultural sites in order to attune the experience architect to these challenges.

Building A Place-Based Methodology In the development of this methodology, I make a number of assumptions about research design and methodology. First, I follow Sullivan & Porter (1987) in their articulation of methodology as praxis. In forwarding methodology as praxis, they eschew the notion that methods and methodologies should be dictated by traditional, well-established and immutable principles; instead, they prefer a localized and reflexive methodological development. They argue that “real methodological power and productive inquiry exist beyond and between the conventional boundaries, in transdisciplinarity, and that the best research (re)defines methodological standards (while remaining conscious of and, to a degree, respectful of them)” (Sullivan & Porter, 1987, p. 65). This approach to methodology implicates researchers in questions of subjectivity, ethics, and epistemology that are particularly appropriate for both experience architects who seek to build participatory networks and place-based researchers who take risks each time they enter a community. Their focus on situated methodological development prompts

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researchers to ask: What kind of methodology does this place require? Who am I working with? What can I learn with and from these participants and from this place? What are the ethical implications of my methodological choices? For too many user experience designers, the answers to these questions are dictated by tradition, by the disciplinary frames that provide blueprints, scripts, and standards for usability. The emergence of experience architecture provides an opportunity to break out of these overly stabilized approaches and frames. In turn, then, the second assumption I make about methodology emerges from the colonial traditions that inform most methodological practices, including qualitative research methods. Sullivan and Porter suggest that we ought to come to our methodologies with a critical eye. Decolonial methodologists (Agboka, 2014; Haas, 2012; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) take this further by identifying the colonizing practices that dominate the academy. Agboka (2014) identifies this as particularly problematic for technical communicators working in intercultural sites of communication. Although few intercultural communicators have taken up domestic sites as intercultural (Thrush, 2004), in crafting a place-based methodology, I’m mindful of the ways communities inhere diversity, even (and perhaps more so) if that diversity is hidden. In other words, if place-based experience architecture is intercultural, and I argue above that it is, it is incumbent upon place-based experience architects, then, to be attuned to the community’s diversity. This attunement requires a decolonial methodology. Or so I’ll suggest. Here are the affordances of a decolonial methodology: • Decolonial Methodology draws the experience architects’ attention to “colonizing tendencies in discourse and research” (Agboka, 2014, p. 304); • Decolonial Methodology builds on “social justice epistemologies and critical interpretive practices” (p. 304); • Decolonial Methodology focuses on social justice as a central goal; • Decolonial Methodology privileges the community and its needs (Tuhiwai Smith). As outsiders, experience architects need these decolonial tenets in order to effectively and ethically work in local communities. Thus far, I’ve suggested that a place-based methodology requires a praxis-based, decolonial methodology because local communities have particular stabilizing traditions and infrastructures. Inherent in this suggestion is that experience architects should respect these traditions and engage with local communities and places with humility. What do I mean by this? Let me give another example:

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In Springdale, Illinois, I was researching a different transportation planning project for which Vortex Communications had been hired to conduct the public engagement/experience architecture. The city, Springdale, IL, had a long history of rail traffic as its dominating economic force; this domination brought with it decades of promises that investment in public projects would bring economic security to the communities. The city also had a long history of racial tensions, having been the site of race riots in the early twentieth century. The consultants with Vortex Communications aimed to architect a series of events that invited participation in decisions about how to accommodate the nearly 50% more rail traffic that was anticipated in the next decade. In architecting a participatory experience for citizens, the consultants might have ignored, silenced, or omitted the enduring traditions that caused anxiety for citizens and informed their decisions about how and whether to participate in the project. However, as experience architects, they invited discussions of these two concerns, understanding that if the final design of the rail corridors did not consider these traditions, they would be designing a city that reinforced the distrust and racial divisions that had been perpetuated for more than a century. In this case, and in other local community projects, the experience architect is responsible not merely to the designers but to the participants as well. We have long agreed that our participants can and should be central to our decisions. But in place-based experience architecture, the user-turned-participant is the participant-turned-inhabitant. They are already a part of the sociotechnical network in which and with which the experience architect works; this requires new methodologies.

Place-Based Methodology for Experience Architects Given that I espouse a praxis-based approach to methodology, I am not forwarding an overly certain or stable methodological practice for place-based projects. As I argue elsewhere (Simmons, Moore, & Sullivan, 2015), uncertainty can and should be an assumed part of any methodological undertaking. Here, I maintain that foundation for a place-based methodology: a place-based methodology assumes that the experience architects’ knowledge of a place is uncertain and that any knowledge gained about a place is limited and unstable. This orientation towards place (and, indeed, it is little more than an orientation) fuels the heuristic approach to a place-based methodology that I draw out here. Beginning with the premise that local experience architecture projects are rife with uncertainty, and that this is a good and

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ethical characteristic, I propose a series of heuristic questions to be used to develop place-based experience architecture. In developing these heuristic questions, I focus specifically on an experience architecture methodology that invites participation in knowledge-making about a local project. I assume that local projects require local expertise and that drawing out that local expertise is a methodological imperative for experience architects. As such, I present the methodology in three parts: 1) Learning about the Place, 2) Executing a Situated Plan, and 3) Evaluating the Plan In each of these sections, I address both the theoretical elements of a place-based methodology and the ways this methodology might be carried out in practice. These “In Practice” pullout boxes are meant to elucidate some [though not all] of the ways these principles might be carried out in practice and to demonstrate the ways this methodology might shift our approach to projects in more particular ways. Because, as I argue, a place-based methodology must be built from particular places and sites, the details of developing the specifics for practice must be saved for local, context-specific projects. Learning About the Place. In place-based experience architecture, great care is needed to develop ethical and effective approaches that respond directly to the site of research. This kind of care is not, I argue, necessary in other forms of experience architecture. In order to discover the citizens’ needs, the experience architect must engage in reflective practices, face-time with citizens & community sites, and continued dialogue. In Table 1, I summarize heuristic questions to aide in the development of local knowledges about the site and community of research. Below, I explain each question and provide practices that can be enacted alongside the question. Table 1 Overview of Heuristic Questions to Learn about the Local Site of Research Question

Summary of Practice

Explanation

1. What do I not know?

Reflecting on our own positions

Experience architects in local communities must become an expert on what they know and what they don’t know about the local community. When they assume they know something, they must consider how they know it, what might be missing from their understanding, and how to deepen their understanding.

Experience Architecture in Public Planning Question

Summary of Practice

Explanation

2. What about the Place?

Gathering Stories, Narrative, and Learning about the Land

Experience architects in local communities must understand the land and its value to the community. The first step to this is spending time in the place they’re studying (a series of questions below elaborate upon this).

3. Where do the local communities gather?

Finding a time and place to meet

Place-based XA requires meeting in a shared location. As a form of intercultural communication, experience architects must strategize meeting sites that maximize the potential for inclusivity. Any choice of meeting location will disclude particular community groups, and this, in turn, determines what kinds of feedback the XA will elicit.

4. How do the local communities communicate with one another?

Determining media and modes.

XA in local communities requires that the XA works with communities in the modes and media that they use in their daily practices. This sometimes means that the most cutting edge approaches to XA are ineffective for particular communities; it often means that multiple modes are required.

1. What Do I Not Know? Reflecting on Our Own Positions.

Many researchers of the critical, feminist, decolonial or qualitative persuasion have remarked on the importance of reflection and reflexivity in their methodology. Experience architects have yet to invest in this practice in meaningful ways—at least on paper—but for local work, this is particularly important. When designing for local communities, the assumptions we make about the city, the project, and the communities can have long-term effects on the communities we enter. Entering with a critical stance about our own subjectivities and histories allows for us to see our limitations; to come clean about our assumptions; and to elicit advice, help, and collaboration as needed. In the Springdale, IL, case, for example, the Vortex Consultants spent a great deal of time negotiating their intersecting characteristics as educated Black women. As one of the consultants shared, in some projects, the fact that all of the consultants in their firm are Black women presents challenges; in the Springdale case, it was a strength because it endeared some of the community members to them. Most of the public projects that had caused distrust and had inflamed racial tensions in the city had

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been run by white men, and so their identity as Black women was an asset in bridging gaps and building trust. Putting This in Practice: Some Initial Steps Place-based XAs must consider their own limitations in terms of their ability to enter into particular places. Therefore, in practice, they might:

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• Discuss the identity and subjectivity of the XA team; • Identify assumptions the XA team is making about the communities and trace the knowledge; • Identify potential gaps in the knowledge about the community and its location • Build practices that widen the knowledge base (see below). 2. What about the Place? Gathering Stories, Narrative, and Learning about the Land.

In all of the cases of transportation and urban planning I’ve observed, study teams spend significant amounts of time studying the land. These study teams are often architects or engineers surveying the land, but experience architects can and should engage directly with the land and with citizen-participants in discussions and stories about the land. Engaging directly with the land requires that the XA begins to see the land as a part of the sociotechnical network in ways that she might not in other projects. Considerations about the community, city, or town as a sociotechnical network are too many to count, of course, but they can include: • • • • •

Public transportation routes Historically Sacred Land & Property Regular Gathering places (see below) Schools, Libraries, and other sites of learning Economic centers, like downtown areas, strip malls, or big box stores

There are more, of course. Drawing on Hommels’ discussion of embedded infrastructure, I suggest that in order to conduct experience architecture in local communities, experience architects must expand their understanding of context to include the embedded infrastructure. I make this claim for a number of reasons. First, local communities develop within places; citizens’ daily practices are dictated in part by the embedded infrastructures that enable or disable movement, work, hobbies, etc. In order to understand the needs of users-turned-participants-turned-citizens, experience architects can and should see their lives within the context they work in.

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This, of course, is a claim made by many scholars involved in experience architecture. Spinuzzi (2013), for example, discusses context as “the set of observable differences in actors’ material relationships within two or more instances of the same activity” (p. 265). Although he is astute in his awareness of material relationships, because he is focusing on activities-as-context, his approach does not necessarily require consideration of the embedded infrastructure. It’s unlikely, for example, that the ways the pipes are designed in a workplace dictates any significant action in a workplace study. However, material, embedded infrastructure has far-reaching implications, particularly in XA cases when the design aims to build, tear down, or rebuild parts of this infrastructure. Putting This in Practice: Some Initial Steps Place-based XAs must consider the way the place matters in the project, and this requires both learning from citizens and engaging in the city itself. In practice, then, XAs might: • Visit central sites in the city, particularly those likely to be affected by the project; • Interview citizen groups systematically to identify differences in perspectives and concerns; • Invite local citizens from diverse groups to tell stories about their experiences in the place and their hopes for the future; • Use multisensory forms of research, including pictures, videos, and, where pertinent, descriptions/attunement to smells and vibrations.

3. Where Do the Local Communities Gather? And When? Finding a Time and Place.

Building an experience architecture project in local communities requires familiarity with the tempos and geographies of the citizens. It is possible, of course, to predetermine locations with seeking to accommodate community members’ schedules and travel patterns. This pragmatic approach is used widely in public planning and experience architecture: the logistics are dictated by the planners or experience architects. In a place-based methodology, however, the time and location of any XA event draws on its decolonial foundation. Because the time and location of events often dictate who can and cannot participate, the place-based experience architect designs XA projects that consider the inclusion of citizens across diverse communities. Few experience architects discuss the ways their time and place respond to citizen, user, or participant needs—perhaps because of the homogeneity of

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their user/participant population—but in the intercultural contexts of community and local XA, such discussions are necessary. Putting This in Practice: Some Initial Steps Place-based XAs must develop opportunities for gathering in the locations and at the times that accommodate a range of community members. They might:

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• Hold multiple meetings in locations across a community; • Determine times and locations that piggyback on other events; • Request time on the agenda of local community groups, including churches, neighborhood associations, informal groups, and schools.

4. How Do the Local Communities Communicate with One Another? Determining Media and Modes.

For many experience architects, the forms of research and the types of communication are dictated (with good reason) by best practices; in local communities particular attention is needed to determine which media and modes best accommodate citizens. Putting This in Practice: Some Initial Steps Place-based XA (like all XAs) must develop strategies for communicating effectively with the local communities. This means they might: • Develop a Community Advisory Group to help advise about what media and modes to use; • Consider low-tech options for communication, participation, and other XA project events; • Integrate multiple modes, including kinesthetic activities, visual forms of communication, and oral/aural delivery. Because most local communities inhere diverse cultures, it’s likely that multiple modes and media will be needed to accommodate the participants. In order to determine which modes and media, experience architects using a place-based methodology consult with their participants and users about the media and modes they already use within the community. Although other forms of communication, medias, and modes might provide more flexibility or robustness for the experience architect, place-based experience architects develop events, plans, and projects that build across

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platforms already in use by the local community. In one urban planning project in West Prairie, for example, the planners of a project designed an elaborate web-based platform for participation that allowed participants to contribute ideas. Although the platform provided lots of opportunities and was meant to be inclusive, the site didn’t have equitable reach across all communities affected by the West Prairie planning. As such, the suggestions and participants unevenly represented community groups. In the Springdale, IL project, for example, in addition to having an online platform, the Vortex Consultants provided a range of other modes for learning about and contributing to the Springdale project. These experience architects designed a mobile presentation that informed citizen groups and also solicited feedback, sought to understand community concerns, and encouraged citizens to dialogue about the project. They additionally provided telephone-based walk-throughs of presentations and information shared on the website to accommodate citizens who could not attend presentations. These methodological questions serve as a heuristic for building experience architecture in local communities. In any case where experience architects hope to provide opportunities for participation in knowledge-making for citizens, the local knowledges and knowledge-making must be tied to the place in which and about which the knowledge is being made, and these questions aim to provide a foundation for inquiry into the relationship between the place, the citizens, and the project at hand. Before closing, I want to discuss the aims and activities of a place-based experience architect. As I said earlier, I am drawing on public engagement as a form of experience architecture, and—like Potts’s experience architects—those architecting public engagement experiences do so with the objective of providing opportunities for knowledge-making. They also, in some cases, provide opportunities for empowered decision-making. These opportunities occur as a part of the design process. In the three cases I’ve discussed throughout this chapter, the experience architects designed opportunities for citizens to build knowledge that would inform the design of roads (in the Orlando Extension case), rail corridors (in the Springdale case), and/or urban plans (in the West Prairie case). Unlike other forms of experience architecture, then, the projects focus on enabling knowledge about the project so that the design can be built in 5–10 years. Experience architects involved in public engagement, then, focus on developing knowledge-making processes that can lead to decision-making. Executing a Situated Plan. Learning about the place is central to a place-based experience architecture, but the execution of these plans requires sustained methodological investment. That is, an experience architect cannot learn

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all about the local community and site of research, and then proceed as if that research had not been conducted. Because I assume that place-based experience architecture involves two forms of design, the end goal and the process, I pause a moment here to provide some examples of what these knowledge-making processes have entailed in my own research, particularly in the three cases I’ve already discussed. Most of the projects I’ve studied require an informational phase, wherein citizens are made aware of the project and the ways they can become involved in designing the place in which they live. Then experience architects design a series of experiential knowledge-making processes that encourage citizens to make knowledge about the project at hand. Along the way, experience architects (drawing on participatory design) continue to collect data and redesign their XA processes. Thus after learning about the place through methodological heuristics (above), the learning process continues to be iterative along the way. The primary objective, then, of the experience architecture in these cases is to architect experiences for making knowledge about a project (and so the process is the goal; not the end design). Unlike Potts’s (2014) description of social media use in disaster, the impetus for knowledge-making is fabricated by a project team and an impending change. As such, the participation requires both prompting and processes that help citizens engage with potentially unknown or unfamiliar knowledge. Table 2 Overview of Place-Based Experience Architecture Projects in the Chapter Project

Informing

Knowledge-Making

Decision-Making

Orlando Extension

Newsletters, letters, fliers, web and social media, newspaper advertisements

Dot Placement Activities, Writing and Sharing of Concerns

Evaluative Forms

Springdale Case

Newsletters, individual letters to citizens, videos, community presentations

Advisory Groups, Open Houses with Dialogues, Interactive Maps, and Interactive Handouts

Evaluative forms, Online Forums

West Prairie

Facebook announcements, fliers

Drawing and Revising Maps, Writing and Sharing of Concerns, Interactive Dot/Maps

n/a : Planners collected information and made decisions

In determining how to enact the research, a series of additional methodological heuristics to encourage knowledge- and decision-making are necessary.

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Here, I follow Simmons’ (2007) heuristic approach to decision-making in forwarding a critical approach that acknowledges the need for citizens to have power in a project and participation early in the process. She suggests that designing processes for decision-making is a form of user-centered design, and as such, she suggests the frequent, early involvement of citizens in the decision-making processes. This is foundational for successful experience architecture. But beyond that, more heuristics are needed to determine what the participation and processes ought to look like. How do we design processes that honor the places we’re designing and the citizens who live there? How do we enable knowledge-making processes and decision-making processes that account for place? The goals in designing these processes include participation, knowledge-making with citizens, and the opportunity for participants to make informed decisions. As such, the final outcome/output is less concrete than other kinds of experience architecture. Rather than forwarding traditional criteria like: memorability, efficiency, error, learnability, and satisfaction (Nielsen, 2012), place-based experience architects must design with new goals in mind. For Vortex Communications, these five criteria include: sustainability, transparency, accessibility, representative, and results-oriented. I adapt these slightly, suggesting that place-based experience architecture should be: transparent, process (not product) oriented, inclusive (intercultural and accessible) participatory approaches, representative, and focused on knowledge-making. Table 3 Criteria for Enacting Place-Based XA Design Criteria

Enacting

Why This is Important

Transparent

Identifying the end goal design openly and clarifying the relationship between process design and the end goal

Experience architects in local communities are often designing processes for end-goal designs with complex decision-making structures. The design of a final bridge, community plan, or local library often integrates federal approval, zoning statutes, and safety codes that can and should be a part of the final decision. Developing trust and mutual understanding about the project requires that these elements be laid bare for citizens. This local impact is what necessitates a place-based methodology.

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Enacting

Why This is Important

Process Oriented

The aim must be on creating a process that enables knowledgebuilding and decisionmaking, not on swaying end design in any particular way

Experience architects are often trained to design products or technologies; in local projects, like the ones I discuss, the endgoal design is not the initial focus; rather experience architects serve as the experts on assisting citizen/user/participants in sharing and building their knowledge about the project. It is likely, then, that the experience architect and this process continues to inform the end-goal design; however, if the experience architect has worked to involve citizens directly in the end-goal design, the hope is that experience architects have very little to do with the end-goal design and are replaced, instead, with citizen/user/participants.

Inclusive Participatory Approaches

Developing modes, media, and processes that accommodate multiple cultural groups

The design of these place-based experience architecture projects requires that designers cater to a wide range of needs, including various modes, language, media, and events that accommodate the comfort and convenience of community users. When resources are limited, experience architects can assess power differentials and aim to accommodate those who have traditionally been marginalized, excluded, or silenced.

Representative

Seeking to include as wide a range of citizen/ user/participants as possible

In conjunction with inclusivity, representativeness prompts experience architects to ask whether or not they have sought to develop a process that represents as many citizen groups as possible. The efficacy of this criterion is tied to learning about the place.

Focused on Knowledgemaking

Developing dialogic processes that draw out existing local knowledges and engage citizens with activities that help them make knowledge about the local project

Experience architects should assume, of course, that all citizens have valuable local knowledges, and the design process should aim to elicit local knowledge and, in dialogic activities, build knowledge about the plans, projects, infrastructures that the project aims to determine. This means developing two-way approaches to complex knowledge and designing events that help citizens understand and inform the project.

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Evaluating the Plan. In order to satisfy these criteria, a place-based experience architect should consider both the material and rhetorical construction of participation and knowledge. This requires the investigation of four questions that can be used as a heuristic checklist throughout the process to ensure that both knowledge-making practices and participation opportunities have been carefully and critically designed. What are the materials for participation? • Question the medium: use communication modes that align with existing community practices • Question the location: hold experience architecture events in locations that the community frequents, remembering that “the community” is often diverse and the design processes might need to be mobile • Question the times: consider the daily schedules of the community you’re working with and accommodate their needs, providing multiple times, if need, or providing daycare, food, or transportation as needed What are the rhetorics for participation? • Question the push and pull of information: Push information and pull information from various media and in various modes; you may need to be the personal conveyor of information, serving as a faceto-face medium for building knowledge with citizens • Question the language and literacy: We build rhetorical approaches to communicating knowledge from our own positions; if we aim to build intercultural approaches to experience architecture, we must develop participation processes that accommodate the linguistic and literacy needs of the community members we meet • Question the opportunities for feedback What are the materials for knowledge-making? • Question the modes: Citizen/user/participants make knowledge using different kinds of materials, including paper, maps, stickers, dots, handouts, electronic polling devices, markers, websites, etc. These materials correspond to different kinds of modes, including visual, oral/aural, linguistic, kinesthetic, etc. • Question the medium: Social media provide obvious opportunities for participation, but they may be less effective for particular kinds of knowledge-making. Using paper and pen might be more effective than an online form depending on the community’s daily practices. • Question the procedures: Identify the processes you hope will help

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citizens build knowledge surrounding a project and determine if they are aimed at citizen à experience architect; experience architect à citizen (one way interactions) or if they aim to develop two-way interactions among citizens or among citizens and planning committee members. What are the rhetorics of knowledge-making and power? Or, what are the end goals and final decision-making processes in this design project?

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• Question Citizen/User/Participant Power: Determine and communicate the role citizens will have over the final design in the project; • Question the Local Impact on Changing the Embedded Infrastructure: Because the end-goal design can potentially radically shift citizens’ daily lives, building a long view of how/why this might impact their daily lives (both in conjunction with citizens and perhaps independently) can help determine what kind of inclusive processes need to be designed; • Question those in Power: This is a tricky one; often experience architects will be hired by those in power, but as a citizen/user/participant advocate, understanding the perspectives of those in power will help convey and clarify expectations about the project. This can sometimes be done directly in initial meetings; it can also be gleaned through indirect discussions. These heuristic questions can help the experience architect align their project with the criteria for place-based experience architecture and evaluate their plan. These criteria and questions are heuristic, as Sullivan and Porter (1997) suggest, and must be developed and adapted alongside local projects. They also must be developed alongside pragmatic and logistical constraints. I lay these out as one example of the methodological considerations necessary for place-based experience architects.

Conclusion: A New Set of Criteria This chapter has offered two sets of heuristics that encourage a place-based XA methodology. The first set of four questions function to center the XA project on place, moving XA from user-centered design to inhabitant-centered design. Having centered the project around place, the XA can then focus on knowledge-making and decision-making processes as the central design product. I suggest five criteria for evaluating a place-based XA project and then encourage a series of questions that can help the XA develop a design that honors the place and designs knowledge-making and participation opportunities for diverse, local communities.

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In closing, I want to return briefly to the need for decolonizing our approaches to experience architecture. I was recently at a talk given by a usability specialist who suggested that the user experience architect ought to construct the user through the process of usability. Other user experience architects have suggested that pragmatic organizational concerns can and should supersede user feedback. While I’ll reserve judgment on the workplace or corporate instantiations of these suggestions, I constructed this methodology because these suggestions are dangerously tone-deaf to the current political landscape in which public experience architects work. Enacting pragmatism above all else and seeking to construct our own users flirts with the colonial, imperial preferences that silence those with less power and forward inequity through the design and development of technologies in typical experience architecture and cities/communities in the place-based experience architecture I discuss here. If we aim to seize opportunities for enacting social justice in the field, we need methodological approaches that function to carry out decolonial frameworks and to resist the foundations of our practices that reify oppressive structures.

References Agboka, G. Y. (2014). Decolonial methodologies : Social justice perspectives in intercultural technical communication research. Journal of Tech, 44(3), 297–327. Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planning, 216–224. doi:10.1080/01944366908977225

Blythe, S., Grabill, J. T., & Riley, K. (2008). Action research and wicked environmental problems: exploring appropriate roles for researchers in professional communication. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 22(3), 272–298. doi:10.1177/1050651908315973 Bryson, J. M., Quick, K. S., & Crosby, B. C. (2012). Designing public participation processes. Public Administration Review, 73, 23–34. doi:10.111/ j.1540–6210.2012.02678.x.Designing Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277– 310. doi:10.1177/1050651912439539 Grabill, J. T. (2003). The Written City. In B. McComiskey & C. Ryan (Eds.), City comp: identities, spaces, practices (pp. 128–141). New York: SUNY Press. Hommels, A. (2005). Unbuilding cities obduracy in urban sociotechnical change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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IAP2. (2007). IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation. Retrieved from http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.iap2.org/resource/resmgr/imported/ IAP2 Spectrum_vertical.pdf Johnson, R. R. (1998). User-centered technology: A rhetorical theory for computers and other mundane artifacts. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Johnson, R. R., Salvo, M. J., & Zoetewey, M. W. (2007). User-centered technology in participatory culture: Two decades “Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 50(4), 320–332. doi:10.1109/TPC.2007.908730 Jones, N., Moore, K. R., & Walton, R. (n.d.). Diversity, social justice and inclusivity: An antenarrative of technical communication. Lukensmeyer, C. C. J., & Torres, L. H. L. (2006). Public deliberation: A manager’s guide to citizen engagement. Collaboration Series. IBM Center for the Business of Government. Retrieved from http://www.businessofgovernment.org/report/ public-deliberation-managers-guide-citizen-engagement Nielsen, J. (2012). Usability 101: Introduction to usability. Retrieved June 10, 2015, from http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ usability-101-introduction-to-usability/ Potts, L. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. New York: Routledge. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of writing: Inhabiting places and encountering difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Schriver, K. (1997). Dynamics in document design: Creating texts for readers. New York: Wiley. Salvo, M. J. (2001). Ethics of engagement: User-centered design and rhetorical methodology. Technical Communication Quarterly, 18, 39–66. Simmons, W. (2007). Participation and power: Civic discourse in environmental policy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Simmons, W., Moore, K. R., & Sullivan, P. (2015). Tracing uncertainties: Methodologies of a door closer. In P. Lynch & N. Rivers (Eds.), Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. Spinuzzi, C. (2013). How can technical commmunicators study work contexts? In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. Selber (Eds.), Solving problems in technical communication (pp. 262–284). Chicago, IL. Still, B. (2010). Mapping usability: An ecological framework for analyzing user experience. In Theorizing complexity: Ideas for conceptualizing usability and complex systems (pp. 89–108). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Sullivan, P., & Porter, J. E. (1987). Opening spaces: Writing technologies and critical research practices. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing Company.

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Thrush, E. A. (2004). Multicultural issues in technical communication. In J. Dubinsky (Ed.), Teaching technical communication: Critical issues for the classroom (pp. 414–427). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin. doi:10.1055/s-0029–1241724 Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing Methodology: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd ed.). New York: Zen Books.

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9 Methodologies: Design Studies and Techne Ehren Pflugfelder

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n 1933, architect, designer, and all-around renaissance man Buckminster Fuller unveiled his latest design under the aegis of the Dymaxion Corporation—the Dymaxion Car. “Dymaxion” was a name Fuller gave to a number of his creations, including a house, a world map, and his infamous 30-minutes-at-a-time sleep cycle. Like other Dymaxion-branded creations, the Dymaxion Car was radically different from the norm. It was 20 feet long, held 11 passengers, returned more than 30 miles per gallon, and could reportedly achieve 120 miles per hour (Fuller). It resembled an airplane fuselage more than a car, in part because it was initially intended to fly, though those plans were scrapped during production. The vehicle retained the teardrop shape and aluminum skin of the airplane design, causing it to resemble a tail-heavy Airstream trailer or perhaps a giant metal guppy with airfoils. The Dymaxion Car’s remarkable fuel efficiency and speed were largely due to the low coefficient of drag from the aerodynamic body and unique three-wheeled design. Unfortunately, the strangeness of the design, the sheer length of the vehicle, and the potentially unstable rearwheel steering meant that it was unlikely to be more than a design exercise. After a rather public crash at the 1933 World’s Fair, in which the driver was killed and a passenger seriously injured, the car was relegated to car shows and fundraising efforts. To this day, the car stands as an innovative solution to the growing problem of automobile safety, congestion, and resource use. The Dymaxion Car was a radical departure from accepted thinking, in part because Fuller’s design methodologies were capacious enough to engage problems most other designers failed to see. For example, he thought of the Dymaxion Car as “Omni-Medium Transport”—something that could cope with all possible conditions (Sieden, p. 153). Fuller refused to accept problems as others defined them, and instead identified new ones that designers had not yet considered. Though Fuller’s Dymaxion Car may not have succeeded in the traditional sense, it stands as a dramatic moment of “outside-the-box” thinking applied to the problem of transportation—one that would not have been possible if not for a radically different methodological approach. Researchers in design studies have shown that different methodologies can significantly impact the results of design work, and in this chapter, I show how design studies’ approaches to methodology can be useful for experience architects as they pursue their own responsibilities toward users. In order to show these methodologies, I situate XA in relation

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to changing attitudes of usability testing and user-centered design, and explain the “design science” movement and how “design thinking” developed in reaction. I argue that this shift in design theory connects to methodological questions that experience architects face today, primarily questions about how to approach design projects without buying into methodological frameworks that limit the methods that can be employed. I propose that we can align design science with what David Roochnik identifies as a techne 1, a techne that is more instrumental and functions better in contexts with fewer variables. Likewise, we can connect design thinking with Roochnik’s techne 2, a speculative techne that is appropriate in more abstract, variable, and uncertain design situations. Using Sullivan and Porter’s articulation of methodologies as rhetorical decisions, I repurpose designer John Zeisel’s user-needs gap model and present it in a more open-ended context—one in which we are encouraged to identify the methodologies that best fit the design context. While experience architecture methods and methodologies are always rhetorical, explicitly foregrounding rhetorical situation analysis better prepares experience architects for the tricky work of experience design, especially as problems experience architects tackle are broader, less contained, and have more variables. While some connections between design and experience architecture may seem superficial, insofar as we can say that experience architects work on design projects and therefore might call themselves designers, the connections are a bit more complex. As Liza Potts has argued, experience architects focus on use throughout a system, not only as usability testers; experience architects address the “architecture of systems both above and below the surface” (Potts, p. 3). Both Potts and Michael Salvo have made the case for the term experience architecture, claiming that it better describes the complex work that lies at the intersection between technical communication, participatory culture studies, and science and technology studies (Potts, p. 4). They stress that this work is also fundamentally rhetorical in nature, grounded in a concern for user experience and human well-being (Potts, p. 16; Salvo, pp. 6–9). While research connecting design studies, rhetoric, and technical communication has blossomed in recent years (Buchanan 1985, 1995, 2001; Kostelnick, 1989; Marback, 2009; Lynch, 2012; Purdy, 2014; Leverenz, 2014; Carpenter, 2014; Cushman, 2014; Pflugfelder, 2015), a robust correlation between the methodologies used in these fields has yet to emerge. Here, I explore two specific design methodologies that help frame how experience architects can think of their own work as rhetorical.

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Whether we call them experience architects, information designers, or user experience designers, these professionals rely on a suite of methods in order to research, analyze, and prototype the projects they work on. Experience architects help users through self-reporting systems, conduct interviews and run focus groups, assist in talk-aloud protocols, and test design performance with eye-tracking studies and analytics reviews, just to name a few methods. When taken individually, these methods can seem isolated from some of the larger methodological assumptions underpinning them. However, methods are often chosen for their fit in relation to larger questions that design teams have about their projects and how they identify the boundaries of the problems they tackle. Often, XA professionals choose methods by considering what stage a project is in—some methods identify problems, others establish an initial design strategy or assist in concept generation, product planning, beta testing, or interface design. Experience architects are comfortable employing these different methods, as there are numerous protocols in place to help them sort through the maze of options. An experience architect’s “toolkit” includes a few dozen methods, each intended to fulfill a different purpose, depending upon the immediate needs of the design process and the role of the experience architect in relation to users, other designers, the goals of the project, and the inevitable problems that arise along the way. We also know that experience architects, like technical communicators and usability experts, can be at odds with specific project goals or company philosophies. Because these constraints determine the work that can be performed within a project (budgets and timelines for product rollout are often fixed by external forces), they can also determine the methods experience architects employ. Under certain constraints, XA professionals may elect to use specific methods in response to immediate needs for knowledge, rather than as part of an ideal methodological framework and user-centered design strategy. In her overview of the connections between usability experience and technical communication, Janice Redish outlines how usability testing has shifted from its place as a method applied at the end of a design process to an integrated part of a larger iterative consideration of the user (p. 196). Whenever this broad scope of user-centered design is questioned, it often falls along an identifiable spectrum. Redish calls this disagreement the problem of “little and big” usability: “[l]ittle usability equals usability testing; big usability equals UX [User Experience]. Little information architecture (IA) equals organizing the content of a website; big IA means creating the site that works for its users” (p. 196). A “big” IA values UX and XA practitioners in design teams beyond their ability to

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employ methods in response to clients’ demands. When specific workplace constraints are not imposed upon methodological choice, and when usability is more integrated within a design process, experience architects are able to choose methodologies appropriate for a specific design project. Here, experience architects have a larger role in design and in choosing methodologies for the work they perform as part of a design team. This collection’s focus on experience architecture allows for some of these methodological assumptions to be made manifest. Potts and Salvo have argued for the newer terminology of experience architect (instead of usability professional or other names for the work of a communication specialist involved in a design process), because the term emphasizes that this work is interdisciplinary, rhetorical, and architectural. As Potts explains, “[t]his concept of experience architecture is not particularly new. What is new is the idea that we need to work in teams with diverse backgrounds in writing, design, development, and information systems to build them” (p. 3). Experience architects are engaged in the process of design, not just as usability experts called in to employ methods that are determined by a production timeline, but as architects of user experience. Experience architects “can lead the analysis and design for both the social and technological infrastructures of communication by framing new practices, creating new tools, and enabling richer and more valuable interactions” for users, whomever they may be (p. 4). Key in this architectural positioning is that we think of methodologies as theories that govern methods, that we remember that choices among methodologies are indeed rhetorical choices, and that we recognize links between XA and design. The connections between XA and design are especially salient, because design researchers have already confronted some of the same issues concerning the importance and power of user-focused methods and methodologies in conversations over design science and design thinking.

Design Science and Design Thinking Design science emerged from the work of Herbert Simon, who popularized a systematized approach to design in general and highlighted the implications of revolutionary design practices. Simon’s influential The Sciences of the Artificial (1969) argued that governments, universities, and research centers should focus on this rigorous method-centered approach to design and less on theoretical nuance. For Simon, “[t]he engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be—how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function” (p. 4). Design science was a movement that wanted to raise design activities as rationalized and rationalizable methods applicable to the study of problems in much the same way that empiri-

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cal science was seen to be. As Nigel Cross explains, design science was “an explicitly organised, rational and wholly systematic approach to design; not just the utilisation of scientific knowledge of artefacts, but design in some sense a scientific activity itself” (“Design Research,” p. 51). Here, design is both serious business and a scientific endeavor, with methods that result in observably consistent outcomes. The popularity of design science led to the emergence of more discipline-specific design methods, including those in architecture, management, urban planning, information design, and computer science. Further, the strengths of these design models can be easily observed, insofar as they represent relatively clear and approachable methods for the analysis of identifiable problems. For example, Walls et al. (1992) explain how design science can be employed in information systems, suggesting that design can function as “a prescriptive theory which integrates normative and descriptive theories into design paths intended to produce more effective information systems” (p. 36). Design science methods are especially adept at building from existing knowledge and aligning with larger discipline-specific goals. Information systems designers Alan Hevner and Samir Chatterjee (2010) argue that the research phase of science-based design is especially useful when a discipline is new or when there are significant changes to a research environment, with the overall goal of establishing “best practices” for that discipline. They clarify the role of design science as addressing “important unsolved problems in unique or innovative ways or solved problems in more effective or efficient ways,” thus contributing an archive of foundational methods (p. 15).” My goal is neither to suggest that the methodology is too aligned with static, positivist scientific assumptions, nor assume that it is only applicable for minor, easily identifiable problems, but to acknowledge that design science operates within different disciplines in part because it aligns with more formal models of knowledge generation. Design science seeks out empirical validity for rational methods in order to solve discipline-specific problems. The adoption of design-science methods does not directly lead to a “little UX” perspective of usability. Certainly, there may be design-science-guided projects that uncritically employ usability testing as a rote, formal aspect of the design process, though we cannot blame a design-science methodology alone for these instances. However, when an existing “body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine[s] about the design process” is employed within a discipline with similar beliefs about the development of, or the nature of, knowledge, the likelihood for compartmentalization of usability can be high (Simon, p. 113).

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In response to the emergence of design science, some researchers and practitioners shifted from the pursuit of design as a methodology applicable to other disciplines and re-considered the discipline of design on its own terms. This movement involved a greater critical awareness of design as a professional practice, where designers commented upon the methods used in design, instead of how design functioned in relation to scientific methods or fields. Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983) became a touchstone work for this shift. Schön pointed out that designers engage in fundamentally different practices than the subject-matter experts with whom they work and emphasized designers’ specialized knowledge. He argued that designers build knowledge about the process of design through critical self-reflection. For Schön, this reflection allows a designer to “criticize the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialized practice, and can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which he may allow himself to practice” (p. 61). This reflective practice was to give way to what Cross called “designerly ways of knowing” in his article (2001) and later book (2006) of the same title. Cross argued that design, as a field, “has its own distinct intellectual culture; its own designerly ‘things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them’” (“Design Research,” p. 7). The design-thinking stance that emerged from this assumption positions design as an independent discipline, not as a handmaiden to science, and emphasizes designers’ broad range of creative thinking habits in order to solve problems. Design thinking has also seen strong support in the last decade— support that has transcended the discipline. Unlike design science, when design thinking has been imported into other fields, such as marketing, business, or education, its methodology is still conceptually bound to the field of design. Tim Brown, CEO and president of the IDEO design firm, has been one of the most vocal advocates of the methodology. Brown situates design thinking as “human-centered, creative, iterative, and practical approaches to finding the best ideas and ultimate solutions” for various problems (92). Distinct from explicitly “user-centered” design practices, design thinking identifies as “human-centered”—an approach that defines “human” needs in a broader context than “user” needs. A human-centered approach seeks out opportunities to foster human creativity, skill-building, and wellness through design, as opposed to determining whether a product is usable and safe. Design thinking incorporates this broader consideration into a solution-focused process of divergent idea development and creative problem-solving, often referred to as “outside-the-box” thinking. While those engaging in design-thinking methodologies can still generalize a process, their generalizations rely on a wholly different approach to problem identification.

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Unlike design science, where problems are defined within specific disciplinary boundaries, design thinking focuses on the process of problem setting. A problem can be identified as pertaining to a number of existing fields of research or, more likely, multiple fields at once. For Schön, design science can focus too rigidly on problem solving, while discounting the nuances of problem setting (p. 40). When we ignore this setting, he claims we limit: “The process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen. In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problem situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain” (p. 40). The appropriate response to broadly defined problems lies in re-focusing on the work of designers themselves and creative, design-centric processes (p. 49). Here, idea generation in response to a problem is divergent and cumulative rather than analytic, which is where “outside the box” thinking emerges. The general process of design thinking follows a human-centered model where designers “empathize,” “define,” “ideate,” “prototype,” and “test” (Bootcamp Bootleg 1–5). Versions of this methodology have been implemented in design schools, most notably the d.school at Stanford University and the D-School at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam, Germany, as well as in design firms such as IDEO and Intuit. To summarize, in these definitions for design science and design thinking, we see two different methodologies: one more formal, disciplinary, and specific to problem-definition, and one more divergent, design-centric, and focused on problem-setting. My point is not that experience architects should align with a specific design theory, but that the field of design has been wrestling with concerns over the scope and implications of methodological choice for some time. As a more recently emergent field, XA could learn from this disciplinary discussion, especially as professionals continue to identify best practices for choosing from multiple methodological constraints. Here, I want to shift the discussion from differences between design science and design thinking to the concept of techne, a broader category for numerous making-related arts. Because techne describes an art of production, exploring the varieties of techne can highlight why certain methodologies are applicable to certain production contexts. The connections between techne and design situate the work of experience architects as fundamentally rhetorical, in part because the methods XA professionals use are dependent upon rhetorically grounded decisions over methodology.

XA and Techne For rhetoricians, techne is most generally known as the larger category of productive knowledge and activity of which rhetoric is a part. Most would

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refer back to Aristotle’s classification of rhetoric as a techne in his Rhetoric, and his definition of techne as “a reasoned state of capacity to make” (p. 1140a6). The concept of techne is thus the larger conceptual category for many production-focused arts—arts that concern how we learn specific skills, strategies, and methods and to what ends those efforts are directed. Techne is not the same as design, and we would be mistaken to equate the two, but techne is a knowledge that comes from knowing how to engage in some form of production as well as why specific strategies and skills are applicable to specific contexts. Techne is the larger category of what we can call architectonic arts. An architectonic art is an art about art, that is, an art that can be applied to any given number of individual topics. For example, rhetoricians see their art as being applicable to many areas, and designers likely believe the same, as design can be configured as a methodology that directs research, analysis, and production. An architectonic art can be defined as any art “concerned with discovery and invention, argument and planning, and the purposes or ends that guide the activities of the subordinate arts and crafts” (“Rhetoric, Humanism,” p. 31). Understanding design as an architectonic art, we recognize that it concerns production, but also that our assumptions about art determine our methodological perspectives and the methods we choose in design projects. As I explain below, our methodological decisions are also rhetorical choices. Here, I highlight how different conceptions of techne coordinate with, and therefore suggest, different rhetorical approaches to design, understandings of audience, and even user-orientation. Even though our general understanding of techne is the larger conceptual category for arts like rhetoric, design, architecture, sculpture, medicine, etc., its definition has been in contention for over two millennia. David Roochnik, in Of Art and Wisdom: Plato’s Understanding of Techne (1996), identifies numerous complex understandings of pre-Platonic techne, and Kelly Pender, in Techne, from Neoclassicism to Postmodernism: Understanding Writing as a Useful, Teachable Art (2011) categorizes at least five definitions (16). Pender clarifies Roochnick’s larger contention that there are two main forms of techne—a techne 1 and a techne 2. A techne 1 is a determinate, universal, and infallible set of techniques used to accomplish something. This techne closely resembles a set of direct commands in an instruction set. We can align a techne 1 with design science because design science encourages usability methods to be adapted to other fields. A design-science process, for example, can be a relatively straightforward concern, with an overall concern with outcomes-based research, specific guidelines for analysis, and end-user utility. A techne 2, however, is a less-certain affair. For Roochnik, there exist many fluctuating definitions of techne 2, and they tend to be located on the opposite end of the spectrum from more

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instrumental forms of techne. A techne 2, in his words, “has a determinate, but not rigidly fixed or invariable subject matter,” “is reliable, but not totally so,” “is recognizable by the community, but not infallibly so,” and is able to offer a logic, “but not one of unimpeachable clarity” (p. 52). This techne, in Janet Atwill’s explanation, “intervenes when a boundary or limitation is recognized” to create “a path that both transgresses and refines that boundary” (p. 48). A techne 2 is more than a set of methods, but an abstract process to be consciously employed in variable-rich contexts. When the boundaries of what is possible are reached, our capacity to develop new solutions is dependent upon the looser, less constrained interventions that help us, as Atwill explains, “create paths in uncharted territories—to help one find one’s way in the dark” (p. 68). It is tempting to think of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projects as just these kinds of attempts, even though his work has been more often affiliated with a nascent design science. The radically “outside the box” design of the Dymaxion Car envisioned a strange logic that pressed up against traditional 1930s boundaries of what an automobile can and should do—certainly indicative of a techne 2. That said, with a definition of techne 2, we recognize how design projects are able to engage in a methodology that is less structured and less easily aligned with specific methods. We can likewise identify connections between techne 2 and design thinking, specifically in how design thinking involves broadly human-centric, divergent, outside-the-box approaches to design and refuses to choose specific methods simply because of external constraints.

Rhetorical Methodologies As I suggested above, my goal of identifying the differences between design science and design thinking is to show that the field of design has already engaged questions of methodological uncertainty. By mapping these approaches to conceptions of techne 1 and techne 2, we can identify common traits between design and rhetoric as architectonic arts. These corollary spectrums of design methodology and techne frame our choice of research methods, but even further, they show how choice in methodology is a fundamentally rhetorical choice insofar as it evaluates the needs of multiple stakeholders in problem definition or problem setting. Building methods for experience architecture, then, should arise from the knowledge that methodological choice is one of the most important aspects to working in a design team. Patricia Sullivan and James Porter, in Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices (1997), argue that too often the word “methodology” stands in for a method. That is, “methodology is equated with particular observational procedures or data-collection strategies and with specific data-analysis techniques” (p. 11). They view methods as tech-

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niques, or sets of research practices, and define methodologies as broader “theoretically informed frameworks” governing possible methods (Stanley & Wise, p. 26, qtd. by Sullivan & Porter, p. 11). Design methodologies are deeply dependent upon experience architects’ analysis of the design problem or the event, space, or topic in which they wish to intervene. While XA methodologies are always rhetorical, explicitly foregrounding that rhetorical context, and its analysis, would better prepare experience architects for the tricky work of experience design. In order to visualize this claim, we can examine a past model from the field of design. In the past, design theorist John Zeisel has advocated for clear representations of how decision-making happens in design fields, so that designers can coordinate with other disciplines to improve a specific situation or project. Because Zeisel saw design functioning within other disciplines, we can locate his work as aligned with design science. Zeisel, in Inquiry by Design: Tools for Environment-Behavior Research (1981), investigates these inter-disciplinary relationships and identifies a problem: designers want to be directly involved in the production of things, which is not always easy to facilitate in an “increasingly complex society, where designers often build for strangers and strange groups” (p. 34). To assist, he contrived a kind of rhetorical situation for designers, one that considered the process of knowledge generation with regard to both paying clients and users (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Zeisel’s user-needs gap model (35).

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For example, when designers are contracted to develop a large public project, there are likely two main gaps in knowledge at the start of a design process. Designers communicate with paying clients and understand their needs and constraints, though neither paying clients nor designers fully understand what users want from the design. Zeisel’s model pre-empts some methodological decisions that designers (and experience architects) could engage. His model is a concession to real-world scenarios, and while we should appreciate this gesture, we should also question whether we should use a model that glosses over the relationship between designers, the problems designers intend to solve, and how users relate to both. We might ask why experience architects would restrict themselves to this “problem definition” framework, especially when a rhetorical engagement could take so many different forms. While many design scenarios are constrained by client demands, we do not need to assume that those demands represent a starting point for methodological decisions. Such a practice is unnecessarily limiting. Designer Bryan Lawson explains problems with this approach: At first sight it may seem obvious where design problems come from. Clients bring them to designers! [. . .] [W]hilst that is often true it is not always so, and it turns out to be only a small part of the story. It is certainly possible for designers to discover a problem without a client and much interesting design work is done under exactly these clientless conditions. (p. 84) For Lawson, as for Schön, the work of “problem-setting” is both important and inherently rhetorical because the act of establishing the boundaries of what is known and unknown is a practice of determining which methodologies are applicable. Jeremy Cushman likewise echoes the value of “problem-setting” for technical communicators: The practice involves coping with complexity and sometimes overload by attuning to shifting contexts and allowing some elements of a situation to emerge as more salient than others—even while the practitioners and their rhetorical decisions intertwine with the situations they hope to affect. Problem setting helps push technical communication practices away from the bias toward standard processes or procedures left by industrialization [. . .] and toward more communicative and tacit forms of counterprofessional and rhetorical work. (p. 332) Happily, we would not have much trouble adjusting Zeisel’s model so that we begin with open-ended inquiries of rhetorical problem-setting.

Methodologies

Instead of focusing on the relationships between designers, users, and paying clients, we would focus on experience architects, the humans to which they are ethically beholden, and the complex problems to which they have chosen to respond. An altered version of Zeisel’s user-needs gap model, which we might call the experience architecture gap model (see Fig. 2), replaces the desires of paying clients with the more open-ended concept of architectonic problems, which can include a paying client’s articulations of a problem, but is not limited to that definition, discipline-specific or not. An architectonic problem can be addressed through any architectonic approach. Unlike Zeisel’s original model, experience architects do not need precise knowledge of the problem they are being asked to solve; potential gaps exist in all elements of the design context. The methodologies appropriate for problem-setting can be either more established or more experimental, and this model does not pre-determine any specific approach to either, thus allowing for the ability to identify possible techne for the project. Instead of limiting ourselves to client-specific problems, we can ask questions about the nature of the problem, how humans (not user-clients) relate to those problems, and how designers and the resultant designs can intervene. The goal is to identify problems that are less easily located within specific domains of knowledge or disciplinary areas and allow for human-centric solutions. To show how this more open-ended approach to problem identification and methodological choice bears fruit, it may help to examine an instance where a complex problem, with a client, was tackled successfully. In 2006, the Ford Motor Company contacted the design firms of IDEO and Smart Design to develop a new interface, one they hoped would help drivers achieve the highest miles-per-gallon from their hybrid car’s drivetrain. In this case, the problem-definition phase of the project was critical because the “problem” was not immediately identifiable or fixable by one specific approach. Designers knew the domain of the solution was going to involve interface design in some capacity, yet the problem itself could be defined in a number of different ways. Further, users did not know what specific kind of interface would help them. IDEO conducted interviews with and observed thirty-six drivers, in order to learn more about their habits and beliefs. From those interviews, designers then created a general framework for interaction. The participants in this study ranged from drivers who had never seen gas-electric hybrids to those who owned one and wanted to drive as efficiently as possible. Steve Bishop, IDEO’s global lead of sustainability, claims that the “big finding was that drivers interested in fuel efficiency were playing a game. They want[ed] a high score” (“Hybrid Electric”). In response to this evidence, IDEO and Smart Design focused on

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helping drivers get the most out of the hybrid powertrain through an interactive visual metaphor that would discreetly prompt them toward better mileage. The resultant design became the Ford SmartGauge with EcoGuide. Located just behind the steering wheel, the SmartGauge features two liquid crystal displays on either side of the speedometer that show one of four possible visual representations of data: • • • •

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Inform: fuel level and battery charge status Enlighten: electric vehicle mode indicator and tachometer Engage: engine and battery output Empower: power sent to each wheel, engine pull-up threshold, and accessory power consumption (“Ford’s SmartGauge”)

This interface is intended to create a driving situation where “the gauges and the configurations function as tools that better communicate with drivers, giving them the tools to maximize fuel efficiency” (Eisenstein, 2009).

Figure 2: An amended version of Zeisel’s user-needs gap model, the experience architect’s gap model. The most notable innovation on the SmartGauge however, is the specific interface and metaphor of “Efficiency Leaves.” Efficiency Leaves are graphic representations of green leaves located on the right LCD screen that “grow” in number whenever the vehicle attains a pre-established level of driving efficiency. As Ford explains: Short-term fuel efficiency can be displayed in two ways—either as a traditional chart or using an innovative display that shows “growing leaves” and vines on the right side of the cluster. The more efficient a

Methodologies

customer is, the more lush and beautiful the leaves and vines, creating a visual reward for the driver’s efforts (“2010 Ford Fusion”). If we were to employ Zeisel’s original user-needs gap model, designers could have identified Ford’s wishes for an interface, based on a previous conception of their users, and made assumptions based off of that information. However, instead of relying on Ford for an articulation of what users wanted, IDEO sought to define the problem from a more open starting point. The interface solution required a design-thinking approach that focused on responding to human desires that may not have been identified if predetermined methodologies encouraged conventional usability methods. In this case, a design-thinking methodology was appropriate, as less was known about the problem, current understandings of that problem, and the ability of a digital dashboard to engage drivers in passive forms of play. Even though some parameters were placed on design context, designers did more “exploring in the dark” than in Zeisel’s original model and likely accommodated human capacities and desires that exist outside of the context of “user.” Their methods resulted from rhetorical choices between methodological frameworks.

Conclusions Experience architects’ initial evaluation of a design situation and their work in the rhetorical analysis of “problem setting” can guide the work that follows. Further, envisioning design problems as rhetorical situations allows experience architects to think beyond the kind of constraints typically found with techne 1 methods. In doing this analysis, an experience architect develops an estimation of what methodology would best suit a situation; in cases of greater certainty and fewer variables, the methodological constraints are higher and designers may more easily identify methods that would best fit. Techne 1 approaches and more clearly defined usability methods might make sense under those conditions. When there are more variables and the problem is much less defined, like the Ford dashboard example given above, odds are that designers need to do more work to understand the design context and develop possible interventions into the larger problem. In these contexts, a techne 2 approach might be in order. When experience architects identify problems that do not suggest any specific methods, or discipline, problem setting can be especially tricky. Problems like aggravating emergency room visits or frustrations with user-built, user-run social networks have no immediately identifiable definition or solution. In scenarios like these, experience architects are called upon to understand a socio-technical context that requires innovative think-

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ing and exploratory methods and methodologies (including broad contextual inquiries, open-ended field studies, etc.) in order to identify some of the variables at play. Effective “outside-the-box” thinking occurs in projects where there is no consensus on how the problem should be defined. A very open-ended inquiry might fit under what designers like Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby have called “conceptual design.” A conceptual design is an extreme techne 2 design-thinking methodology that can lead to radically new or thoroughly untested designs or speculative human-oriented methods. These designs, like Fuller’s Dymaxion Car, may only gesture toward potential solutions or hypothetical technologies. Often, they come across as something closer to “art” than usable design. These creations, such as Chris Woebken and Natalie Jerimijenko’s Bat Billboard (2010), would not fulfill a paying client’s desires, nor necessarily provide immediate help for users, but instead point to interesting potentialities. As a response to the fungal infection afflicting bats known as “white nosed syndrome” (Geomyces destructans fungus), the Bat Billboard project visualizes a safe haven for urban bats by turning a billboard into a bat habitat. The billboard structure protects bats from the fungal infection, and the projected face of the billboard shows translated messages “from” the bats themselves. As a response to the disease, the bat billboard is certainly an unusual one—and likely could not have been developed with a methodology pulled from Zeisel’s original user-needs gap model. My point in showcasing a project like the Bat Billboard is not to identify a specific methodology, or even suggest that Dunne and Raby’s vision of conceptual design is valid for particular projects. Instead, I hope to show that conceptual design is an extreme example of a techne 2 approach, in much the same way that overly formal techne 1 approaches in highly structured, field-specific environments exist at a completely different end of the design spectrum. Further, I hope to have highlighted that design frameworks are built upon rhetorical assumptions about the nature of design and the process of problem-setting. By tracing the conversation designers have had about methodology, experience architects can understand that the choice of any methodology impacts the work that follows. Here, I have identified the “problem-setting” phase of design work as the site of rhetorical analysis for methodology decisions. Experience architects face some of these same methodological choices every day, and should be wary of constricted, client-centric versions of this framework. In part, this correlation of problem setting through the languages of design and rhetoric is an attempt to identify common methodologies for experience architects, as they engage in and with different disciplines. Potts and Bartocci have argued that “[i]f we truly wish to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of how to build better tech-

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nologies, systems, and business processes, our disciplines must first reach common ground regarding design research methods” (17). While not the “methodological toolkit” that Potts and Bartocci identify as most useful, the connections offered here should at least identify some of the methodological assumptions from which we can build.

References 2010 Ford Fusion SmartGauge with EcoGuide coaches drivers to maximum fuel efficiency. (2010, March). Media.Ford.com.. Retrieved from http://www.media.ford.com/images/10031/SmartGauge.pdf Aristotle (N.d.). In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Atwill, J. M. (1998). Rhetoric reclaimed: Aristotle and the liberal arts tradition. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press. Brown, T. (2008, June) Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, pp. 84–92. Buchanan, R. (1985). Declaration by design: Rhetoric, argument, and demonstration in design practice. Design Issues, 2(1), 4–22. Buchanan, R. (1995). Rhetoric, humanism, and design. In R. Buchanan & V. Margolin (Eds.), Discovering design: Explorations in design studies (pp. 23–68). . Buchanan, R. (2001). Design and the new rhetoric. Philosophy and rhetoric 34(3), pp. 183–206. Carpenter, R.. (2014). Negotiating the spaces of design in multimodal composition. Computers and Composition, 33, pp. 68–78. Cross, N. (1999). Design research: A disciplined conversation. Design Issues 15(2), p.p. 5–10. Cross, N. (2001). Designerly ways of knowing: Design discipline versus design science. Design Issues, 17(3), pp. 49–55. Cross, N. (2006). Designerly ways of knowing. London: Springer-Verlag. Cushman, J. (2014). Our unstable artistry: Donald Schön’s counterprofessional practice.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 28(3), pp. 327–51. P Dunne A. & Raby, F.(2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Eisenstein, P. (2009, October). 2010 Ford Fusion Sport has crisp design as hybrids get eco-geek dashboard tech: L.A. Auto Show preview. Popular Mechanics. Retrieved from http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/ news/4289684 Ford’s SmartGauge with EcoGuide coaches drivers to maximize fuel efficiency on new Fusion hybrid. (2008, October). Ford Motor Company

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Newsroom. Retrieved from http://media.ford.com/article_display. cfm?article_id=29300 Fuller, B.(1937). US Patent No. 2,101,057. 7. Washington DC: US Patent and Trademark Office. Kostelnick, C. (1989). Process paradigms in design and composition: affinities and directions. College Composition and Communication, 40(3), pp. 267–91. Hybrid electric vehicle interaction for Ford Motor Company. (n.d.). IDEO.com. Retrieved from http://www.ideo.com/work/ hybrid-electric-vehicle-dashboard-interaction/ Lawson, B. (2005). How designers think: The design process demystified (4th ed). New York: Elsevier. Leverenz, C. S. Design thinking and the wicked problem of teaching writing. Computers and Composition 33, pp. 1–12. Lynch, P. Composition’s new thing: Bruno Latour and the apocalyptic turn. College English, 74(5) (2012): 458–76. Print. Marback, R. (2009). Embracing wicked problems: The turn to design in composition studies. College Composition and Communication, 61(2), pp. 397–419. Pender, K. (2011). Techne, from neoclassicism to postmodernism: Understanding writing as a useful, teachable art. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Pflugfelder, E. H. (2015). Rhetoric’s new materialism: From micro rhetorics to microbrews. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 45(5), pp. 441–61. Potts, L. & Gerianne B. (2009, October). experience design . SIGDOC, Bloomington, IN. Potts, L. (2014). Social media in disaster response. New York: Routledge. Purdy, J. What can design thinking offer writing studies? College Composition and Communication, 65(4), pp. 612–41. Redish, J. Technical communication and usability: Intertwined strands and mutual influences. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 53(3), pp. 191–201. Roochnik, D. (1996). Of art and wisdom: Plato’s understanding of techne. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Salvo, M. (2014). What’s in a name?: Experience architecture rearticulates the humanities. Communication Design Quarterly, 3(2), pp. 6–9. Print. Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Seiden, L. S. (2000). Buckminster Fuller’s universe: An appreciation. New York: Basic Books. Simon, H. A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.

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Stanford d.school. (2011, March). bootcamp bootleg. Retrieved from http:// dschool.stanford.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf Stanley, L. & Wise, S. (1993). Breaking out again: Feminist ontology and epistemology. London: Routledge. Sullivan, P. A. & Porter, J. E. (1997). Opening spaces: Writing technologies and critical research practices. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing. Walls, J. G., Widmeyer, G. R., and El Sawy, O. A. (1992). Building an information system design theory for vigilant EIS. Information Systems Research 3, pp. 36–59. Woebken, C. & Jerimijenko, N. (2011). Bat Billboard. Retrieved from http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/talktome/ objects/146223/ Zeisel, J. (1984). Inquiry by design: Tools for environment-behavior research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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10 Ethnography as Research Aggregator Andrew Mara and Miriam Mara

W

hen one puts XA research methods on a timeline of the design process, there are few places that a kind of XA research method could not be used to gather information to improve the design process. The frontend steps of internal discovery and user identification and the back-end steps of usability only form two bookends on a broad spectrum of research methods that can be conducted to help design teams create compelling and usable products and services for users. The challenge that this wide array of possible research presents, however, is the very real danger of research incoherency, and a set of ambiguities that can derail the design process if there aren’t ways to reconcile different kinds of data. One way that XA designers can coherently connect the gap between key XA user research methods— contextual design and qualitative surveys and interviews—is through the use of ethnography. Conducting and incorporating the thick description of extensive observation and interaction into their XA research can help practitioners create a sense of coherence in their collections of user data. This chapter outlines the data collection methods of ethnography, describes the writing practices that inhere in this anthropological approach to research, and demonstrates how these are connected through an illustrative case study of two iterations of a mobile-technology-inflected art event. Because the practice of ethnography has blended both observation and participation, the philosophy behind this practice can help UX researchers invent more useful research protocols, participant heuristics, and contextual inquiry interactions. The generative interaction of ethnography can additionally help UX researchers represent their data as topoi, personas, affinity diagrams, or other audience-sensitive representations. To give the reader a feel for the usefulness of ethnographic practices, it is important to first give a brief overview of interview design and framing, field preparation, interviewing, data capture and evaluation, and insight deployment. All of these steps are designed to help the UX researcher better envision, collect, and shape their data to understand their users and their audiences better. In addition, this chapter will foreground how ethnography provides a rhetorical orientation towards what can be a dizzying array of data. Experience Architects form and design pathways that users experience—a system which sometimes, but not always, includes computer-human interaction. Building on an Aristotelian instrumental understanding of individual types, by inflecting it with human-shaped data, the

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Experience Architect can blend the in-media-res perspective of the user with the goals of other stakeholders to better understand the relationship between attitude and activity. Ethnography allows the Experience Architecture researcher to reconnect user perception with the aggregation of habits and pathways that these users take through data. Additionally, ethnography synthesizes a triple focus on individual motivation, connections, and interactions that are necessary for any XA project to succeed. XA research can have a distinctly Aristotelian feel, with both the use of themes and topoi, and appeals to (temporarily) typed people. Yet, XA research is ultimately driven by a belief in the ability to make any product, and argument, better and the willingness to prioritize data insights by situating them in human practice. The openness of ethnography works best when the practitioner/researcher believes that any proposition might always be strengthened; conversely, ethnography must be willing to entertain the possibility that its opposite is also plausible. XA research combines astute observation of human behavior, data-driven classification and division, and a combination of data collection and analysis that saturates contemporary ethnography. Furthermore, the combination of deductive and inductive methods of ethnographic focus and contextualization can help the XA researcher isolate and spatialize their data in time and place. Finally, this chapter will use a case study to detail how the author deployed work processes and genres that are most critical to the method— the field notebook (online or physical), the field note, and the report—to iterate a public art event. In this case, ethnography connected and contextualized the surveys, affinity diagrams, personas, and briefs that had made up an earlier iteration of the Fargo-Moorhead Art Marathon (#fmartmar14). By drawing the lessons for how ethnographic genres created richer document ecologies in this case, XA researchers might better understand what ethnographic practices, if any, might help her/him better supplement and understand the UX data that is already being collected and deployed in their organization. Ethnography, the immersion of a researcher into the life-world of a group of people, an ethnos, emerges from the writing practices that unfold during the process. Ethnographic research has traditionally unfolded over longer time periods of at least six months (Fetterman, 2010; Bishop, 1999). More recently, however, research that emerges from much shorter time periods has been described as ethnographic research (Mara, 2015; Mara, 2013; Millen, 2000; Potts, 2009). What remains constant in the shifting timeframe of ethnography are the writing practices and the immersion of the researcher into the groups participating in the research. Field

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notebooks and the field notes are the fundamental genre and micro-genre for the ethnographer to collect and analyze data: The most common tools ethnographers use are pen and paper. With these tools, the fieldworker records notes from interviews during or after each session, sketches an area’s physical layout, traces an organizational chart, and outlines informal social networks. (Fetterman, 2010, p. 73)

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This immediacy and flexibility of note-taking in a notebook dovetails with the assumed skill of note-taking (a skillset that is increasingly being mourned by teachers). Notebooks and notecards are an unobtrusive, portable, and zero-power way to collect data. Of course, field recording, photography, and other forms of data collection are possibilities as well, but tend to be presented as supplemental and/or peripheral. Additionally, the field note presents itself as an early step in a long genre set transformation: “This process becomes product through analysis at various stages in the ethnographic work—in field notes, memoranda, and interim reports, but most dramatically in the published report, article or book” (Fetterman, 2010, p. 12). The more finished or scholastically-valued genres emerge from the field note because these notes are ready to hand and allow a variety of literacy practices for the ethnographer to “combine sketching . . . develop checklists and grids to tabulate regularly recurring activities,” and to qualitatively assess whether or not the researcher’s assumptions were correct through reflection and comparison (Bishop, 1999, p. 77).

Ethnography as Macro-Genre The role that ethnography can play in the research ecology of an experience architecture team is both as a set of writing genres and as a process that can help the team collect the kind of research that connects social activity with the more instrumentalized behavior data. Additionally, ethnographic research can mediate mixed methods of research across multiple interfaces to help design teams negotiate decisions across this array of sites and data. Rebekah Rousi notes how ethnography can perform the double task of creating greater cross-interface coherence and cross-data saliency in her work on elevator user experience: A leading elevator design and manufacturing company gave me the task of examining how people experienced and interacted with elevators. The scope included everything from hall call buttons, to cabin interior design and perception of technical design. When given the brief, the artistic director noted country specific design features (or

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omissions) and even mentioned that there may be observable elevator habits I would want to take note of. Then, on our bidding a corporate-academic farewell she added that I might want to consider the psychology of the surrounding architectural environment. With that, I was left with a long list of to-do’s and only one method I could think of that would be capable of incorporating so many factors—ethnography. Ethnographic inquiry provides a framework in which the researcher’s own observations and experiences of the phenomenon under study–in this case elevator users’ behaviour in relation to the elevators, other users and the surrounding architectural environment— can be combined with “insiders’” opinions and insights. (Uplifting) Ethnography helps Rousi use observation, note-taking, and experiencing the processes herself to understand the ways that users interact with the elevator as a system. Only by spending time with elevator users, watching them, recording their habits, and then triangulating that information with her own experience of the context, could Rousi amass the kind of information needed to understand how users interface with the elevators and their surroundings. Though the field note is an incremental and embryonic step in the ethnographic process, it is by no means a first step. Ethnographers—even those practicing phenomenological (or at least non-positivistic) research are still expected to bring a well-developed theoretical framework against which data will be compared (Fetterman, 2010, p. 15). Theories—whether materialist, cognitive, feminist, phenomenological, etc.—or some combination thereof—inform the kinds of data collected, the genres that will be deployed to collect data, analyze patterns, and forward insights to the communities that debate and valorize ethnography. The recursive pattern of theorize—observe—note—analyze—conclude—distribute—debate—theorize determines the genres that shape and drive the cycle. For Experience Architects, the genres from contextual design, technical writing, and information architecture are all bound together with insights gathered through ethnographic research. The rhetorical canons of invention—arrangement—style— delivery—memory are inflected by the imperative of developing an emic, or inside, perspective of the community being studied. In other words, all facets of writing and persuasion get altered by the deeply collaborative ethnographic methods and genres used to capture the generated insights. For both the Experience Architect and the ethnographer, the experience of the participant/user is key, and understanding the significance of symbolic activity, whether cognitive, experiential, or material, occurs against an articulated theory that is guiding the rhetorical inquiry.

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While an Experience Architect may have a definite idea of both a theory (or some sort of model about how things unfold in the world), going into the field with a sense of how an interview should unfold, a set of questions, protocols for questioning, and a sense of how to conduct oneself during the interview ensures that the XA team will maximize their time and effort. Once the XA team has created a list of questions and an interview protocol, the team needs to pick the locations and times that they want to conduct interviews and more focused interactions. If the team is doing contextual design, such research will need to occur where the users deploy their technology and integrate other pieces of their expressive ecology into a particular practice. As rhetoric of science and technology researchers Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, John Law, and Clay Spinuzzi (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Law, 2002; Spinuzzi, 2003) have observed, users often create surprising technology workarounds that may not seem obvious, and can even be invisible to outsiders. The use of post-it notes, material workarounds, and even verbal genres help users bend technologies to do work that is meaningful to them. Interviewing provides key moments for designers to collect stories about the experiences that they are designing and to check hunches and theories against the insights of the people responsible for deploying the technologies, products, and services. The stage setting and protocols should help guide the interviewer(s), but the interview should be based upon capturing the users’ sense of how concepts fit into an ecology of use. The XA researcher should bring visual, tactile, and conversational prompts that tease out how the user navigates a set of mostly tacit steps to fulfill motivational activity. Researchers should be ready to quickly discuss, map, visualize, or prototype how the what of observed activity connects with the why. Using Steven Portigal’s (2012) “Show and Tell” and/or IDEO’s (2002) “Day in the Life,” XA mapping activities can help a design team begin to concretize user concepts into operations, interfaces, products, and experiences. (Portigal, 2012, p. 51) Data capture is a critical component to any XA team’s ethnography strategy. Beyond the genre of the field note and notebook, it is important for the ethnographer to observe as a participant would. Preparing for the interview will help the researcher more comfortably interact with other participants and should help the researcher know what kind of data to record through notes, photos, and even social media markers like retweets and hashtag banter. Creating an online data trail and comprehensible notes that follow themes that are hypothesized or accumulated during phenomenological research streamlines the process and allows the team to test theo-

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ries and components of theories that will help them confirm or pivot away from particular iteration choices. For the Art Marathon XA researcher team, in working on an app-enabled art scavenger hunt, it was important to iterate the genres being used to create and manage the event even as we were iterating the event itself. What emerged in a casual conversation in a hotel board room with one of the founders of the Grand Rapids, MI event, ArtPrize, eventually grew through the use of emails, observation notes, analysis, Google docs, charts, post-it notes, reports, and eventually a formal place in an arts regranting organization in Fargo-Moorhead. The first instantiation of the event was merely an online menu of art events in the Fargo-Moorhead area that were occurring one month before the May 2013 Fargo Marathon. From that initial sketch, the XA participant-observer research team sought to begin making this event a more interactive and fan-driven event. The second iteration of the Art Marathon, in Spring 2014, included creating a phone app with a local app development company and connecting twenty-six art installments or events throughout the Fargo-Moorhead area. During the third iteration, in Spring 2015, the software developers created a more robust app with four distinct sub-pages: a list of events or QR codes to be found and “unlocked,” a map, a leaderboard indicating which players had unlocked the highest number of codes, and a QR reader page. The free downloadable app became the key way to engage participants in the marathon. Participants could also engage with the art by photographing and micro-curating each event stop via Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook with the hashtag #FMAM15. Curation was actually a prize-eligible category, and many of the participants chose to curate as well as run the race. Since XA works with users negotiating a system, it is useful to understand the system. For the art marathon, a network of multiple actants coordinate to produce the event. To begin, there are twenty-six art pieces. Each piece of art (or art performance) also connects to its location and the proprietor or vendor of that establishment, such as a store owner, a gallery manager, a minister, or grounds manager at a church. Event coordinators, one of whom is also a researcher, request and negotiate with local venues to locate and secure art for the event. Sometimes participants running the course interact directly with the proprietors, and sometimes not. The phone application represents an important actant in this system, as are the developers who create it and the QR code stickers that allow participants to “unlock” each station. Using lessons from the previous instantiation of the event and the app, coordinators worked with the developers to improve the app and create a better experience for the users/participants. Participants themselves become part of the system, and the interactions between them

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—as competitors and as community members—represent an important and often overlooked piece of XA research.

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Researchers collected data in a number of ways, including participant observation with field notes and screen captures of daily app activity, email surveys of selected participants, unstructured follow-up interviews with participants, and observation and collection of related social media posts. We observed the leaderboard of the app each evening to observe who was participating and their levels of success. We also checked the hashtag created for the event (#FMAM15) on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on a daily basis to both answer questions (as participant-organizers) and to take a pulse on the level and nature of participation. Researchers also attended and hosted the events, observing at each of them. Such observations of participant interaction online and in person allowed researchers a long view of practices and behaviors. Immersive observation over time, even short stints like this ten-day event, put participant observers in close contact with user participants. The researchers garnered IRB approval and used participant consent forms for interviews and collecting tweets or other social media posts; all participant names are changed to protect participants from identification. Through this multimediated data collection, the researchers created and iterated support genres (Google spreadsheets for event tracking and weekly design briefs), and they established messages and marketing materials to generate additional interest in the event as it progressed. The researchers’ participation in the events as both organizers and runners informed the framing of both the interviews and the surveys. The participants, several of whom were runners in the earlier events, had become familiar with the designers because the event was a grassroots attempt to deepen and broaden the definition of arts participation. Neither the researchers nor the participants were getting paid to participate in the race. To be sure, there were participants in the event (restaurants, a local arts regranting organization, galleries, software developers, and artists) that COULD potentially be paid as a result of the Art Marathon; however, there was no guaranteed payday for anyone pitching in. Rather, there was a shared interest in growing the Fargo-Moorhead art scene. In order to nuance both the interviews and the surveys, the XA researchers asked about the central features in the event (the app) and how the challenges and gaps presented in the app were experienced.

Ethnography as Research Aggregator

Results Ethnography as an immersion into the culture being studied and designed with/for enabled more nuanced and subtle observations of where interviews, questionnaires, and even design tweaks might best occur. For example, much to the surprise of the XA researchers, the gaps and breakdowns in the app—incorrect addresses of particular stops or QR codes that would not scan because of lighting conditions or color of the QR code itself—presented participants with opportunities to deepen their relationship with other racers. These gaps presented some of the most meaningful participation in the event. One of the runners in the event, an organizer for an earlier iteration of the marathon, used breakdowns in the app as a reason to call up another runner (who was also an artist) for tips on how to overcome the difficulties. The breakdowns, rather than being merely a chance for friction and frustration, provided a chance to bond and make the activity more meaningful. This counterintuitive observation was made during the researcher’s participation in the event and was uncovered during casual conversations with the participants in the run. Several runners adapted individual strategies for coping with particular difficulties (QR codes that wouldn’t scan and getting to remote locations with no automobile). The innovations of participants were both technical and social—like the earlier example of using the cellphone. The winner of an earlier marathon used a partner’s phone to take a picture of a QR code, and then used a native application (Instagram) to darken the QR code—which was then scanned into the app to register that the runner had visited that stop on the course. The social (the relationship with the partner) and the technical (the use of Instagram, another phone), and an intuitive innovation connecting these things were all guided by underlying motivations to complete a newly fabricated event. Those motivations quickly became the focus of the XA researchers’ surveys, interviews, and design tweaks, and ethnographic methods allowed for deeper understanding, such as the ability for researchers to integrate their observations and field notes in asking follow-up questions during interviews. Another motivation common to many of the participants was the involvement in a community, either one they were already a part of, such as a family or couple “running” the event together, or the art community itself. One team used the moniker Smithfamily3 (name actually changed as with other participants) to identify their team. By naming themselves as a family and competing well, this team reminded other participants of family ties every time they examined the leaderboard. They used the event to enjoy time together learning about the Fargo Moorhead community. Another team was made up of romantic partners who used the competition as a date.

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The layering of the research methods, not only through different approaches (surveys, participant-observation, and interviews), but also through the duration of the design process (making adjustments in the instrument based upon other kinds of collected data) helps the XA researcher conduct more responsive and responsible research. The layering serves as a kind of verification through triangulation. Also, and more importantly, this layering helped the researchers locate key participant motivations and cues in order to design more meaningful experiences. Through immersion and then follow-up contextual research, the designers were able to discern that ease-ofuse was very low on the priorities of the participants, and, in fact, prevented deeper engagement with the event. A few other motivations emerged as key reasons for beginning, continuing, and finishing the art marathon according to participant reporting and observation. Sheer competitive nature became a reason for the winner of the art marathon, who finished the course in under three days. In his interview, the winner, hereafter called Todd, suggests that the Art Marathon “competition got my blood going a little bit.” In fact, difficulties with locating items or with scanning QR codes only ignited the competitiveness further for this participant/winner. Others also suggested that challenges with the app pushed them forward to continue with the marathon. For other runners it was the connection with place that pushed them to continue along the art marathon course. The idea that Fargo-Moorhead is their home and they find pride in that home ran through a few of the participant’s interview answers as well as their curation posts. Exploration of the overlooked great art in the community seemed part of most participants’ motivation. Geo, a participating artist and a runner, emphasized this: “Events like the art marathon help expand horizons and remind people that artistic expression doesn’t have to be relegated to a museum or gallery. Art is all around us—sometimes we just need to open our eyes and search a little to find it.” The Fargo-Moorhead area has boomed economically because of the success of the extraction industry and agriculture. Burgeoning tech, medical, light manufacturing (mostly agricultural), and higher education sectors have helped diversify the region economically; however, art and other cultural organizations have sometimes struggled to match the rapid pace of population and economic expansion. Enlisting local artisans to think of themselves as artists often depends upon framing their work as not only generally artistic, but as something that will help the area improve its standing on the national and international stage. The FX series “Fargo” tapped into this sentiment by marketing locally through YouTube features of local artists and landscapes and a series premiere at the Fargo Theatre.

Ethnography as Research Aggregator

By embracing art in the Red River valley, a show based on a movie that ostensibly made fun of the region was able to win over a local and loyal fan base. Similarly, the XA team tried to enlist local and regional pride when approaching both the local artists and the local developers for inclusion of their work for a fraction of what it might otherwise cost. Another participant evokes the way the Art Marathon pushed him to see more of the area. His fascinating comment that he connected with “sort of a touristy community that I was getting to be a part of even though at the same time it was something more than that” reflects the tensions between seeing local art as part of your day-to-day community. Todd, displays the not-uncommon opinion that going to see art happens during vacations and travel rather than at home. Yet his addendum about the tourist situation as “something more than that” hints at the possibilities of invoking that community pride in local art more readily. Participants also evoked a sense of discovery during their efforts to complete the course. It was one user’s first time visiting most of the art establishments, and she found reasons to enjoy all of the galleries, restaurants, and shops. One of her curation tweets read, “Super psyched about finding Unglued! Got this little guy while searching for a #FMAM15 QR code #cilantroyum,” revealing a sense of adventure as a prime motivator in the hunt for art marathon pieces. The idea that participants were finding spaces, art, and communities they would not otherwise encounter emerged both in the observations and the interview data. Another participant tweeted, “On an art walk . . . How did I miss this #gallery earlier!? #cordmn #prairieplaces #art #FMAM15 #Moorhead,” suggesting that finding new art in her home community increased her motivation to continue on the marathon course. The hashtags on this particular tweet underlined two location-based motivations of the runners. The #cordmn hashtag aggregates posts and tweets about Concordia College (a local private college); similarly, “Moorhead” displays a pride in the Minnesota side of the Red River. While an outsider might simply note the details and chalk it up to pride, a more insider perspective uncovers the fact that combining the Fargo-Moorhead hashtag with two decidedly Minnesota-themed hashtags shows an openness and collaborative spirit that can be in short supply in this particular metropolitan area. Because ease-of-use was not the primary driver in observed user motivation, the task for the event creators and the designers was to ascertain and to emphasize what motivated runners in the event interfaces—the venues, the app, the print marketing, the online documentation, and the social media aggregation. Each design iteration had to connect across the various media and give the runners a sense of meaningful progress across twenty-six art venues. Connecting twenty-six venues can be a capital-intensive and

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tricky proposition in the most ideal circumstances (like Art Prize’s ability to offer a half-million dollars in prize money), so the fact that the Art Marathon is conducted on a shoestring budget (around $4,000) with all-volunteer labor makes creative solutions critical. The volunteers, designers, and researchers cannot throw money at problems. Instead, the design team leveraged the independence and intrinsic motivation of both the design team and the participants to maximize the growth and sustainability of the event. Enthusiasm for cross-river collaboration and the de-emphasizing of ease of access drove the XA team to locate experiences on both sides of the river, despite the relatively long driving distances between certain venues. One venue—a Moorhead-based art school—sits miles away from other venues; another venue—a library display of locally-crafted banjos with ornate woodwork—was located miles in the other direction (and in a suburb unfamiliar to many participants in the race). The wide distribution of events across state lines did not deter participants who completed the event on foot and bicycle; indeed, the 2015 Art Marathon winner completed the race on foot and by bicycle. The XA team focused on creating meaningful pauses in the event, on connecting participants with the narrative thread of the event (a progression through twenty-six points), and with connecting narratives that participants want to build into their lives about their school, their city, region, state, and life. In order to feature the difficulties that made the race more significant and the socializing that could help provide the narrative of a group journey, the experience-architecture researchers also had to locate places where the experience should be as invisible as possible (what Rousi calls “unconscious”) (2013, p. 291). The race surely interferes with some of the more quotidian daily activities of runners—part of the point of any competitive event—but should not create complicated barriers at the start. A feature that was built in to the 2015 iteration of the Art Marathon was the possibility of creating teams of up to four people. Earlier contextual research had indicated that runners enjoyed the company of a shared race—anecdotal research borne out by the couple who won the 2014 race. What ethnographic and contextual inquiry uncovered in the 2015 iteration were difficulties that participants had in creating passwords for their teams. Individuals were comfortable with creating longer individual passwords, but wanted to have easy-to-remember passwords for their teams to use. Because the app required at least eight characters in the passwords, the XA team had to mingle with users in the field to catch the issue early enough to address it.

Ethnography as Research Aggregator

Conclusion Ethnography’s dual use as a research coherency builder and an insight generator in its own right can help an experience architect connect what can feel like disparate research techniques and produced genres during a design cycle. By connecting the front-end and middle-end contextual research with the back-end usability and summative surveys, ethnography can help the XA team contextualize and integrate aspirational and instrumental data with subtle observations of more long-term participation. By cross-checking contextual inquiry with ethnographic observation and note-taking, interviews, and surveys, an XA research and design team was able to successfully iterate an annual arts event to preserve meaningful challenges while reducing interface ambiguities and difficulties that detracted from the experience.

References Beyer, H., & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Bishop, W. (1999). Ethnographic writing research: Writing it down, Writing it up, and reading it. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Clair, R.P. (2003). The changing story of ethnography. In R. P. Claire (Ed.), Expressions of ethnography: Novel approaches to qualitative methods, (pp. 3–26). New York: SUNY Press. Cresswell, J.W. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fetterman, D. M. (2010). Ethnography: Step by step (3rd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. IDEO. (2002). Method cards for IDEO. Palo Alto, CA: Author. Latour, B., & Woolgar., S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press. Law, J. (2002). Aircraft stories: Decentering the technoscientific object. Durham, NC. Duke University Press. Mara, M., and Mara, A. (2012). Irish identification as exigence: A self-service case study for producing user documentation in online contexts. In Computer-Mediated communication across cultures (pp. 173–86). IGI Global. Mara, A., Potts, L., and Bartocci, G. (2013). The ethics of agile ethnography. SIGDOC. Proceedings of the 31st ACM international conference on design of communication. pp.101–6. Millen, D. (2000). Rapid ethnography: Time-Deepening strategies for HCI field research. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, pp. 280–86.

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Portigal, S. (2013). Interviewing users: How to uncover compelling insights. New York: Rosenfeld. Potts, L., & Bartocci, G. (2009). Experience Design SIGDOC. Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication.,pp. 17–22 . Read, S. (2011). The mundane, power, and symmetry: A reading of the field with Dorothy Winsor and the tradition of ethnographic research. Technical Communication Quarterly, 20(4), pp. 353–83. Rousi, R. (2013). The experience of no experience: Elevator UX and the role of unconscious experience. Academic Mindtrek. Proceedings of International Conference on Making Sense of Converging Media, pp.289–92. Rousi, R. (2014). An uplifting experience–adopting ethnography to study elevator user experience. Ethnography Matters. Blog. Retrieved from http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/04/02/an-uplifting-experience-adopting-ethnography-to-study-elevator-user-experience/. Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

11 Audience Awareness: Resituating Experience Architecture as Execution Cait Ryan

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hough user experience (UX) has historically been difficult to define, there has been a marked push in recent years to resituate user experience from a tactical to a strategic role within organizations. In 2012, industry expert Peter Merholz called for a rethinking of user experience as strategy rather than as design. Specifically, Merholz recommends doing what he calls the tactical work of wireframes and workflows, an activist situation intended to position practitioners of information design primarily as mission-critical policymakers. Other practitioners continue to explore this concept in various discursive contexts. Such growth in understanding of what it means to be an effective UX practitioner is reflected in the developing field of experience architecture (XA). However, in many organizations, user experience and other practitioners encompassed under the umbrella of experience architecture continue to be associated more with executing predetermined strategy decisions than actually engaging in strategic decision-making. It is not enough to say that we need to be more strategic in our work. We must also value and develop the additional skills needed to make our practice of user experience more strategic (much in the same way that content managers developed new skills as they shifted into the role of content strategists). It is in this gap that the benefit of rhetorical skills for experience architects is revealed. Unlike user experience and other traditionally design-based disciplines, the growing field of experience architecture is founded on principles of rhetoric. This evolution from user experience to experience architecture helps to solve some of the user experience difficulties made apparent as a result of an exclusionary focus on design. Key to achieving a satisfying experience architecture is a humanities focus, in particular on a strong background in rhetoric. Described simply, rhetoric is communication with an acute awareness of audience, purpose, and context. This awareness of and empathy for an audience is one of the most powerful tools available to a rhetorician (Keith and Lundberg, 2008). The need to deeply understand one’s audience (or users, customers, and participants) is a familiar concept to user experience practitioners as the purpose for conducting user research (Portigal, 2013; Hall, 2013). With this in mind, technologies, products, policies,

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and services can be seen as carefully crafted, rhetorically-aware acts of communication for an audience of participants. However, experience architects cannot build and deliver these experiences alone. In addition to deeply understanding our external audience of participants, we must also direct our attention to the internal audiences at the organizations in which we work. In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman also claimed that we must be able to work cooperatively with numerous teams in order to balance various requirements throughout our organizations (Norman, rev. 2013). In 1998, Lesley Trenner and Joanna Bawa explored the need for practitioners to learn “how to influence opinion and behavior (p. xiii)” in order to justify funding, influence implementation, and maintain relevance inside an organization in their edited collection The Politics of Usability. As the field has expanded beyond usability, first to user experience and now to experience architecture, building awareness and engaging effectively with internal audiences is even more necessary. Dorazio’s note in 1998 that usability practitioners must regularly justify their existence and prove their worth remains resonant today. Now, instead of justifying the need to invest in usability, we must justify and prove the worth of putting user experience in a strategic role within the organization. Though the tactical activities of creating wireframes and designing interfaces have gained broader acceptance, we must set our sights on showing internal audiences the benefits of placing a human-centered viewpoint at the core of strategic business decisions (Sharon, 2012; Quesenbery & Brooks, 2010; Hall, 2013). In this essay, I’ll explore the ways in which experience architects benefit from the rhetorical skill of audience awareness in resituating our work from execution to strategic leadership. The essay draws upon my own experiences working in industry, as well as the writings and experiences of others in the field throughout its development. I assert that our success in becoming strategic experience architects can be greatly enhanced by developing a keen ability to understand, engage with, and appeal to various audiences throughout the process of researching, creating, and delivering meaningful experiences across technologies, products, policies, and services. To begin, let me return to Keith and Lundberg to further clarify what I mean when I say rhetoric. In The Essential Guide to Rhetoric, Keith and Lundberg define rhetoric as “the study of producing discourses and interpreting how, when, and why discourses are persuasive” (p. 4). This is a helpful definition, but it is more easily understood through their following clarification that “rhetoric is about how discourses get things done in our social world” (p. 4). They further explain that being a skilled rhetorician helps practitioners accomplish complex tasks that require the cooper-

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ation and collaboration of multiple contributors. As Keith and Lundberg state, a skilled rhetorician is able to “say the right thing, to the right people in the right situation, at the right time, and with the right ethical conditions” (p. 11). This developed skill of knowing what to communicate, how to communicate it, and whom to communicate it to is a unique contribution that rhetoricians bring to the table that is absolutely crucial in the developing field of experience architecture. In “Leading Participant-Centered Research: An Argument for Taking a More Strategic Role as User Experience Architects,” (Ryan & Potts, 2015) we explored some of the reasons that participant-centered research hasn’t become a ubiquitous and successful practice. There is more investment than ever in participant-centered research across numerous industries and even in government. Books, conferences, and articles regularly teach best practices for beginners and seasoned practitioners. However, even with substantial investment and resources, the practice has not become an integral part of producing products and services. Though we explored this specifically as a problem for research practitioners, this issue is true for most user experience professionals. Despite high levels of interest and investment, it’s still all too easy to find companies producing products and services that are more likely to prompt frustration and complaints than success and delight from participants. Industry experts now believe that this is largely due to the fact that user experience is still considered a tactical rather than a strategic role. First in an article on his website and later in his presentation at UX Week 2012, Merholz claims that the role of user experience professionals should be strategic rather than tactical. He states that many professionals in user experience roles have come from design backgrounds, and are most comfortable when actually creating something (whether it’s wireframes or workflows). Merholz poses, however, that this is not actually the most necessary work of user experience professionals. Instead, he compares the role of user experience as being more akin to the director of a film—coordinating the work of all groups across an organization with the goal of creating exemplary user experiences much as a director coordinates the work of multiple contributors to create the final film. In this way, “the practice of user experience is most successful when focused on strategy, vision, and planning, not design and execution” (Merholz, 2012). We can also see this argument in assertions from other practitioners such as Lou Rosenfeld, Hoa Loranger, and Jeff Gothelf. Gothelf claims that “without a consistent voice of the customer present in executive discussions, corporate strategy, and product direction, decisions are debated and made based on each executive’s responsibilities and professional perspectives” (p.

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106, 2013). In an interview in 2012 for Tomer Sharon’s It’s Our Research, Rosenfeld echoes this claim by asserting that when people with the ability to develop a deep understanding of users “become the decision makers, when they move up the chain inside of organizations. That’s probably when it’s going to get a little easier and a little better.” Loranger adds to this with the claim that “an orchestrated approach across many disciplines and stakeholders must be achieved to create a truly effective user experience and for the company to thrive” (Loranger, 2014). To summarize these claims, user experience professionals are recognizing that it is not enough for a company to create a siloed team of user experience professionals within an organization. If we see a user’s experience as the sum total of all the touchpoints a person might have with an organization, we can also see that UX is something to which everyone in the organization must contribute. In order to align every employee’s work around the user experience, there needs to be clear communication about who users are and what they actually need. Employees need to be able to point every bit of their work back to actually serving these users. To that end, we need people in leadership roles who are experts in communicating with and understanding the needs of real people, and translating those needs into a strategy the organization can act on. Though it is not yet widely recognized, these skills have already been developed by user experience practitioners with a background in technical communication, and can be seen in the development of content strategy as a field. However, before these rhetorical skills can become central to experience architecture, they must first be recognized and accepted by user experience practitioners. There is a perception that an education in rhetoric and writing is not a desirable background for a career in user experience. In fact, many people I meet are surprised to find a person with a background in rhetoric and writing claiming a connection to user experience. This disbelief is unwarranted given the historical connections between technical communication and user experience. For decades, in fact, from the very beginning of usability, technical communication academics and practitioners alike have participated in applying rhetorical skills to usability and user experience. As Quesenbery noted in 2011 in Figure 1 below, user experience encompasses a wide variety of practices including (but not limited to) information architecture, interaction design, user research, content strategy, and web design. In other words, UX has been a multidisciplinary field from the beginning, and technical communication has always been one of those disciplines.

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Figure 1. Whitney Quesenbery quoted in Redish & Barnum (2011) Despite this variety, user experience skills are most strongly associated with design over any other background (Merholz, 2012). Merholz (2012) asserts, though with a question mark, that most user experience professionals come from a design background. Regardless of whether or not this is true, it seems to be a shared perception that I see repeated whenever I speak with user experience professionals without a background in technical communication. This can be seen in the prevalent title of user experience designer and the privileging of visual design skills as requirements for these positions when searching for relevant job postings and exploring the background of user experience designers. However, numerous well-known user experience practitioners claim a background in technical communication. In her 2011 article, Redish provides several examples of practitioners including Janice James, Ginny Redish, Carol Barnum, Tharon Howard, Steve Krug, Tamara Adlin, Dana Chisel, JoAnn Hackos, Judy Ramey, and Stephanie Rosenbaum. These practitioners have provided the field with important works such as Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, Quesenbery’s Storytelling for User Experience, and Redish’s A Practical Guide to Usability, User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, and Letting Go of the Words.

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In addition, when it comes to the concepts of design and design thinking, it is common to hear discussions on how design thinking can transform the practices of other disciplines. Recently, in writing studies, Purdy (2014) explores the ways in which adopting design thinking can help those in writing studies become more forward-thinking, action-oriented rhetoricians and demonstrate value in the work of writing. It is less common to hear discussions of how design practices relate to and can benefit from the practices of other disciplines, including rhetoric and writing studies. Purdy’s article, despite pointing to the value of a background in rhetoric for preparing writing students to adopt design-thinking practices, does not ask how those in the design fields might, in turn, benefit from the same rhetorical skills. In making his arguments for adopting design thinking in writing studies, Purdy shows existing similarities between design and writing by aligning the steps in the design-thinking and writing processes (Table 1). 202

Table 1. Alignment of Steps in Design-Thinking and the Writing Process (Purdy, 2014) Design Thinking

Writing Process

Understand

Research

Observe

?

Define

Analyze Audience

Ideate

Brainstorm

Prototype

Write rough draft

Test

Share and revise

Purdy also claims that “many graduate programs in writing studies already equip students with the habits of mind and rhetorical skills required to do this work—for example, an understanding of writing as a mode of thinking, an openness to revision and dialogue, an awareness of a rhetorical approach to audience, and a sense of communication as contextual and kairotic—so a design orientation does not require radical shifts from the field’s foundation tenets.” However, he stops short of acknowledging that rhetorical skills can also increase the value of design practices. Instead of focusing on embracing design thinking, we must instead consider the unique skills that a background in rhetoric provides. For example, Keith and Lundberg (2008) note that rhetoric is, by its nature, a strategic practice. As Johnson-Eilola observed in 1996 and Hart-Davidson later commented on in 2001, in attempting to resituate UX as a strategic practice, those outside of technical communication are again focusing on

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standard practices in technical communication without an awareness that these issues have already been addressed by technical communicators. Barnum (2011) acknowledges this gap in the UX field between desiring skills from technical communication and the realization that these skills are rhetorical skills. She describes several challenges that technical communicators still experience in being seen as part of the user experience and provides suggestions on how to address them. The first of these challenges is the lack of inclusion for technical communicators in the early stages of product development despite the skills and experience they provide. The second of these challenges is the lack of recognition for technical communication as a desirable background for UX roles. The third is that the work of technical communicators in UX is not widely known due to a lack of publications and presentations. I would add to this that, when UX practitioners with backgrounds in technical communication publish or present on their work in UX, this background is often not mentioned and therefore is not widely known. For example, when introducing Quesenbery’s background for an interview in It’s Our Research (Sharon, 2012), her background in technical communication is not mentioned. Barnum recommends overcoming these challenges by assertively inserting ourselves onto product teams at the earliest stages of product development and clearly explaining our skills as a solid background for user experience by highlighting our work in content strategy, information architecture, and user research. However, she also acknowledges that overcoming these challenges requires the help of UX professionals as well as better communication of our value as technical communicators. The challenges that Barnum describes are unfortunately still prevalent, and I see many of them reflected in my own career. I began my own transition from technical communication to experience architecture early on in my career, though I didn’t know it at the time. My first job out of college involved building online courses for international trade professionals. The process would begin with a subject matter expert (SME) who would write the content. My job was then to take this material and reshape it to be accessible for our audience. This was my first rudimentary effort to create a positive user experience by balancing the goals of two audiences. I had to balance our subject matter experts’ desire to be factually accurate with our users’ need to receive information in an easily digestible format that they could apply to their jobs. In other words, to make sure that users would be able to understand the relevant international trade regulations and be able to apply them to their actual work. As I transitioned to working as an instructional designer at a software company, it remained my role to translate often-complex concepts in

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an easily digestible format. However, like many other technical communicators, I became frustrated with the limitations of explaining complexity to users after the fact rather than confronting the complexity at its source. I developed the belief that Norman expresses in The Invisible Computer (1998)— that technical communicators are people “whose goal should be to show the technologists how to build things that do not require manuals” rather than act as “cleanup artists” at the end of the process (p. 191). In making this transition, however, I sometimes lose sight of the fact that my background in writing and rhetoric is an asset rather than a liability when it comes to presenting myself as a user experience professional—particularly when speaking with practitioners who are unable to see a connection between my background and user experience. In addition, as I looked at job postings and required skills, I often saw listings of degrees and backgrounds that did not include mine (unless the listing included the vague “related degrees” and you stretched to include Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing). I began to feel the need to move the focus away from rhetoric and writing by glossing over it and highlighting that I was focusing my studies on user experience design and research. While it may be necessary in some circumstances to represent myself in this way, I now see downplaying a background in rhetoric and professional writing as an inherently flawed approach. This background does not make it a stretch for us to pursue careers in user experience, and now experience architecture. Instead, as we can see in the successful transition from content management to content strategy, it makes us especially prepared to aid in establishing user experience as a strategic rather than a tactical practice. Rhetoricians, with their focus on effective, focused, precise communication are ideally situated to take on these strategic roles. As stated in the reasoning for situating MSU’s degree program in XA in the College of Arts and Letters, “XA’s home is in the Humanities because of our empathy for people. A variety of methods and philosophies exist for creating websites, apps, services, policies, and etc., but we believe in a people-centered approach that enables users of digital artifacts and services to interact in ways that creates positive and valuable experiences. Such an approach requires a strong foundation in understanding the contexts of people and societies” (MSU, 2014). Technical communicators have had a strong role in usability and its evolution to user experience and now experience architecture due to this focus on people-centered approaches. In the meantime, many companies continue to situate user experience as another siloed department rather than treating it as a key driver of business success. This can likely account for the continued prevalence of poor user experiences, even from companies that are increasing their in-

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vestment in this area. It would be difficult to find an organization that does not want to deliver a positive user experience. Unfortunately, one doesn’t have to look hard to find products or tools that do not achieve this goal— even at companies that invest a great deal in user-experience practices. This disconnect can be largely attributed to the siloing of the information needed to create positive user experiences within functional groups that do not speak the same language and therefore do not share knowledge and collaborate with one another (Rosenfeld, 2013; Sharon, 2012). Communication and understanding across groups witin an organization define many of the experience concerns (Tuffley, 2009). Though Tuffley focuses on the understanding gaps between developers and users, his call for rhetoricians to serve as facilitators of communication, and therefore support collaboration across groups, can apply to all groups within an organization. Rosenfeld (2013) calls for a similar strategy by recommending developing a shared language to aid colleagues from different backgrounds “to understand each other and, eventually, collaborate.” We must facilitate collaboration and coordination across functional groups within our organizations in order to achieve desired outcomes. Therefore, in addition to deeply understanding an external audience of participants, experience architects must also direct their attention to the internal audiences at the organizations in which they work. As Norman (2013) claims, we must be able to work cooperatively with numerous teams in order to balance various requirements throughout our organizations (Norman, rev. 2013). Loranger (2014) further explains that, in order to produce exemplary experiences, “coordination must be achieved among multiple disciplines, including product management, development, marketing, content, customer service, graphic design, and interaction design” (2014). These claims echo Merholz’s (2012) assertions that user experience is something that everyone is responsible for. If everyone is responsible for the user experience, it follows that ownership of the user experience cannot be isolated to a siloed department in an organization. Though technical communicators still face challenges in being seen as legitimate user experience practitioners, the current trend toward seeing user experience as a strategic rather than a tactical practice has created an opening that practitioners with a strong background in rhetoric are uniquely qualified to fill. They have already demonstrated these skills in the successful transition from content managers/writers to content strategists. They also demonstrate these skills in their proven ability to translate an understanding of and empathy for the needs of external audiences into actionable insights for product teams, organize and coordinate work involving a variety of stakeholders, and communicate effectively with numerous audi-

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ences both internal and external to the organizations for which they work. We can convince others of this by being able to clearly communicate our established history in user experience and how our skills can enable user experience to successfully make the move from a tactical to a strategic practice. In 2001, Hart-Davidson asked “why not us?” in reference to treating technical communicators as “pivotal players” in creating new technologies. Experience architecture changes that conversation for rhetoricians from a question to an assertion of “yes, of course us.” As an interdisciplinary discipline, experience architecture continues the tradition in technical communication of serving as translators between different groups. However, instead of merely explaining difficult concepts to external audiences, experience architects are situated to help organizations avoid creating products and services that are difficult to use in the first place. In order for organizations to successfully create exemplary user experiences, they must recognize that user experience should not be a functional group but rather a responsibility shared by everyone within the organization. These organizations must also employ practitioners who are able to communicate and collaborate effectively with all groups inside of the organization. Experience architects are well-situated to fill these strategic roles by starting with a solid foundation in rhetoric and developing a keen ability to understand, appeal to, and coordinate with various audiences throughout the process of researching, creating, and delivering meaningful experiences across technologies, products, policies, and services. Though there is no one “right” approach, rhetoric offers a number of tools to help us ethically gain the trust and goodwill of stakeholders throughout organizations and explore a variety of appeals that are both rationally and emotionally compelling. As skilled rhetoricians, we are well-equipped to look inward at the organizations we aspire to lead and outward at the participants we serve in order to understand and empathize with the needs of these varying audiences. This ability to understand and collaborate effectively with both internal and external audiences can distinguish experience architects from other practitioners and help us make the transition from execution to strategy. Though design thinking is appealing and helpful, it is incomplete. Its limited scope cannot help user experience grow beyond a small-team orientation. It is not big enough to encompass the needs of an entire organization and the various audiences housed within that have to collaborate together to create a user experience. It’s time to add rhetorical thinking to the repertoire of the user experience professional, allowing the evolution from tactical user experience to more strategic experience architecture. There is no one “right” approach. However, rhetoric offers a number of tools to help us ethically gain the trust and goodwill of our stakehold-

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ers and explore a variety of appeals that are both rationally and emotionally compelling. As skilled rhetoricians, we are well-equipped to look inward at the organizations we strive to lead and outward at the participants we serve in order to understand and empathize with the various concerns, fears and desires at play. Regardless of job title, this ability to understand and collaborate effectively with both internal and external audiences can distinguish experience architects from other practitioners and help us make the transition from execution to strategy.

References Dorazio, P. (1998). Usability practice in the United States: Perception versus reality. In L. Trenner & J. Bawa (Eds.), The politics of usability: A practical guide to designing usable systems in industry (pp. 169–81). London: Springer. Gothelf, J., & Seiden J. (2013).Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience. Orielly Press, New York. Hall, E. (2013). Just enough research. New York: A Book Apart. Halvorson, K. (2010). Content strategy for the web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Hart-Davidson, W. (2001). On writing, technical communication, and information technology: The core competencies of technical communication. Technical Communication, 48(2), pp. 145–55. Johnson-Eilola, J. (1996). Relocating the value of work. In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central Works in Technical Communication, pp. 175–92. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.. Keith, W. M., & Lundberg, C. O. (2008).The essential guide to rhetoric. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Loranger, H. (2014, August). UX without users is not UX. Nielsen Norman Group.Retrieved from http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ ux-without- user-research/ Merholz, P. (2012, May). User experience is strategy, not design. Peterme. com. N.p.. Retrieved from http://www.peterme.com/2012/05/04/ user-experience-is-strategy-not- design Merholz, P.. (2014, November). UX is strategy; not design. UX Week 2012. Vimeo. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/52634329. Norman, D.. (2013). The design of everyday things revised and expanded edition. New York: Basic. Norman, D. A. (1998). The invisible computer: Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Print. Portigal, S. (2013). Interviewing users: How to uncover compelling insights. New York: Rosenfeld Media.

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Purdy, J. P. (2014). What can design thinking offer writing studies? College Composition and Communication, 54(4), pp. 612–41. Quesenbery, W., & Brooks, K. (2010). Storytelling for user experience crafting stories for better design. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media. Redish, G., & Barnum, C. Overlap, influence, intertwining: The interplay of UX and technical communication. Journal of Usability Studies, 6(3), pp. 90–101. Retrieved from http://uxpajournal.org/wp- content/uploads/pdf/JUS_Redish_Barnum_May_2011.pdf Rosenfeld, L. (2013, August). Seeing the elephant: Defragmenting user research. A List Apart. Retrieved from http://alistapart.com/article/seeing-the-elephant-defragmenting-user- research Sharon, T., & Rosenfeld, L. (2012, May). An interview with Lou Rosenfeld. It’s Our Research, N.p. Retrieved from http://itsourresear.ch/rosenfeld.html Sharon, T., & Quesenbery, W. (2012, September). An interview with Whitney Quesenbery. It’s Our Research. N.p. Retrieved from http://itsourresear.ch/quesenbery.html Sharon, T. (2012). It’s our research: Getting stakeholder buy-in for user experience research projects. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Trenner, L., & Bawa, J. (1998). The politics of usability: A practical guide to designing usable systems in industry. London: Springer. Tuffley, D. (2009). Mind the gap. International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 1(1), pp. 58–69.

12 Kairos and Managing Experience Architecture Projects Ben Lauren Paradoxically, structure is the key to freedom. —Donald Reinertsen, Managing the Design Factory

Introduction

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ryan Singer’s (1995) film The Usual Suspects enigmatically begins with the ignition of a matchbook used to light the cigarette of a seemingly defeated character we eventually learn is named Keaton. A flammable fluid appears to empty on the surface of a boat and Keaton uses his matchbook to light a fire that wantonly travels over to a set of metal stairs. Simultaneously, a liquid begins to pour down on that fire stopping it in its path, and as the camera pans up, we discover a dark, mysterious person: Keyser Söze. As the scene comes to a conclusion, Keaton is shot dead and Keyser Söze coolly flicks his cigarette at the flammable liquid, reigniting it as he sneaks down a ladder to safety, and the boat is engulfed in flames. The next scene is a police interrogation of a character named Roger “Verbal” Kint, which begins, in earnest, with the movie’s central question: “Who is Keyser Söze?” The movie works to answer this question through unexpected twists and turns and ultimately reveals an unpredictable answer to that question. There is a method for this story structure called in medias res. In medias res is a Latin term, which literally means “in the midst of things” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). It is used to describe a specific type of story that begins in the middle to create intrigue, and then goes backward in time to fill in details for the audience. The Usual Suspects is a great example of the in medias res structure because the audience participates in the nonlinear journey toward answering a question that appears simple but over time proves to actually be complex (i.e., “Who is Keyser Söze?”). Like The Usual Suspects, experience architecture (XA) project managers frequently operate in medias res because today’s projects often aim to solve problems based on asking and answering questions. That is, XA project managers’ work exists in the middle of things, where the end game is to solve a problem, but that solution, and the path to it, is often not linear or predictable. For example, an XA team might seek to answer, “Who are our users?” or “How do people experience our products and services?” While answers to those questions exist, the path

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to those answers will almost certainly be variable. That unpredictability is both the fun and frustration of doing XA work, and the project manager (PM) is in the middle, facilitating that nonlinear process. Depicting the PM as existing in medias res demonstrates that XA PMs need a strategy for building equitable communication spaces for teams to participate in project work. This chapter explains the rhetorical concept kairos (i.e., the opportune moment) as a means for reading and responding to the communication exigencies of an XA team. The goal for this chapter is to develop a rhetorical grounding for how XA PMs approach facilitation of communication across teams as they work to answer relatively complex questions and solve problems. The chapter begins with a brief review of project management in experience architecture. It continues by explaining the spatial, temporal, and ecological aspects of kairos that can be used to strategize project management. Additionally, the chapter reviews conditions that affect the structure and organization of XA teams and project work. Next, the chapter discusses kairos as a means for thinking critically about creating communication spaces for working with clients and other stakeholders in the problem-solving and design process; agile and lean project-management techniques, including scrum, sprint, retrospective, and other iterative processes; demystifying project work by focusing on realistic goals and outcomes and providing value to clients and customers; and implementing solutions. Finally, the chapter ends by emphasizing that PMs must “develop and test different options, learn from the outcomes, and try again—and, in many cases, again and again” (Hill, Brandeau, Truelove, and Lineback, 2014, p. 147). In this way, the chapter underlines that effective project management is kairotic, iterative, and recursive; improved through participation and feedback; and can make user experience a more central activity within an organization.

Project Management as Facilitation Joann Hackos (2007) notes two goals that are often misaligned in project management roles: “The efficient management of the project so that you reach your goals, and the successful development of information products that excel at meeting the needs of your customer and adding value to the product or service that your information supports” (p. 317). Much in information design has transpired since Hackos (2007) published Information Development, but the emphasis on temporal (efficiency) and spatial (exigency) concerns still holds true today. Some have argued a potential way to balance the temporal and spatial concerns of project management is through focusing on project management activity. Scott Berkun (2008) explains, “By project management activity I mean leading the team in figuring out

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what the project is (planning, scheduling, and requirements gathering), shepherding the project through design and development work (communication, decision making, and mid-game strategy), and driving the project through to completion (leadership, crisis management, and end-game strategy)” (p. 8). Others attempt to simplify the spatial and temporal concerns of PM to that of master planning. Brown (2013) depicts a PM as “responsible for ensuring the project team delivers on its obligations, creates plans to do so, and successfully executes against those plans” (p. 4). When consulting project management philosophies and methodologies, there is certainly no shortage of ideas, but focusing on aligning the temporal and spatial elements of project work requires more emphasis on the workplace experience of employees. Dicks (2004) takes a more philosophical approach to thinking through PM, however, arguing, “the best managers, whether formally or informally, consciously or intuitively, establish a set of principles to guide the way they function” (p. 1). The context in which these principles are practiced influences how project work is done. Since XA is an emergent discipline, the PM in the role of facilitator is a relatively new concept. Arnie Lund (2012) describes the user experience project manager by writing, “At times they are called producers and their role is to clear the way for UX work and support it, to amplify the impact of designers, and to work through the technical issues necessary to deliver on many of the user requirements” (p. 23). What Lund’s observations hint at is XA PMs use many of the same methods to architect participatory workplace experiences as they do to develop solutions to problems for customers. In other words, XA is being practiced externally and internally at a company, shifting the temporal and spatial elements of how work gets done. The rhetorical concept of kairos helps to illustrate the interrelationship of linear time, timing, and space in XA project work.

Kairos and Project Management Space Kairos is traditionally understood as the opportune moment, the right time to say or do the right thing” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 35). A rhetor’s ability to read the right time is often gained from experience. Thusly, Kinneavy (2002) explains kairos as having two considerations: the right timing and proper measure. Kairos also has additional implications and meanings that are important for the work of PMs in XA. Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel (2012) explain, “Many theorists emphasize that kairos includes both temporal and spatial dimensions” (p. 6). The emphasis on spatial dimensions is important because kairos can be used to represent not just the right time to take action, but it can also refer to the right space for that action to oc-

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cur. And while space as a term may come across as somewhat amorphous or abstract, context seems less capable of describing the spatial elements of project communication in XA. Context is not created in the same way. The XA PM must, at times, invent these communication spaces where they did not previously exist. Time and timing are discussed differently in Greek rhetoric. Chronos is the term used to represent linear time as understood today (i.e., seconds and minutes that tick off of a clock as time trudges forward). In the context of XA, Donald Norman (2013) compares linear and nonlinear strategies of managing design projects, explaining, “The traditional design process is linear, sometimes called the waterfall method because progress goes in a single direction, and once decisions have been made, it is difficult or impossible to go back” (p. 234). Waterfall approaches to project management emphasize chronos because teams recursively move forward toward a goal in a linear fashion. As well, Leston (2013) describes chronos as linear: “In its modern manifestation, chronos is said to mark linear time or duration; in other words, chronos is quantitative” (p. 32). The emphasis of chronos as quantitative is demonstrated by the traditional tools and measures used by PMs for gauging risk in waterfall projects. That is, tools such as Gantt charts emphasize the quantitative measures of a project by visualizing goals in terms of linear time. To contrast chronos and kairos, Leston (2013) explains, “Kairos, on the other hand, marks the instant or moment that chronos comes to a critical point; it is qualitative” (Leston, 2013, p. 32). The qualitative aspects of a project make waterfall approaches less viable, particularly in XA projects where the goal is to solve a problem, not necessarily build a product. To compare the waterfall approach with more contemporary agile methodologies, Norman (2013) describes an iterative approach “where the process is circular, with continual refinement, continual change, and encouragement of backtracking, rethinking early decisions” (p. 224). The process Norman describes is qualitative because discovering the need for communication spaces (especially as a form of invention) is an emerging practice. Agile methodologies encourage the development of kairotic moments during sprints through nonlinear discoveries, even though resigned to a linear timeline (i.e., discovery can be limited to a period of time, though the process itself is nonlinear). Given such agile approaches, it is useful to understand the workplace as an ecology made up of employee experiences across several communication spaces. Understanding the different environments of the workplace as an ecology helps to position kairos as what coordinates temporal and spatial considerations of project management. Leston (2013) further argues, “An

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ecological understanding of the rhetorical situation expands the situation into a more comprehensive whole, effectively spatializing the temporal concept of kairos by locating it within the ecological milieu” (Leston, 2013, p. 38). In other words, the PM no longer seeks the right words at the opportune time without also thinking about the right space for equitable communication. Consideration of how decisions affect teams becomes temporal (in terms of schedule) and spatial (in terms of communication), which makes up the workplace ecology. In globally distributed teams, for example, meetings must be arranged at a specific time but must also select a common space for facilitating the nature of the work needed to get done by the team at that moment. Meetings can be informational or collaborative, or both, but require technologies that support project goals, which could spontaneously change during the meeting. Understanding how project management influences team dynamics in kairotic ways affects how project leaders approach the workplace ecology. In project management literature, preparedness is often explained as managing risk, which is usually identified at the beginning of a project cycle. Berkun (2008) writes, “The bigger the risk, the more time you’ll want on your side in dealing with it. If you don’t address risks until later on in the schedule, you’ll have fewer degrees of freedom in responding to them. The same goes for political, organizational, or resource-related risks” (p. 40). Even so, many argue that managing risks is not an individual effort, but a collective imperative. Spinuzzi (2015) explains, of what he terms all-edge adhocracies (teams that form around a single project only to disperse at the end of it), that employees in today’s workplace share in project management activities. PMs have a number of ways to facilitate such opportunities, from weekly check-ins to feedback loops built in to communication workflow. These strategies are all based on building the right space at the right time to encourage equitable participation in project work. Yet, the technologies used to support projects in the workplace can frequently change, and often without notice. Leston (2013) also argues that ongoing change is a reason kairos is so important for rhetors to draw from because of the need to constantly adapt to different situations: “Environments, relationships, situations, our selves are in perpetual flux; it follows that such continual movement gives rise to a changing and shifting reality that consistently requires intervention” (p. 29). These spaces are ones that the project leader must be prepared to address depending on the right moment, but in today’s global workplace, also in the right communication space.

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Imagine a team of technical communicators transitioning from writing product documentation using traditional waterfall approaches to participating in problem-solving activities by engaging agile methodologies. To facilitate the shift, writers are being moved from the periphery of product development to the center. In the past, writers had worked with subject-matter experts and engineers to deliver comprehensive product documentation. Post-release, writers then curated and updated documentation accordingly, often through addressing customer-side submitted bugs. Now, however, the company decided to move writers to the center of project work, creating agile teams where writers would take on leadership roles to prioritize the development of valuable customer experiences. These writers would also now be called information experience designers. This new job title was very different than technical communicator, particularly given the addition of the word “experience.” Experience generally emphasizes a customer’s ongoing interaction with a company instead of interaction with its products. Experiences occur across and within a company’s ecology. For these writers, the shift feels natural, as they have long been advocates for users, but emphasizing customer experience signals an important development in the thinking about user experience at this company. It seemed to the writers that customer exigencies were now being foregrounded in the company’s ecology, which ultimately would internally change how problems were identified, solutions were researched, and products were developed. Liza Potts (2014) helps to explain the shift many companies like the example above are making, particularly with how technical communicators are beginning to focus on the end-to-end experiences of users. Potts also gives us a term to understand the role of these workers: experience architects, explaining, “This concept of experience architecture is not particularly new. What is new is the idea that we need to work in teams with diverse backgrounds in writing, design, development, and information systems to build them” (p. 3). There is a historical precedent for the term experience architect. Donald Norman (2013) called his group at Apple “the User Experience Architect’s Office” back in the 1990s (p. xiv). Potts further explains the mind-set of people who work in this area, “Thinking outside of a single use where people sit in one program all day long, experience architects look at how an individual component is part of a larger ecosystem” (p. 3). The larger ecosystem is made up of the many “touch points” a customer has with a company as she interacts with products, policies, procedures, and processes in order to solve unique problems. Peter Morville (2014) reminds us that experience architects are strategists who serve as “architects of understanding.

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[They] shape how users view the business, the topic, the task” (p. 46). However, when turning our focus to the end-to-end experience of the people in the workplace, we must also consider how employee experiences contribute to project outcomes. Simply put, how employees experience communication in the workplace influences project and business outcomes. As companies like the one above move toward architecting end-to-end experiences for customers, the same methods must be used to architect workplace experiences for employees. In this sense, PMs are also experience architects, working to facilitate and coordinate a range of dynamic methods to help teams achieve project and business outcomes by creating equitable communication spaces. Architecting communication spaces for today’s workplace requires a need to structure both temporal and spatial aspects of projects and teams for participation. Teams are growing more agile as a way to efficiently and intelligently participate in solving problems or responding to unforeseen discoveries in project work as a whole. Agile approaches, as noted earlier, are focused on the discoveries presented by emerging data gleaned from quick iterations that can sometimes feel messy given the nonlinear work patterns of discovery. To manage the mess, “a true agile approach [. . .] calls for small teams whose members are located next to each other physically, with little focus on defining roles between team members” (Unger and Chandler, 2009, p. 64). On the other hand, many companies have employees distributed across the world, and it is near impossible to collocate everyone on the team. Distributed teams require a different set of communication spaces. Of these teams, Hart-Davidson (2013) explains, “At the organizational level, the term ‘distributed work’ refers to the way individuals and teams often work at different times, from different locations, and across a variety of technological platforms and systems” (p. 52). Spinuzzi (2007) also adds, “Distributed work is the coordinative work that enables sociotechnical networks to hold together and form dense interconnections among and across work activities that have traditionally been separated by temporal, spatial, or disciplinary boundaries” (p. 268). PMs working with distributed teams require a variety of ways to support agile methods and adaptive processes, and such support creates a complex architecture of information and workspaces that have spatial and temporal implications for how work gets done. For these reasons, agile methods are often adapted to a specific workplace in ways that make sense for a team, client, or project. Additionally, the tools used to access and share this information and support collaboration are often accessed on mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, or smartphones. Mobility in the workplace “trouble[s] the idea that work occurs in a single,

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definable place” (Swarts, 2007, p. 280), which suggests project managers must build the communication spaces of a team through participation and with temporal and spatial exigencies in mind. These spatial and temporal considerations are especially true for effectively timing collaboration opportunities across the team. Reinersten (1997) argues for decentralizing control of teams “by defining specialized roles within the system and assigning these roles to different modules” (p. 137), suggesting that through basic rules decision-making about communication strategies can be locally owned. For instance, if there is a meeting across several time zones, including international lines, selecting a space and time for the meeting becomes increasingly challenging to arrange because of internet speed and the rhythm of different satellite offices. However, the underlying structure of the meeting can be controlled locally. That is, the team can choose to meet in a room together and connect via video chat to another group collocated at a different office, or the team can choose to individually connect to the larger whole at their own workstations. Online spaces that support agile methods of collaboration such as design studio (see Gothelf, 2013) add another layer of complexity to workplace ecology. Throughout a project, as employees participate in the workplace ecology, the spaces where people communicate can frequently vary. As mentioned previously, internet-based technology enables workers the flexibility to be mobile, even within the physical barriers of their own organizations. Some companies facilitate mobile working styles by architecting flexible working environments. The spatial representation of these flexible environments is especially important to how we architect workplace ecologies to facilitate the equitable exchange of ideas, support diverse work practices, and facilitate discoveries. Face to-face interaction, a widespread approach to leveraging agile methods, now exists in both physical and online spaces, which creates a different experience for agile teams. “Throughout history, when a medium that was once understood as geographically fixed becomes mobile, a cultural shift accompanies this transformation” (Farman, 2012, p. 1). This cultural shift in the workplace makes participating in deliberative, face-to-face activities more flexible. A worker can remain at a desk to await a phone call and participate in a meeting down the hall. If a person is at home, the worker can participate just the same. “Mobile work places are sites in which online and offline activities coexist” (Forlano, 2008, p. 35). Workplace mobile tools, however, are not merely a way to connect when physically located outside of the office, they are also a way to manage multiple ongoing projects across sometimes diverging spaces and timelines.

Kairos and Managing Experience Architecture Projects

The Kairos of Project Timelines Many XA projects today begin with an inception, or kick-off, meeting of sorts. At the start of a project, it is near impossible for a team to predict the solution or solutions that will surface as they work to solve problems. The ambiguity of agile projects can cause confusion for some, and that initial meeting is designed to collocate stakeholders like clients, vendors, subcontractors, and members of the team in the same room to interact; to develop project timelines and outcomes; to address project ambiguities; and to clarify project workflow, processes, and procedures. In distributed teams, co-location is an important part of the kick-off meeting, but cannot always be arranged. In many workplaces, people participate in several projects at once and cannot devote all of their time to a single project. At other organizations, people need to be transported to the kick-off meeting from different continents. Nevertheless, Ratcliffe and McNeill (2012) make a case for the importance of collocating a team because “the key benefits are efficiency and quality of both communication and problem solving” (p. 78). Solving problems is not just a temporal consideration in terms of efficiency, but a spatial one that influences quality of work. That is, a team must understand both the temporal and the spatial elements of a problem. If collocation is not possible, Ratcliffe and McNeill (2012) suggest making sure one or two members of the team attend the kick-off meeting and bring information back to colleagues. The timing of the kick-off meeting is purposeful because it signals the beginning of a project for a team, but the location of that meeting contains equally important information about a project. As managers choose spaces for the kick-off meeting, they must also remember how environments can enable or disable equitable participation. Video chat can be disrupted through poor Internet connection or distributed employees may pay less attention as they work on finishing a more pressing task. Strategically thinking through the temporal and spatial aspects of this meeting is key for architecting effective experiences for employees on the project team. The issue of location is explored deeply in the first chapter of Section 3 of this book, where Anders Fagerjord describes a rhetoric of location based on participation, giving a rich example of how mobile phones can be used to support meaningful experiences with culture. As teams move from the kick-off meeting to defining and solving problems, additional issues related to co-location can surface. When collocated, teams interact across the workplace ecology with the added context of face-to-face communication. For example, some companies have built offices with open floor plans to motivate collaborative work. Such environments may work well for collocated teams, but architecting similar experiences online can prove difficult because of technology limitations that make

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recreating face-to-face communication difficult, lack of training with specific tools, and/or mismatched work schedules. Leveraging participation in online environments requires the PM to pay more attention to how employees participate in project work, seeking methods for creating and iterating more equitable communication spaces. The time and space for intervening in collaborative processes, however, depends largely on how PMs manage the risk presented by lack of participation. Thinking kairotically about participation, project leaders can consider the spatial and temporal effects of intervening at different times and in different venues, encouraging participation in creating solutions to problems as they are presented (once again, see Fagerjord’s chapter in Section 3 of this book). Kairotic questions about spatiality might revolve around how intervention at a given moment would influence where project work is getting done? How will that intervention change team dynamics? And temporal questions might address the schedule with questions like how will intervention affect the completion date of the current iteration? What would happen to the schedule if no intervention took place? In the next section of this book, Cody Reimer will discuss a participatory process used to create the game League of Legends. Riot Games’ participatory approach outlines the importance of an effective and transparent communication strategy. Of agile methods, including scrum, sprint, and retrospective, Ratcliffe and McNeill (2012) emphasize activities over processes by explaining, “We use this framework of discover, envision, elaborate, deliver, evolve to reduce uncertainty” (p. 67). One way to achieve such a strategy on a team is through scrum, which is sometimes called a stand-up. An agile project management technique, scrum is used to help coordinate information across teams. During scrum, each person on the team gathers in the same space and stands up in a circle to respond to three prompts, which can sometimes vary by workplace or team. In distributed teams, I’ve seen scrum done in a video chat room less formally (sitting, not standing, and with less urgency). The three prompts ask, “What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? What’s in my way?” (Davies and Sedley, 2009, p. 77). The scrum can be large or small and can occur daily or weekly. During scrum sessions, the project manager or product owner (i.e., the client) runs the session and works to clear impediments for the team. Clearing impediments is a kairotic exercise. “People often think there is only a right decision or a wrong decision. What they miss is the no-decision option. Sometimes we don’t need to make a decision at that moment. It is possible to defer it to a later time, when you’ll know more and be able to make a more informed decision” (Ratcliffe and McNeill, 2012, p. 67). What the authors appear to advocate for is kairotic thinking in these instances to avoid deci-

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sions that might negatively influence the project’s outcome. Hurrying to a decision can often mean hurrying toward a mistake, particularly when making choices about workflow. In agile methods, the term sprint is used to define a length of time for an iteration made up of a cycle of designing, testing, and analyzing. Sprints often have a simple goal: to deliver value to the project (sometimes to the client or product owner) by its completion. Sprints also overlap temporal (scheduling) and spatial (design, testing, and analyzing) considerations while working to meet project outcomes. When architecting sprints, project managers must consider scheduling them in such a way that discovery is facilitated while also choosing the right environments to support design, testing, and analytical activities. Across some distributed teams, sprints can be done, out of necessity, by those collocated at the same office. To motivate more interaction, the project manager can carefully choose the correct moment and space to intervene. For instance, architecting the project to use daily scrum through video chat during a sprint to help coordinate discoveries and discuss design and research progress. Effectively architecting the sprint across the workplace ecology becomes the main concern of the project leader. Retrospectives are sometimes called post-mortem reports, and are essentially a time and space for teams to reflect on the project. Sometimes reports are filed, but they can also occur as a final meeting about the project for a team. These reports or meetings can be completed at the end of a sprint or at the end of a project. The decision to complete formal or informal post-mortem retrospectives is often a decision for project leadership. In some instances, choosing to complete retrospectives more often makes sense, particularly if the workplace experience has recently changed through the adoption of unfamiliar technologies. I mentioned the team earlier that struggled with the adoption of a new project management software solution. One way to mitigate such issues is to address them in project teams or in scrums. The project manager can create the time and space in the schedule for training, depending on the level of risk the issues present. Retrospectives work to improve internal processes but also serve as a summary of what happened on the project. To help summarize what was learned, rubrics can be developed at the kick-off meeting with stakeholders to evaluate the project. These rubrics can be used as a heuristic for the team to internally evaluate their performance on an ongoing basis as well. Of course, using these rubrics is also a kairotic consideration. Agile methods work to deliver value to stakeholders as often as possible. Setting up a meeting time and workflow to deliver information is both a temporal and spatial negotiation for teams (once again, see Cody Reimer’s

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chapter on League of Legends). These considerations are largely made with a client in mind, but when the team chooses to provide information, the client is particularly important to the workflow they establish. For instance, a manager in New York might alter her workday each week to wake up at 5:00 am for a 5:30 am meeting with a team in Bangalore to catch up with them before the end of the workday. Employees can choose to keep virtual workspaces private or invite clients into that environment, which changes the dynamic of the workplace ecology. Project management software, such as Basecamp, allows users to invite clients into the workspace and control what can be seen. Additionally, client meetings can take place online or in person in the form of a scrum. Each of these considerations can be carefully examined through employing a kairotic mind-set. For instance, a project manager can clarify how often the client would like updates or to view working software and create a schedule based on iterations to meet those goals. The implementation of solutions also has spatial and temporal influences on project workflow as well. Berkun (2008) calls this “end-game strategy,” explaining methods for finishing a project and implementing solutions. Sometimes solutions are products or new releases of products. Other times, projects are developed to complete research or develop a proof of concept. During the end of a project, teams require a great deal of coordination across the workplace ecology. They continue to iterate and test the product, but as is especially the case in distributed teams, coordinating information becomes a kairotic exercise in storing updated information, sharing it, and retrieving it. An effective workflow, however, must be architected throughout the project before the end-game strategy has commenced. In essence, the structure of the project can determine how end-game strategy will unfold.

Conclusion Project management in XA is structurally in medias res, kairotically working to create communication spaces that are equitable and encourage participation in project work. In this chapter, I depicted PMs as facilitators of work across temporal and spatial workplace ecologies. To facilitate valuable experiences for employees, PMs can use kairos to help support decision-making and guide how projects are architected in the workplace. Kairos helps reveal the temporal and spatial elements of the workplace ecology as overlapping in important ways that can drive decisions about architecting team dynamics and workflow. Further, when positioning PMs as architects of communication spaces in the workplace, project management can be more easily understood as a participatory and empathetic activity. Work by Indi Young (2015) explains how XA PMs create communication spaces that can also

Kairos and Managing Experience Architecture Projects

be understood as practicing empathy. As project management continues to adapt to agile and post-agile methodologies, the importance of facilitating empathetic approaches is key to architecting effective end-to-end experiences of the workplace. A project-management philosophy focused on this sort of facilitation can also help to make user experience a more embedded, central activity within an organization, creating equitable communication spaces where nagging frustrations previously flourished.

References Berkun, S. (2008). Making things happen. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Brown, D. (2013). Designing together: The collaboration and conflict management handbook for creative professionals. New York, NY: New Riders. Davies, R., and Sedley, L. (2009). Agile coaching. Raleigh, NC: The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Dicks, S. R. (2004). Management principles and practices for technical communicators. N.p.: Pearson/Longman. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2015). In medias res. Retrieved from http:// www.britannica.com/art/in-medias-res-literature Farman, J. (2012). Mobile interface theory: Embodied space and locative media. New York, NY: Routledge. Forlano, L. (2008). Working on the move: The social and digital ecologies of mobile work places. In D. Hislop (Ed.), Mobility and technology in the workplace (pp. 28–42). New York, NY: Routledge. Gothelf, J. (2013). Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Hackos, J. T. (2007). Information development: Managing your documentation projects, portfolio, and people. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Technology Pub. Hart-Davidson, W. (2007). Researching the activity of writing: Time-use diaries, mobile technologies, and video screen capture. Studying the mediated action of composing with time-use diaries. In H. McKee, & D. DeVoss (Eds.), Digital writing research: Technologies, methodologies, and ethical issues, (pp. 153–169). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Hill, L. Brandeau, G., Truelove, E., and Lineback, K. (2014). Collective genius: The art and practice of leading innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing. Kennedy, G. (1994). A new history of classical rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kinneavy, J. (2002). Kairos in classical and modern rhetorical theory. In P. Sipiora and J. Baumlin (Eds.), Rhetoric and kairos : Essays in history, theory, and praxis, (pp. 46–57) Albany, NY: SUNY.

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Lauren, B. (2015, July). Participating in project management experiences in the workplace. In D. Armfield (Ed.), Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGDOC ’15, July 16—17, 2015, Limerick, Ireland. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.1145/2775441.2775473. Leston, R. (2013). Unhinged: Kairos and the invention of the untimely. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 21(1), pp. 29–50. DOI: 10.1080/15456870.2013.743325. Lund, A. (2011). User experience management. In Essential skills for leading effective UX teams. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufman Publishers. Manovich, L. (2013). Software takes command. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. Morville, P. (2014). Intertwingled: Information changes everything. Ann Arbor, MI: Semantic Studios. Norman, D. (2013). The design of everyday things. New York, NY: Basic Books. Potts, L. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. New York, NY: Routledge. Ratcliffe, L., & McNeill, M. (2012). Agile experience design: A digital designer’s guide to agile, lean, and continuous. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Reinertsen, D. (1998). Managing the design factory. New York, NY: The Free Press. Sheridan, D., Ridolfo, J., & Michel, A. (2012). The available means of persuasion: Mapping a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public discourse. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Singer, Bryan (Director). (1995). The usual suspects [Motion Picture]. USA: MGM. Smith, J. E. (2002). Time and qualitative time. In P. Sipiora and J. Baumlin (Eds.), Rhetoric and kairos : Essays in history, theory, and praxis, (pp. 46–57) Albany, NY: SUNY. Spinuzzi, C. (2007). Guest editors introduction: Technical communication in the age of distributed work. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16(3), pp. 265–77. Spinuzzi, C. (2015). All edge: Inside the new workplace networks. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Swarts, J. (2007). Mobility and composition: The architecture of coherence in nonplaces. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16(3), pp. 279–309. Unger, R., & Chandler, C. (2009). A project guide to UX design: For user experience professionals. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Young, I. (2015). Chapter 2: Empathy brings balance. In UX Matters. Retrieved from http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2015/04/practical empathy. php#sthash.s5BkB0kv.dpuf

Part 3: Sites of Experience

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13 Toward a Rhetoric of the Place: Creating Locative Experiences Anders Fagerjord

Introduction

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odern smartphones, tablets, laptop computers, and increasingly even cameras and wristwatches now come with built-in geolocation sensors. An ever-increasing range of services now ask for the latitude and longitude registered by these devices. Not only services like 4square, that are built around sharing information about places, but all kinds of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and etc. Pointing to the increasing use of wearable sensors that register all kinds of movement in addition to light, sound, temperature, and even bodily functions, Gunnar Liestøl has described this as the “emergence of sensory media” (Liestøl et al., 2012). It is only to be expected that location-aware devices should be used for artworks, entertainment, and education, and it also has been for two decades (for good overviews of early works, see Løvlie, 2011; Ciavarella & Paternò, 2004). These works are generally done within the user-centered design paradigm, in fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) design, and user experience (UX) design (see Asaro 2007 and Hartson and Pyla 2012 for extensive overviews of these fields). Such methods yield excellent results for many services, but they stop short of helping designers of experience architecture: As I have argued more fully elsewhere, HCI and UX methods focus on interfaces to systems, systems that hold “content,” but are of little help to those who wish to design content (Fagerjord, 2015). I will argue in this chapter that rhetoric as a frame of mind can aid authors of locative experiences, and I will illustrate that with our experiences with the Musica Romana project, experiences that bring to mind what we call the rhetoric of the place. Musica Romana (http://fagerjord/lok/roma/) is a website for mobile phones, bringing classical church music to tourists in the many churches in Rome, Italy. It uses the mobile phone’s location services to list interesting churches close to the tourist. A map leads her to the nearest church. Inside, she can listen to music written for this church in the Renaissance or Baroque and hear a short talk about the composer, comparing the music with the architecture and art in the church.

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In our work, we combined a UX design approach similar to that outlined by Hartson and Pyla (2012) with a rhetorical approach and some new evaluation methods. As my concern in this chapter is to share our rhetorical approach, I will order the chapter according to four of Cicero’s five operations: Inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and actio: That since all the business and art of an orator is divided into five parts, he ought first to find out what he should say; next, to dispose and arrange his matter, not only in a certain order, but with a sort of power and judgment; then to clothe and deck his thoughts with language; then to secure them in his memory; and lastly, to deliver them with dignity and grace (De Oratore, p. 142). This means that this chapter does not have a traditional “methods” section, as method is the concern throughout. Instead, we begin with inventio, the search for the right arguments.

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How does one find out what to say in a locative experience? In Musica Romana we spent quite some time on this, and the work fell naturally into three distinct phases: Distinguishing the genre and topic, finding the information to be included, and matching possible arguments with the place. Most locative projects in the research literature seem to start from a general topic: an idea of what could be interesting to communicate in a certain spot. Musica Romana started from my interest in music history; visiting Rome almost two decades ago, I noticed all the churches from the Medieval age, Renaissance, and Baroque and began to wonder what music was played there and whether any composers I knew about had worked in any of them. This old idea came back to me when colleagues at the University of Oslo approached me for a locative media project in 2005. This was hardly the most original project. History is the most common use of locative media: explaining how what is on a site came to be, or showing what was once there. The many other possibilities we could have explored become apparent if we consider dimensions like time, space, or fiction, elements of what could be a “list of commonplaces” for locative experiences. While we set out to explain what was once in a certain space, others have focused on what will be, or what could be in the future. Liestøl has published both a SitSim showing how Oslo’s massive new National Museum will look when finished (Liestøl & Morrison, 2015), and one showing how different landscapes would look if the global temperatures rise so much that the polar ice melts (Liestøl, 2014a). Some projects add to what is at the site, such as Augmented Reality (AR) projects, and either explain what is there or show what has been

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or could be there. There have also been projects, however, that close off as much as possible of the actual site and create a mediated space in the same spot. Ståle Stenslie created a virtual sculpture in Oslo that could not be seen, only felt when wearing a special bodysuit (Stenslie, 2010). Our choice to make an explanatory or pedagogical project is also quite commonplace. Others have explored other genres such as game (Silva, 2006), poetry (Løvlie, 2011), and abstract artworks, such as music (Behrendt, 2012). Once a topic is decided, Inventio for locative media is also to find the information, stories, or arguments that make your topic relevant for an audience in a certain location (Liestøl et al., 2012). Our single most important source of information was the brilliant article on Rome in The New Grove (Antolini, 1995). From there, we collected a long list of composers and musicians, as well as thirty-five important churches, theaters and palazzos. Not all of these are open to the public, however, and those that are open may not be very interesting today, if they even exist. Rome’s first opera theatre, the Tor di Nona, was torn down several centuries ago, and while an opera buff might want to visit the site, there is not much to do there, as a rather nondescript apartment house now occupies the land. Working our way through the list, we chose six churches for the first prototype work and went back to the library to research information. The third phase was to map our collection of music history to each church. We did extensive research on other mobile apps in Rome to catalogue different ways of presenting history in locative media. Scouring Apple’s App Store, we found nine guides to Rome, which we tested in the city, together with five different guide books and three audio guides in the Colosseum, the Forum, and on a bus tour. (This work is reported in more detail in Fagerjord, 2010; Fagerjord, 2011). We found several ways to approach the explanation of a place. One can focus on what is unique in a place or highlight what it shares with other places, up to the point where it is used as an example of a class of sites, for instance, using the Santa Maria in Trastevere as an example of the basilica form of church architecture. More often than not, we found it worked best when audio guides used the particulars of a place and linked them to a larger topic. A story of Michelangelo’s relation to the Vatican when constructing the Piazza di Campidoglio makes the whole economy of the Papal state understandable, while it is exciting to feel that this happened right here. As music and aesthetics was our topic, we frequently tried to point out parallels between music and architecture or paintings from the same period that the audience can see in the church.

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In hindsight, however, we realize there are many more options available than those we chose initially. We would have come up with many more alternative, and quite possibly better, ideas had we worked more systematically with an inventory of arguments like those found in rhetoric. These catalogs do not yet exist, but a beginning could be to consider whether to use fiction or fact; whether prose, poetry, game, or abstract expression; whether to present the past, the future, or the possible future; and whether to select this place or map another place to this.

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Kairos, a rhetor’s sensibility for the rhetorical situation is a central skill in rhetoric. While Kairos is often described as the time and place, it is rather the audience gathered in a particular place at a certain time that should be the rhetor’s concern. In locative media, however, we know where our audience will listen, but not necessarily when. And who is the audience at this spot? Authors of locative services will have to decide whether they address all people gathered in a spot or a select target group. Further, they must decide if they only write for those who have found the spot themselves, or if they will want to lead prospective audience members to the place. Many, perhaps most, of locative services exist in places where people gather by their own initiative, but some take care to lead audience members to places they otherwise would not find. That was the approach we took in the Musica Romana service. We thought of our audience as tourists in Rome with an interest in classical music (but not with much formal training) and a couple of days to spend experiencing the city. While many visitors to Rome will visit the St.Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican or sit down for a coffee in the Piazza Navona, where the San Luigi Dei Francesi is just around the corner, several of the other churches are a bit out of the way. Our prospective audience would then be arriving in a new place they knew little about, expecting to listen to music and learn a little history. Any application is intruding on its users, asking them to alter their ways, to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do. We wanted our service to intrude as little as possible by adapting to the common behavior in the church, so we visited the churches we had selected and analyzed how tourists experience them: We studied the art and architecture, the lighting, the mood, and most important: typical behavior. Spending hours inside the churches, we observed how visitors behave in these sacred areas, and we found a typical pattern: Arriving from a hectic street, often with bright sunlight, visitors suddenly alter their pace when inside these cool, dim, quiet rooms. Once inside, people tend to stop a few steps from the entrance and get an overview of the interior and sense the atmosphere. With slow move-

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ments, they then either sit down on one of the benches, looking up towards the altar and the (often decorated) ceiling, or they walk down the sides, looking into the chapels. Most visits are between ten and fifteen minutes, not counting those who just peek in and leave. From our historical research, we had lists of several composers and works for each church, but we realized that we only had time to present a few in each place. Listening to different works inside each church, we tried to find music that corresponded with the period of the architecture and main artworks and that fit the atmosphere. Our initial assumption was that the periods should match, so we selected Renaissance music in a Renaissance church, for example. (As we will see later, this assumption was not correct, however.) We also gave priority to important composers, such as Palestrina or Corelli, and tried to identify woks and movements that might have a popular appeal. Attention to the place is also to identify difficulties users may have in the location. Weak GPS signal in certain areas is a common problem. The Inventio app for Forum Romanum suffers from the strong sunlight and few shadows in the place, so the audience is encouraged to bring an umbrella (Liestøl, 2012). In the Oslo Art Museum app, there is a traffic warning: Users are prompted on the screen to look out for approaching trams in the area (Liestøl, 2014b). The panorama app for the Eiffel Tower (2012) depends on the compass for direction, but on many devices, the compass is compromised by all the steel in the tower. For our project, the main difficulties occurred when users tried to find the churches, as we will see in the next section.

Dispositio Dispositio, meaning ordering the parts, is the temporal dimension of a speech, but in locative media, it will also be in space. It is to direct the audience’s experience in time, and it begins with getting them to the place (Broadbent and Marti 1997; Løvlie, 2009). A user interface to the navigation system guides the user from point to point, and we wanted it to be easy, logical, and as expected from earlier interfaces. Our research interest was not user-interface design but the experience in the churches, so we decided early on to rely heavily on well-known interface conventions, (Nielsen and Loranger 2006) in the beginning from Apple’s Map and iTunes applications, later also from Google maps. We did have to adapt these quite a bit, however, mostly to help users to find our churches. While the enormous St. Peter’s can be seen from most of central Rome, other churches can be difficult to find in the historic center’s cobblestone maze. Our survey of guide books and apps gave us insight into this:

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We often followed a guide and knew we were close to a church, but still, we couldn’t find it. To create a better solution, we began with paper prototypes. We tested on ourselves, and we realized we had to cut down on features. Originally, we wanted to include several different overviews: A timeline, a composer overview, and a list of places. We found, however, that this distracted users from the main task: navigation in a busy city. By removing choices, and focusing on a smooth journey, we arrived at flow in three steps that were evaluated on the site by test users, five for the first iteration, seven for the second. Users were observed and asked to think aloud when navigating the street (Lewis 1982). The second iteration performed well in the tests: First, the user selects a church from an overview in the form of lists and maps (Figure 1). From there, we present navigation aids for that selection only. We used a map where we show the user’s location dynamically (using GPS location, Figure 2). This is not enough, however. Many churches are large, but their entrances are relatively small with adjacent buildings on all sides. 230

Figure 1: Overview screen with lists of sites available. Not shown: map view. Photograph by the author. Two adjustments were necessary: First, it is important that the church’s coordinates on the map be those of the entrance and not to the center of the building. Otherwise, users may be heading in the wrong direction and get

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lost, even when very near. Also, when closing in on the target, users depend less on the map, and more on their own eyes. When we inserted a picture of the entrance in the application, it became easier for the users to identify the right building from a few hundred meters away (Figure 3). The resulting user interface for street navigation thus moves the audience through three concentric circles: Far away (a city map), in the neighborhood (a facade photo of the entrance), and at the place of interest (Figure 4).

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Figure 2: Dynamic location view uses real-time GPS data to locate the user in space and time. Photograph by the author. Inside the church, we adapted the service what most people do there. We designed a “radio program” one can listen to while walking around or sitting at a bench, studying the marvelous interior. The program is presented as a list of tracks, not unlike how album tracks are visualized in music player apps such as iTunes or Spotify (figure 4). We created two or three tracks for each church. The first track introduces the theme we chose for the church, while the others give more details and, of course more music. Separating the tracks in the interface gives an indication of sequence, while it is possible to skip a track that is not interesting. Well-functioning interactive media find a balance between a dramatic flow and allowing choices for the user. Musica Romana aims at this balance by a logical sequence for physical navigation to a church, from outside to inside, and a preferred sequence of tracks created to be pedagogical and interesting. Users may easily leave the path at any point, however, instead moving to other parts of the service.

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Figure 3: Changing the initial view to an image of the building’s façade facilitated users’ ability to accurately navigate urban space.Photograph by the author.

Figure 4: Clear images of the interior spaces confirms for users that they have arrived at their intended destination. Photograph by the author.

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Elocutio Several early studies concluded that audio works better than writing and images for many kinds of locative media as it allows the audience to view their surroundings while listening (Oppermann and Specht, 1999; Bellotti et al., 2002; Bornträger et al., 2003; but cf. Liestøl and Morrison, 2015). This would only hold true in places that have visual interest, but that is very much the case in our project: Roman churches are so beautiful that a tiny mobile phone screen can’t compete. Many people that have been involved in various stages of the project have suggested including pictures of the churches, but we have repeatedly found that our users prefer to look at the place they are in and not on the screen. The few images we have included are there to allow for browsing elsewhere, for instance, in the hotel room planning where to go the following day. We developed a range of different techniques for our eight churches: Space as scene of an event (locus in quo), space as metaphor, space as metonymy, space as example, space as scene of fiction, and space-agent dramatization. These were evaluated in two rounds of user testing. In the first evaluation, with five respondents, user opinions were elicited in focus group interviews and a survey. The next iteration was evaluated using seven testers, who also were interviewed in a group. In this test, we asked each evaluator to visit two churches with contrasting kinds of programs, asking them afterwards to compare them (what we have called a “within-subject A/B test,” see Fagerjord 2015). The service was also peer reviewed by another scholar with long experience in locative media.

Locus in quo The first and most obvious technique for historical locative media is to present what happened right here and only here. In music history that can be first performances of famous works or other notable concerts, or it could be a place of importance for a noteworthy musician. This technique, which we may call locus in quo, was used for three of our churches: Many of Archangelo Corelli’s works, including his popular “Christmas Concerto,” were first performed in San Lorenzo in Damaso, a chapel inside Cardinal Ottoboni’s palace off Campo di Fiori. Handel’s powerful Dixit Dominus had its premiere in Santa Maria in Montesanto, one of Carlo Rainaldi’s twin churches at Piazza del Popolo. Finally, Italian Baroque music can be said to have begun in Chiesa Nuova, where Cavailieri’s oratorios were performed around the year 1600. By stressing that our audience is in the very spot where this happened, we are relying on what we might call an “aura effect,” borrowing from Benjamin (2002). Our test-audience members confirmed in inter-

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views that it had a special value to know that they were listening to music just where it was first heard centuries earlier. “It was as if the music came closer to them,” they said.

Space as Metaphor

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I have written repeatedly of instances where music and architecture “fit” together, creating “synesthetic parallels.” These parallels are metaphorical relations. In most cases, it is on an aspect of architecture that is used as a metaphor to explain or describe one aspect of music, as architecture is visible and tangible compared to music. One example is the melodic arch. In Palestrina’s choral music, the voices’ melodic lines are quite symmetrical, so sequences going up, that is, to higher pitches (again, a metaphor of altitude, we have no other term for this), alternate with sequences going down. While most listeners will agree that the effect is one of balance, it is first when one sees the musical notation or tries to draw the music for one’s inner eye that one realizes that it is similar to an arch. Palestrina’s music is constructed of such melodic arches, some longer, some shorter. If we accept the metaphor of the arch, we can make the comparison to Michelangelo’s architecture in St. Peter’s cathedral, where the entire construction rests on semicircular arches, all mirroring the circular main cupola, and several smaller cupolas. Arches upon arches, circles within circles. A slightly less obvious metaphor is the view that “[t]onality is to music what linear perspective is to painting—it organizes time towards a central point of perception within the listener, the way that, in painting, space convergences of the eye/I of the viewer” (Johnson, 1999, p. 119). Tonal music is based around a central tone, the root, the first note of the major or minor scale, and the tension created by a chord formed on the fifth step of the scale (a G or G7 chord in the key of C) leading towards the root. That tonal music was developed in Italy around the same time as central perspective in painting is a parallel pointed out by many, as well as the development of atonal music in the same years as abstract painting (see, e.g., Brunswick, 1943; Schorske, 1981, p. 346). Santa Maria di Trastevere is an old church where most of the Medieval interior is kept, including the magnificent Medieval mosaics, which to a modern eye clearly is without any linear perspective. In this church we likened this art to the modal (and not tonal) Gregorian Chant of the middle ages. Gregorian chant is far from unique in this Church, however, it was sung in all Catholic Churches right up to the twentieth century. We use the unfamiliar Medieval mosaic as a metaphor to explain how the scales used in Gregorian Chant give it its character that, to modern ears, is floating, ethereal and meditative.

Toward a Rhetoric of the Place

To use one setting to explain what is a general principle of many places or a whole epoch in this way can be called space as example. Gregorian Chant in Santa Maria in Trastevere is used as an example of a musical style that was performed in all of Rome’s churches, as the art in the church may be used as a pedagogical metaphor. We used examples in combinations with other techniques: Santa Cecilia in Trastevere became the example of the older Roman Chant, as one of very few manuscripts of this music is kept in this church, thus using the locus in quo effect.

Place as Metonymy The other master trope of rhetoric, metonymy, was also used but with lesser effect. When we, as in San Luigi dei Francesi, present music written in a period when the church was built, there is a metonymic relation between the two. In our commentary, we explained how this was a period of rich, lavish art, pointing out how the music written for two, four, or maybe eight choirs placed at different galleries was similar in its lavishness to the rich gilded decorations in the church.1

Antithesis To use the locus in quo effect sometimes also led us to use music we felt did not fit the church particularly well. Handel’s powerful and dramatic oratorio Dixit Dominus was first performed in Santa Maria de Montesanto, a small and rather unassuming church, which displays none of the drama and contrasts we find in Handel’s music. The space becomes the music’s antithesis, a contrast in aesthetics, and gave us an opportunity to discuss why this is so. Another example of space as antithesis is our program for Santa Maria della Valle, a very large church on the large Via Corso. The entire first act of Puccini’s opera Tosca takes place inside this church, so we presented three airs from the opera inside, summarizing the action in our commentary. We did not point out the, to us, obvious antitheses of the late Romantic music inside the Baroque church but assumed it would make the effect of the experience less powerful. Our testers, on the other hand, did not think this was a problem, and reported they very much enjoyed this space-as-fiction effect. “It was like walking on stage in an opera,” one tester expressed.

1. In his chapter on the Scene-Actor ratio, Burke treats this as a synechdocic relation, using an example where a harsh landscape yields harsh, strong men (Burke 1969, 8).

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Personalization The last effect was personalization, used in San Lorenzo in Damaso, in which cardinal Ottoboni utilized his support of the composer Corelli as an example of the relation between church, clergy and art in the late Baroque Papal State. Our test audience preferred the story of this colorful and extremely wealthy patron to the more general introduction to the Baroque in San Luigi dei Francesi. This is hardly a surprise; personalization is a well-known rhetorical technique, and it functioned in our project to make abstract observations of art and society come alive. User evaluations have shown that these eight techniques (locus in quo, space as metaphor, space as example, space as metonymy, space as antithesis, space as fiction, and personalization) can work to create interesting learning experiences in a location-based system. It was not enough to write and record these texts, however. We also had to find an effective way of delivery.

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The Latin term actio is generally translated as delivery. In this chapter, we will use that as a term for all that which brings the words and music to the audience. At this step in the process, we had selected music for each place and how to present it. The next step was to record the narration and to put in place the technological system to play it back. Voice recordings were done with an inexpensive microphone (a Blue Snowball), and consumer software (Apple Garage Band). We did the recordings for the first prototypes in a hotel room and were able to do many quick iterations. As we compared different versions, it became very clear that the narrator needed to speak rather slowly and in a low voice in order to blend in with the place. The human voice is a very intimate medium of communication, and we are all sensitive to small variations in speech. Our narrator has several years of radio experience, but when he spoke in his usual “radio tone,” it felt literally “out of place” in the churches. As many, including Jason Farman (2012), have argued, a place becomes a place only when experienced by people. As described earlier, a Roman church is a dim, solemn place where people move slowly and speak in low voices. To blend in with the places, our narrator needed to speak like people tend to do there. When we were satisfied with the tone of narration, we re-recorded the tracks using the same equipment in a radio studio for better acoustics and less noise. Another continuous question of delivery was what technology to use. The first version was made as a native iPhone app. This gave us total control over interface, graphics, text, and navigation. We could also include

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the sound recordings, including the music, in the app so users would download everything at once. This created a problem with music rights, however: Recording artists and their record company have the rights to distribute the recordings, and anyone wishing to distribute a recording needs a license from the record company, which in most cases have to be bought. Large digital music providers like Apple or Spotify negotiate license deals for thousands, even millions of tracks at once, but we found no way of buying a license for the dozen tracks we needed. Apple also upgraded the iOS in this period, meaning that we would have to change large parts of our app. We chose to move our service to the Web, recreating the app in HTML and JavaScript. New telephone browsers now included geolocation services available through JavaScript, and we could stream the sound from the web server, using a music license for web podcasts. Technically, this worked fine. Through several user tests we have confirmed that the navigation functions properly, the pages download quickly over a cellular network, and music plays back when we want it to, even within the thick marble walls. GRAMO, the Norwegian recording rights association, did not accept our application for a podcast license. We also approached a record company, which did not reply to our letters asking for permission. Without a license, we could not make our prototype publicly available on the web. As a workaround, we chose to use Spotify’s Web API, playing back the music from Spotify’s streaming service. This is far less elegant, as the users need to have the Spotify app installed on their phones, and because music and narration need to be on separate tracks. Users stated in comparative tests that they preferred to have music and narration simultaneously (Fagerjord 2015), but as the iPhone only allows playback from one source at a time, we had to forgo our radio-like version with mixed narration and music. In 2014, Spotify launched an iOS SDK, making it possible to include music from Spotify in native iOS apps, and causing us to consider whether we should return to our original ambition to create a native app for the iPhone. Our experiences with several different technologies and their different regulatory regimes show that a locative experience can be delivered relatively unchanged by many means. We could create the same user interface both as an iPhone app and a web page. Even if it looks similar, these choices are not without effect on the experience, however. A web browser comes with its own interface controls, meaning the address bar and the back button (what developers know as “browser chrome”) take up space. Streaming music is also less reliable than a preinstalled track, and the costs of data

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traffic can be quite expensive for visitors to Italy with data plans from other countries. On the other hand, downloading an app with all the music will take a long time (and also be expensive) over a telephone network, so users would want to do that at home or in a hotel with a Wi-Fi connection. It is less likely that a casual tourist in one of our churches could be told about the service and decide on the spot to try it out. Finally, our current Spotify workaround creates a less immersive experience, as music and narration are in separate tracks, and users have to juggle the Spotify app and the web browser simultaneously.

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Creating a locative experience is more than offering a smooth user interface. Furthermore, to create a database system of “containers” into which one locates “content” is not enough to guarantee an exciting result. I hope to have demonstrated that ancient rhetoric outlines a sequence of steps useful for one of the most modern genres of interactive media. I also contend that rhetorical concepts are not only useful to sort and catalogue different ways of creating locative media, but also good tools for thinking and generating ideas when creating place-specific stories and explanations. Klaus M. Krippendorff has observed that to design is to combine well-known elements in new combinations (2006). Rhetorical tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, and antitheses may be used to generate ideas for new works. In many ways, locative media are old. Plaques, statues, signs, obelisks, arches, burial mounds and pyramids have been used for millennia to communicate what is significant and special about a certain place. While electronic, sensory media open new possibilities, speech and its purposes stays remarkably stable. That may be why the oldest of disciplines can be used for the most modern of media.

References Antolini, B. M. (1995). Rome. In S. Sadie (Ed.), The new grove dictionary of music and musicians. London: Macmillan. Asaro, P. M. (2007). Transforming society by transforming technology: The science and politics of participatory design. Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 10, pp. 257–90. Behrendt, F. (2012). The sound of locative media. Convergence, 18(3), pp. 283–95. Bellotti, F., Berta, R., de Gloria, A., and Margarone, M. (2002, April– June). User testing a hypermedia tour guide. Pervasive Computing, pp. 33–41.

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Benjamin, W. (2002). The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility. In H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (Eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Bornträger, C., Cheverst, K., Davies, N., Dix, A., Friday, A., and Seitz, J. (2003). Experiments with multi-modal interfaces in a context-aware city guide. Mobile HCI, pp. 116–30. Brunswick, M. (1943). Tonality and perspective. Musical Quarterly, pp. 426–37. Burke, E.. (1969). A grammar of motives. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ciavarella, C., & Paternò, F. (2004). The design of a handheld, location-aware guide for indoor environments. Personal Ubiquitous Computing 8, pp. 82–91. Cicero, M. T.. (2014). De oratore. [On the Orator]. In J. S. Watson (Trans.), Cicero: Complete Works, Delphi Classics. Kindle ed. Fagerjord, A. (2010). Reiseguiden som sammensatt tekst: Retorisk konvergens på papir og skjerm. In M. Engerbretsen (Ed.), Skrift/bilde/lyd: Analyser Av Sammensatte Tekster, (pp. 56–78). Kristiansand: Høyskoleforlaget. Fagerjord, A. (2011). Between place and interface: Designing situated sound for the Iphone. Computers and Composition, 28, pp. 255–63. Fagerjord, A. (2015). Humanist evaluation of locative media design. The Journal of Media Innovation, 2(1), pp. 107–22. Farman, J. (2012). Mobile interface theory: Embodied space and locative media. London: Routledge. Hartson, R., & Pyla, P. S. (2012). The UX book: Process and guidelines for ensuring a quality user experience. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann. Johnson, J.. (1999). Out of time: Music and the making of modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krippendorff, K. (2006). The semantic turn: A new foundation for design. Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis. Lewis, C. (1982). Using the “thinking-aloud” method in cognitive interface design (Research report RC 9265). Retrieved from IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Liestøl, G. (2012). Roman forum. iOS application. Liestøl, G. (2014a). Climsim: Sitsim demo Iii. Demo video, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1paoiHS3N00 Liestøl, G. (2014b). Nytt Museum. iOS application. Liestøl, G., Doksrød, A., Ledas, Š., and Rasmussen, T. (2012). Sensory media: Multidisciplinary approaches in designing a situated & mobile

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learning environment for past topics. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies, 6(3), pp. 24–28. Liestøl, G., & Morrison, A. (2015). The power of place and perspective: Sensory media and situated simulations in urban design. In A. Silva, & Sheller, M. (Eds.), Mobility and locative media: Mobile communication in hybrid spaces, (pp. 207–22). New York: Routledge. Løvlie, A. S.. (2011). Textopia: Experiments with locative literature (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Oslo, Oslo, NW. Nielsen, J., & Loranger, H. (2006). Prioritizing Web usability. Berkeley, California: New Rider. Oppermann, R., & Specht, M. (1999). A nomadic information system for adaptive exhibition guidance. Archives and museum informatics, 13(2), pp. 127–38. Schorske, C. E. (1981). Fin-De-siècle Vienna: Politics and culture. New York: Vintage. Silva, A. (2006). Mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. Space and Culture, 9(3), pp. 261–78. Stenslie, S. (2010). Psychoplastics: How to sculpt your self. Descripiton of art project, available at https://stensliehome.files.wordpress. com/2014/06/psychoplastics-pdf.pdf Tour Eiffel: Official visitor guide Hd. (2012). Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel. iOS application.

14 Dialogic, Data-Driven Design: UX and League of Legends Cody Reimer

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ucian the Purifier is a gunslinging marksman. Tormented by his wife’s death at the hands of a soul-collecting spectral reaper, he wields twin relic-pistols to purify Runeterra, League of Legends’ landscape. Since his release in August 2013, Lucian has been a contested champion in Riot Games’ immensely popular League (2009) title. The story of his journey from strong to untouchable to finely-tuned is one of dialogue, data, and design. It’s a story of one of the most popular video games in the world, of its engaged user-base, and of how its developers and users co-construct the game’s experience. More importantly, one needn’t be an insider, or even a gamer, to appreciate how such design practices might translate to other applications. This chapter is a case study of Riot’s design process for League of Legends. The first half begins by making a case for the importance of rapid iteration; it suggests that the use of Big Data to enable such iteration requires dialogue with users to temper it; then, it presents a model of Riot’s design process and briefly explains its component pieces. The second half contains the case of Lucian, our League gunslinger, and the changes he underwent over the course of several patches. The section includes a brief note on methods, an overview of stakeholders, a data narrative, and some illustrative examples of the process in making changes to Lucian. These changes highlight the benefits of—and Riot’s reliance on—dialogic, data-driven design.

A Case for Rapid Iteration Martin Fowler (2003) writes about the problem of sacrificing quality for speed in software programming, and the resulting accrual of “technical debt”: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and

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dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

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UX debt has been promoted as an extension of the metaphor (Lipka, 2011; Melbourne, 2011; Wright, 2013; Kalbach, 2014). Kalbach urges us to consider UX debt “as a way to reflect the accumulation of learnings about improvements to the design of a product or service that go unaddressed over time,” writing, “UX debt is the difference between the desired user experience and the delivered product or service,” and cautioning that “left unchecked, a backlog of UX debt can lead to a downward spiral of negative experiences.” UX debt begins accruing immediately, and therefore is quickly “baked-in” (Melbourne) to the final product. The solution, Kalbach explains, is ongoing optimization. Perpetual, live iteration. Live iteration requires continuous input and testing to make work, to identify and quantify issues like UX debt. The list of tests able to quantify and reveal debt for UX design include, according to Kalbach, usability tests, heuristic evaluations, satisfaction surveys, and other forms of feedback. But, as he warns, these tests are “heavy” and time consuming. With the growth of data aggregation methods and statistical analytical tools, Big Data has been heralded as a possible solution to the issue of time consuming data gathering, with the editor-in-chief of Wired claiming that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves” (qtd. in Boyd and Crawford, 666). This is a tenuous proposition. Boyd and Crawford (2012) define Big Data as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon resting at the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology (663). They see it as “less about data that is big than it is about a capacity to search, aggregate, and cross-reference large data sets” (663), meaning the myth of Big Data promises that with proper algorithms, user-data can automatically be recorded and then cross-referenced and analyzed to “solve” user issues. Boyd and Crawford critique the myth and promise of Big Data. Their critique focuses on the myth that sufficient data makes facts self-evident, that large data sets offer higher forms of intelligence. They see these sentiments as arrogant, noting that data is never self-explanatory, claiming that “too often, Big Data enables the practice of apophenia: seeing patterns where none actually exist, simply because enormous quantities of data can offer connections that radiate in all directions” (668). Part of the allure of Big Data is finding patterns amidst the noise, thereby improving the signalto-noise ratio and increasing the amount of useful information with which to improve decision-making. Why bother with time consuming usability tests and satisfaction surveys when we can just gather sufficient data about user behavior to tell us everything we need to know? We need to bother with

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them—or things like them—because, as Boyd and Crawford remind us, “bigger data are not always better data” (668). We need to be aware of “the complex methodological processes that underlie the analysis of that data” (668) and not see it as a silver bullet for time management with iteration, UX and technical debt, or anything else. Further, as software is more frequently being created with data-gathering practices in mind, and more companies hire analysts to make more sense of the piled-high data, data more easily begins to lose its ties to the people who left it. So many digital footprints in the wet sand of aggregation result in a churned-up beach with no clear tracks. For data analysts, then, it’s imperative to maintain the humanity in the data, to temper Big Data with the complex methodological processes Boyd and Crawford recommend because “taken out of context, Big Data loses its meaning” (670). A mixed method approach, quantitative and qualitative, is necessary, combining data from the users and dialogue with the users. Game developers combine data and dialogue to inform their iterations better than the majority of other software companies. They are able to do this not simply because their users are more interested or invested, but because the companies have recognized the value of co-constructing user experiences and enabled users to do so. Riot Games in particular excels at co-constructing League of Legends with its players. Their excellence stems largely from their transparency. Whereas players from many other games (and we can just as easily refer to them as users, or more accurately in Riot’s case, participants) must data-mine to gain insight into the game’s data, Riot provides typically proprietary gameplay data to players through a free API. They have even held contests for who could best make use of the API. This openness in providing players access to data transforms players’ roles, allowing them to spend their time theorycrafting and driving iteration, rather than battling the black box of code to get a glimpse of what lays within. The term theorycraft has existed in the gaming argot for over a decade, but recently scholars have begun to address its import for play, rhetoric, and design (Nardi, 2010; Paul, 2011; Haynes, forthcoming). Definitions vary, but in essence, theorycrafting is an empirical undertaking by gamers to outline a particular approach to play. Some scholars gravitate more towards the quantitative definitions, but broadly, theorycrafting is all about “solving” the game: finding the most efficient, best, and cleanest way to play. It’s about minimizing risk while maximizing rewards. The way players do this is by studying the game to find what works and what doesn’t. The results are thus useful indicators of user experience and can aid iteration. What’s significant about theorycrafting for XA and rhetoric is the practice’s impact on design and player agency. If theorycrafting is one piston of the

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engine which drives iteration, game data is the fuel that helps it fire. Giving players fuel allows them to make the engine go faster. In turn, they generate more data through their play, forming a feedback loop. Figure 1 presents Riot’s design process and its dependency on the feedback loop between play, theorycrafting, and data. Moreover, the process emphasizes the dialogue that enables co-construction between player-participants and developers. Each component in the process enables rapid, live iteration. Players play the game; the game records data about their play; that data is released to the players; players theorycraft about what that data means for optimal play; that theorycraft informs further play, which is recorded and fed back. Players talk to the developers about theorycraft, play, data, and their experience. Developers talk to the players, analyze the data themselves, and iterate the game based on the sum of their dialogue, analysis, and experience.

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Figure 1. Riot’s design process for League of Legends The design process also includes a test realm, called the Player Beta Environment (PBE), which operates similarly to the live game, but at a much more accelerated pace. Where live patches typically release one to two months apart (or quicker, depending on the size of the patch), the PBE ex-

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ists for developers to tune and adjust numbers and coefficients related to the game even faster. Players may theorycraft based on test realm patch notes, despite PBE data not being released, but it is significantly less common or impactful, given the speed with which the PBE changes. Additionally, the video game streaming industry has largely been bolstered by the popularity of League, with Riot’s title perpetually ranking first or second in real-time viewership. A small portion of players broadcast their play. Often they will narrate their in-game choices or interact with viewers, who occupy a chat channel associated with the broadcast. The most popular streams are informative, entertaining, or both, and can generate considerable profit for the streamer through ad revenue, subscriptions, and donations. Streams are frequently recorded and saved in archives for videos-on-demand (VODs). Streamers can have enormous influence over how players play. Many of the most popular are professional players or players at the top of the competitive ladder. Their skill and rationale are thus highly valued. Viewers gain new appreciation for play by watching such “experts,” new ideas to test through theorycrafting, and novel approaches to play in-game. Each component in figure 1 informs and accelerates iteration. Rapid iteration is core to Riot’s business model: League is a free-to-play game with non-essential microtransactions, meaning that players can experience the entire game without paying anything, but if they want to reduce the time it takes to unlock certain features or gain access to purely cosmetic features, they can pay a little money. To maintain profits, Riot must release new content to keep their player base invested (figuratively and literally). These content cycles necessitate audience-sensitive approaches to design and development lest they accrue too much UX debt. Riot constantly adjusts user experience to stay profitable, which is partially why the first sentence of their mission statement claims: “We aspire to be the most player-focused game company in the world.” And it’s working. Last year, they made just under one billion dollars from micro-transactions (Chalk, 2014). Riot’s success depends largely on maintaining and satisfying user experience as they increasingly develop new features. The only way that they can pay down UX debt and keep users happy as they add new content is to build into each iteration not just more content, but tweaks and adjustments for existing content. The majority of each patch is actually devoted to paying down the debt, and targeting the appropriate debt demands data and dialogue. Riot’s efforts in this area have helped demonstrate how patch notes are becoming spaces for rhetorical framing and persuasion (Sherlock, 2014). They say, “Here’s what users said was important; here’s what we felt was important; here’s how we addressed that; here’s what we changed.” The

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rationale, justification, and design philosophy extends beyond patch notes: Riot employees frequent community forums to engage the player-base. The case study in the next section shows these co-constructive efforts at work.

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This section presents the case of Lucian, specifically focusing on how the changes he underwent were representative of dialogue between players and developers, data recorded from play, and ongoing attention to user experience. It opens with a brief note on method, then moves into a list of stakeholders in League’s design process before supplying a narrative of Lucian’s changes, including some illustrative data and analysis. Data gathered about Lucian spanned patches 4.10 through 4.13 (June 2014 through August 2014). What is presented in this chapter is part of a larger case study, and while the examples used are illustrative, they are isolated and lack the texture of the larger dataset. Nevertheless, they are still productive in understanding Riot’s dialogic, data-driven design process. The data are comprised of official patch notes released by Riot, discussion posts to community forums, and graphs from sites implementing Riot’s free API. Selection of data was based on pertinence (those patches, posts, and graphs concerning Lucian), popularity (sites chosen based on Alexa rankings, individual posts chosen based on internal voting schemas), and parity (how well they corresponded to the design process model in figure 1). The data reveals several types of stakeholders engaged with the game and design process. Here they are presented in three interrelated groups: Industry, Professional, and Community. These groups overlap and intermix, but the categories elucidate what types of roles they play in the design of League. Not every stakeholder in the design process is represented in the data (e.g., the industry artists did not appear except collaterally), so note that the list is not meant to be comprehensive, let alone exhaustive. The Industry category comprises Riot employees, a diverse group invested in making and improving the game and ensuring its usability/enjoyability for the players. One particularly industrious player has tracked all of the Riot employees who use Twitter. @RiotEmployees categorizes Rioters into the following groups: leadership, community, people (HR), art, animation, UX, QA, support, Web, production, design, social systems/player behavior, network operations, engineering, creative, audio, IT, tools, marketing, e-sports, ops, network engineering, wrenchmen, emissary, huntsman, and the council. The player who generated the list links from the @ RiotEmployees Twitter account to the official League forums, where the list resides. The list itself received praise from Riot and is an ongoing project

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with regular updates. It highlights the complexity of the game studio and the breadth of their social media use. The professional category comprises players who earn money playing League competitively. Riot has worked to improve the profile of e-sports (electronic sports, for which League is a competitive platform) in the US, including successfully lobbying the US government to allow professional video game players an athletic visa. And while e-sports, much like video game streaming, deserves its own treatment in another work (see the scholarship of T.L. Taylor), it’s worth pausing to detail some of its significance for the League design process. Riot implemented the League Championship Series (LCS), which salaries professional teams to compete against each other in two splits (fall and spring), with the bottom teams sent to relegation against teams from the top of the ranked ladder. The LCS determines who is sent to the world championships from North America and Europe, and thus, top players in the series have tremendous influence on the state of the game. Their in-game choices, behaviors, and patterns are reflected and mimicked by those who seek to replicate pro player success. Top players often supplement their income by streaming or writing strategy guides and other content. This visibility provides players direct access to some of the best players in the world, the equivalent of watching Peyton Manning describe his thought process on various NFL defensive and offensive formations during practice while being able to ask him questions about those thoughts directly. The Community category is large and diverse. Riot has dedicated servers for multiple countries/regions; it has several data centers; and its fans land on various spots on a continuum of engagement, ranging from those who never go beyond the game-proper to players who devote significant time to making content outside of the game (such as the player tracking Riot Employees on Twitter). It’s important to note that even players who visit forums and never engage in the discourse there, and even players who never visit forums at all, are all stakeholders in the design process. The contributions of players who only ever play (and do nothing else involved with the game) are the data they leave in the wake of their play. That data, in aggregate, supports discussions about theorycrafting, balance, user experience, and game design. Players point to that data to help make their case, to lobby the developers for change (or to urge patience before changes are implemented).

Data Narrative We see each stakeholder category represented in the data about the changes made to Lucian from June through August 2014. Since his release in August 2013, Lucian has been a contested “marksman” champion in both

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casual and competitive play. His toolkit allows him to mete out tons of damage while remaining mobile, a combination which positioned Lucian as a top pick amidst the hundred plus playable champions, dozens of which are other marksman-type options. The role of marksmen in League is colloquially referred to as a “carry,” so-called because with sufficient skill and time they can figuratively put their entire team on their backs and carry them to victory, without the rest of the team needing to do much or any work. They attack from range but are vulnerable when attacked. As such, they rely on exquisite maneuvering to stay within range to attack while out of range of being attacked. It’s a careful dance, one often aided by champions’ innate abilities. Lucian’s Relentless Pursuit ability provides him a significant amount of mobility (in the form of a dash and slow removal) and has been the target of much discussion and several changes. While the rest of his kit has also been changed through successive patches, none of the changes has had such a dramatic impact as those made to Relentless Pursuit. Nine months and four new champions after Lucian’s release, the Purifier’s dominance was unquestionable. Competitive players felt that Lucian was a must-pick or must-ban option: if somebody on their team didn’t get to select him for the match, nobody on the other team could. The general sentiment was that whichever team had Lucian was conferred a considerable edge. Although several other marksmen had similar mobility, few of them could also match his damage output. Riot stepped in and on June 20, 2014, with patch 4.10, tweaked the damage scaling on one of Lucian’s abilities. At the time, they also acknowledged their plans for further tuning. The change did little to Lucian’s popularity or success. Patch 4.11 came less than a month later (July 3) and ushered no new changes to Lucian. In spite of this, Riot developers felt obligated to address player concerns by recognizing the state of his dominance, reminding players that he was slated for changes and noting the delay was because of diligence and not apathy. Subsequently and throughout various forums, players speculated on what might be changed and lobbied to have certain changes made, and developers responded, articulating their goals and the design philosophy. The website cloth5.com is a League-related content and theorycrafting website. Their well-respected competitive-tier list placed Lucian as a top choice for the role of marksman for patch 4.11. Part of their mission also entails acting as a watchdog for changes made to the Player Beta Environment (PBE), where Riot pilots changes with a small player-base before they are implemented on the “live” servers. On July 14, the site released their “PBE Roundup” for patch 4.12. The tentative changes to Lucian were a laundry list of tweaks and “nerfs” (i.e., changes which lower efficacy). Two changes in particular garnered significant discussion: one, the

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range from which he could attack was reduced by about 9% from 550 units to 500 units, putting him in a category with some of the lowest marksman attack ranges; and two, the Relentless Pursuit mechanic was changed to have increased uptime. Instead of resetting his dash only when he managed to kill something with his ultimate ability, its cooldown was lowered everytime he fired a basic shot after using an ability. The week between cloth5’s report and patch 4.12 going live was filled with speculation, theorycrafting, analysis, discussion, and the woes of lamentation. A vocal portion of players suggested that the nerf to Lucian’s attack range would cripple him, and that the changes to his mobility were insufficient to keep him as a viable competitive pick. Others argued that the “nerf” was not dire, but rather the opposite: Lucian was now too mobile. Videos recorded on the PBE appeared that showcased just how powerful Lucian’s altered kit was. Discussion, speculation, and testing ensued. The professional players began playtesting, too. Not long after various watchdog fan-sites reported the 4.12 PBE update, the forums buzzed with talk of pro player reactions. Fans watched pros stream Lucian games; they tracked the pros’ game history; they read their strategy guides. Several pros experimented with bringing Lucian from his traditional marksman position to others. Renowned season three world champion player Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok was among them. Posts to League-related forums began reporting that Faker was “spamming” games with Lucian in a new position. The posts speculated whether or not the move would usher in a “new meta[game].” Players reported other pros bringing Lucian to new positions and pored over the minutia of customization that accompanies playing a champion. On July 21, patch 4.12 went live. The changes to Lucian were the same as those reported by cloth5 a week prior. Speculation continued as players feverishly tried builds tested on the PBE. Shortly after the patch, data indicated that Lucian’s win rate had spiked from 49% to 54%. His increased mobility more than compensated for his reduced attack range. In fact, it was so dramatic a change that player’s skill in positioning, in dancing the fine line between being able to attack and being vulnerable to attacks, became largely unnecessary. If a player was caught out of position, Lucian’s dash mechanic let them escape unpunished again and again. A YouTube video entitled “Lucian Bolt,” a reference to Olympic gold medalist sprinter Usain Bolt, began circulating broadly (with nearly 800,000 views as of January 2015). The video, produced on the PBE and released four days prior to 4.12 going live, depicts Lucian in team fights and small-scale skirmishes flitting around the battlefield, weaving in attacks and dashing just out

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of reach of foes. As he racks up the score, viewers were left wondering why there was so much fuss about his attack range. As Lucian’s pick rate, ban rate, and win rate all climbed, players reversed their previous judgments. He wasn’t “trash tier” (i.e., unplayably bad). He was now “OP” (i.e., overpowered: too strong). Riot quickly disabled Lucian for the League Championship Series, the professional League circuit, and then with 4.13 on August 4th they tuned Relentless Pursuit. They increased its cooldown, effectively lowering its up-time; they also eliminated its slow removal. He could now be caught and punished for poor positioning. Player skill came back into the equation. The changes brought Lucian back in line with other marksmen: he was no longer the superior choice from patch 4.11, nor the mandatory choice from patch 4.12. He was simply a viable option. Balance—and user experience—was restored.

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Here are four artifacts from the larger case study that help illustrate what I’ve been calling the dialogic, data-driven design of League of Legends. Each artifact is accompanied by some context and an explanation of its relevance. Note that because the data is part of a larger case study, the artifacts supplied are not a comprehensive view of the co-construction between Riot and League player-participants.

Artifact 1 “Twitch/Lucian are in a good spot” by Climaxsu, reply from DanielZKlein Released May, 2014 Retrieved January 27, 2015 from reddit.com

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Note: DanielZKlein is a game developer at Riot, responsible for the initial design of Lucian and involved in the ongoing efforts to balance him. Prior to Patch 4.10, many players argued that Lucian (and the other top competitive marksmen pick, Twitch) needed nerfs, that is, they needed their power curtailed. Artifact 1, “Twitch/Lucian are in a good spot,” is a Reddit thread making the argument that these two champions don’t need nerfs, but instead exemplify where the marksman role needs to be. Instead of nerfing them, the poster argues, Riot should buff (i.e., improve) the other marksmen. The post is significant because DanielZKlein responds. Klein is the original developer of Lucian who was brought in by the live balance team to help tweak the champion. His comments regarding professional players provide insight into player involvement with the design process. He writes, “Pros are a GREAT source for identifying problems, and nearly useless for suggesting solutions. This is said with all due respect to our wonderful pros. It’s just not what they’re good at.” He clarifies further down the thread, writing: Thinking through all the implications of a balance change in a super complex system like league is a hard problem that you want trained specialists for. Pros are optimized for solving problems in a given problem space (the current state of the game). Being able to anticipate a new problem space (what the game would look like after a balance change) is not a skill that being a pro selects for, so we wouldn’t expect our pros to be good at it—and mostly they aren’t. There are exceptions, and we tend to hire them. Klein’s assertion that pros are “optimized” for “solving” what I would call the metagame (what Klein calls the current state of the game), is revealing. Pro players’ skill set makes them valuable as heuristics for what needs attention. They game the system, ferreting out its flaws and taking advantage of them. Thus, their choices lead developers to the UX issues, despite not always being helpful in fixing that issue. The additional note that Riot hires those exceptional few who can solve the meta and anticipate new problem spaces speaks to Riot’s valuing of the community.

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Artifact 2 “Patch 4.11 notes—Lucian excerpt” by Pwyff Released July 3, 2014 Retrieved July 3, 2014 from leagueoflegends.com

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Artifact 2 is an excerpt from the official patch notes for version 4.11. While the beginning of the document (not included) establishes the design goals for the patch, the Lucian excerpt explicitly addresses player concerns about the champion’s power level. Riot employee Pwyff writes: We have no change for Lucian this patch but wanted to highlight that he’s currently high on our list. Specifically in competitive play, Lucian is crowding out almost all other marksman choices (aside from maybe Kog’Maw) due to his high general strengths and lack of meaningful weaknesses (does this sound familiar?). We’re currently very aware of Lucian’s dominating performance but want to make sure we get the right changes in to give him said weaknesses! The artifact echoes the patch’s design goals of establishing meaningful strengths and weaknesses for champions, but more importantly functions rhetorically to explain the delay in making adjustments to Lucian. Riot recognizes players’ perturbations and hedges against that frustration through transparency. Without any changes made to Lucian in the patch, he wouldn’t ordinarily be included in the patch notes. All the notes say about his changes is that he was very strong and, yes, he still is. That he is included in the official notes is a savvy rhetorical move to extend the dialogue about what meaningful strengths and weaknesses might look like.

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Artifact 3.1 “The one and only suggestion to Lucian” by Gibly Released July 3, 2014 Retrieved January 27, 2015 from reddit.com 253

Artifact 3.2 “The one and only suggestion to Lucian” by Gibly, reply by DanielZKlein Released July 3, 2014 Retrieved January 27, 2015 from reddit.com In Artifacts 3.1 and 3.2, “The one and only suggestion to Lucian, from a Lucian main,” we see more discussion on the League subreddit forum. A player who self-identifies as a “Lucian main”—one who predominantly plays Lucian—writes an open letter, presumably to Riot, with his or her sugges-

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tion on design. The post opens in 3.1 with the forum-poster bolstering his or her ethos by claiming a high win-rate with Lucian, relying on that as a basis for expertise from which to forward recommendations. In 3.2 we see Klein respond, acknowledging that the player’s prime suggestion has “been suggested around the office a bit” before being rejected for several reasons, which he goes on to list. Klein goes on, noting that he agrees with the poster’s initial analysis and posing questions to spur continued discussion. This back and forth is important for two reasons. One, it demonstrates that Riot employees don’t only engage with players to tow the party line. Instead, they address questions, concerns, and topics where and as they see fit. Two, it positions player analysis close to Riot’s own; Klein agrees with the poster’s assessment, and we learn that Riot even considered a similar course of action. The proximity indicates that Riot listens and attends to player suggestions, even if they ultimately choose a different course. Leagueofgraphs is one of several websites employing Riot’s free API to gather gameplay data. Artifact 4 showcases sets of data associated with Lucian. It features three metrics, spanning from April to November 2014: the champion’s popularity, win-rate, and ban-rate. These graphs depict the peaks and valleys of all Lucian play on the live servers. From mid-July through early-August, we see Lucian’s popularity, win-rate, and ban-rate all rise dramatically. The ban-rate, and one of each plot-lines in the popularity and win-rate graph represent what, for simplicity’s sake, I will call “expert” (gold+) players. These graphs are fascinating, as rhetoricians and tech-comm scholars seldom have such ready-made datasets of what may be called “expert” and “non-expert” use of a system over time. More pertinent for the case study, however, are the posts to official and unofficial forums (not included) which point to these data as proof of Lucian’s rising power, despite patch 4.12’s attempted tuning and the concurrent player skepticism about that patch’s efficacy. Data such as these inform the dialogue between player-participants and designers, enabling successive changes to improve user experience and balance the game.

Conclusion Video games are at the bleeding edge of design practices, and League is one of the most popular, rapidly iterated video games in the world. By fostering open dialogue with players, recording data about the player-use of their game system, and providing that data to those players, Riot Games is able to constantly tune and balance, paying down UX debt (both interest and principal), at the same time as they add new content to sustain their business model. Players’ willingness to provide free labor (conversing, theorycrafting, recording, creating, etc.) to aid Riot’s iteration work is not solely

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Artifact 4 “Lucian Pick, Win, and Ban Rates” by leagueofgraphs Released perpetually Retrieved Nov 5, 2014 from leagueofgraphs.com

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owed to their passion for the game, but must also be attributed to Riot’s receptive and collaboratory efforts. Players see that their work is read, heard, responded to; that it informs future iterations and efforts at balancing the game; and that it improves user experience. The infrastructure is as important as the willingness to listen and act. Without the means to record and release the data, engage in dialogue, or synthesize what each has to offer the next version of their software, Riot Games would not be at the top of the online gaming world. What we learn from Riot, how we translate their practices to other areas, depends largely on the context of transfer and the infrastructure available. The key ideas behind Riot’s success, and the ideas necessary for ongoing development and the paying down of UX debt, however, are transparency, ethical engagement, and a willingness to co-construct a product with its users.

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Boyd, D. & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), pp. 662–79. Taylor & Francis. Chalk, A. (2014). League of Legends has made almost $1 billion in microtransactions. PC Gamer. Retrieved from www.pcgamer.com Fowler, M. (2003). Technical debt. Retrieved from http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html Haynes, C. End game rhetoric. Forthcoming in PRE/TEXT. Kalbach, J. (2014). UX debt: Borrowing from your users. Retrieved from https://experiencinginformation.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/ ux-debt-borrowing-from-your-users/ Lipka, G. (2011). The UX of technical debt. Retrieved from http://commadot.com/the-ux-of-technical-debt/ Melbourne, B. (2011). UX design debt. Retrieved from http://asinthecity. com/2011/05/23/ux-design-debt/ Nardi, B. (2010). My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Paul, C. A. (2011). Optimizing play: How theorycrafting changes gameplay & design. Game Studies, 11(2). Retrieved from http://gamestudies. org/1102/articles/paul Riot Games. (2009). League of Legends. Sherlock, L. (2014). Patching as Design Rhetoric: Tracing the Framing and Delivery of Iterative Content Documentation in Online Games. Computer Games and Technical Communication. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing.

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Taylor, T. L. (2015). Raising the stakes: E-Sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wright, A. (2013). User experience debt. Retrieved from http://nform. com/blog/2013/05/user-experience-debt/

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15 Making as Learning: Mozilla and Curriculum Design Rudy McDaniel and Cassie McDaniel

The Importance of Experience in Education

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hen we consider how best to teach experience architecture (XA), there is likely no better place to start than in the writings of philosopher John Dewey, arguably the most influential educational theorist and reformer of the twentieth century. Although Dewey’s ideas about teaching and education originated long before the hypertext revolution, his arguments about educational outreach, service learning, and the importance of experience in learning are still relevant to modern teaching and training, even in cutting-edge, emerging fields. Dewey was a firm believer of unifying theory and practice long before such a strategy became a core philosophy for user experience (UX) education (Getto et al., 2013). One integral idea expressed by Dewey in Experience and Education (1938/2007) is the connection between personal experience and education. He argues that in order for a student to sufficiently learn something, that student must have a means of relating new content to her own personal experiences. To learn how to create compelling new experiences, then, a student must first understand how to apply her own experience to what she is learning. Further, acknowledging continuous learner experience as an essential component of the learning process calls into question traditional compartmentalized learning practices that have long been the hallmark of formal education from grade school through university. Such structures often leave little room for the idiosyncratic variations in individual learner experiences. If experience is important for learning at large, then it makes sense that experience would be even more important for learning about how to create meaningful experiences for others, as experience architects must do. In his work, though, Dewey noted that simply any experience was not sufficient for productive learning to occur; indeed, he maintained that it is possible for the wrong experiences to distort or suppress desired learning outcomes. For this reason, he called for the articulation of a theory of experience that would specify parameters for those experiences most conducive to positive learning gains. Extending Dewey’s ideas to our contemporary challenge of educating experience architects requires us to ask what a theory of experience for teaching XA should look like. What experiences are most critical for train258

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ing effective, well-rounded, and successful experience architects? For example, one basic method for encouraging learners to experience empathy, a key skill for user-centered design (Kouprie & Visser, 2009), would be something as simple as allowing opportunities for learners to “put themselves in others’ shoes,” a natural companion to the central technical communication mantra “know thy audience.” However, other aspects of collecting, framing, and communicating appropriate experiences for the purposes of effective training are not so straightforward and require additional thought and study. A developed theory of experience must take into account more complicated factors, such as learner background and technological context. We argue in this chapter for examining existing cases in order to better understand the factors involved with such a theory. To further explore this idea of what such a theory might entail, we consider one experiential approach to teaching XA and describe how this model creates different types of experiences for learners. Specifically, we present a case study of how Mozilla Webmaker teaches web-literacy skills using an experiential approach. This chapter explores the strategies used by Mozilla to deliver digital training and design skills to the general public. Learners use their prior experiences as motivation to catalyze projects that require certain web-literacy skills to complete. Examining this case and some specific use cases taken from real participants allows us to assess the values of Mozilla and consider how this approach to teaching and learning suggests new ideas for educating future experience architects. Before considering this case, however, we will first describe some of the complexities involved with learning XA and then outline our approach to considering one method of teaching it using experiential tools.

Teaching Experience Architecture Experience architecture, like information architecture before it, is complicated because it blends many disciplinary practices. Unger and Chandler (2012) suggest that user experience designers on a given project play any number of roles, ranging from information architects and interaction designers to user researchers, brand strategists, copywriters, visual designers, and front-end developers. Similarly, Potts (2014) notes the complexity of a field of study that takes into account architectures “both above and below the surface” (p. 3) of designed products. While there is overlap to be found in such interdisciplinary work practices, there are also distinct skills that must be learned and training unique to those jobs that must be undertaken. Morville and Rosenfeld (2006) note that early information architects got their start in the industry by taking on jobs no one else wanted to do, working as “gap fillers” and “trench warriors” performing tasks such as

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structuring information, indexing it, and making it findable (p. 22). These individuals became indispensable because they possessed hybrid skills in both technology and information management that few others possessed. Corporations saw the value of such skill sets and began searching for new employees to fill new positions that had not previously existed. We are now at a similar point in the evolution of XA. In addition to the skills needed by early information architects, experience architects must also understand how to conceptualize the nature of experience itself as well as knowing how to structure and organize information in online systems. This poses a challenge for educators hoping to teach experience architects to effectively operate in increasingly complex, technical, and distributed professional environments. Understanding experiential models for educating designers and developers is useful for articulating some of the key questions we must consider when attempting such teaching methods. To describe this complex space and consider some of the elements of a model for educating experience designers, we organize our case study around five focal points: access, audience, content, sustainability, and validation. Each of these themes is critical to an effective model for an experiential education. First, it is important for participants to have access to the tools and content that enable learning to occur. Similarly, access to relevant experiences must be provided in order, as Dewey noted, for those experiences to be meaningful in the context of learning. While well-funded school districts in the suburbs might take field trips for granted, for instance, the very concept of a field trip might be foreign to impoverished public schools in less wealthy districts. When planning relevant and appropriate experiences, then, the question of access to both technology and experience is something that needs considering. Along these lines, tools and content should be designed with an audience in mind to allow for the proper shaping and delivery of appropriate content. For example, it would not make sense to present advanced web developers with content and tools for learning beginning HTML and CSS markup, nor would it be logical to teach beginning game designers without programming experience advanced algorithms for artificial intelligence. Similarly, an educator might consider using spatial metaphors of walking through forests to explain typical pedestrian walking patterns while training new experience architects working on interactive virtual reality walkthroughs. In order for such metaphors to be effective, it is important for those learners to be familiar with trees, paths, nature, and so forth; in other words, metaphors function by connecting the dissimilar to the similar. If the similar is not actually similar to learners, then the content is not appropriate and the cognitive association between the two concepts will not be

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made. Stated more simply, the content and tools being used need to properly take audience into account. An experiential approach must also consider the sustainability of content and tools; given the rapid evolution of Internet and digital media technologies and the changing usage patterns that incorporate them, it is important to plan for ongoing and continuous maintenance of assets so that these learning materials are not immediately outdated upon release. Sustainability can also be considered through the perspectives of currency and relevancy. Sustainable content should also be current and relevant. For instance, does the experience of turning a rotary phone or configuring a dial-up modem still maintain relevance to modern digital contexts? Similarly, outside of technology, what experiences will maintain lasting appeal and relevancy over time so that educators can continue to capitalize on these scenarios when teaching new learners? Lastly, validation is important to assess whether or not the system was effective in teaching the material. If the experiential approach to teaching XA is effective, the experiences must lead to learning gains. One can approach assessment as a short term process, such as by evaluating whether learners can remember declarative knowledge on an assessment instrument after a given number of weeks, or longitudinally, such as by tracking learners’ ongoing project contributions or career milestones. While learning outcomes are ideally explicitly linked to learning goals devised by educators, they are also implicitly shaped by the values of an institution and the culture in which the training was created. Some of these embedded values can be observed by rhetorically evaluating an institution’s approach to design. Because culture and experience are so naturally intertwined with one another, we will briefly explore the relationship between culture and design in this next section. While a full treatment of this topic is outside the scope of this chapter, it is worth mentioning that experience and culture are naturally connected and proper designs for training experience architects should take cultural factors into account.

Exploring Embedded Cultural Values in Design One way of evaluating culture’s influence on design is by considering how design is leveraged to solve problems within an organization. What exigencies drive design, and how are those problems handled by the organization? In Frame Innovation, Dorst (2015) suggests a design model useful for addressing complex problems in “open, complex, and dynamic environments” (p. 73). His model uses the metaphor of framing, or considering new perspectives through which to approach and consider problems, as a way of understanding how design experts do their work. Critical to Dorst’s design

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process is oscillation, which occurs in creative movements between analysis and creation. Oscillation considers the problem at hand in general terms and the specific details critical to the central problem being addressed. When considering the design of a learning system, then, one might vacillate between general ideas about higher order skills that need to be present in experience architects as well as the specific types of tool competencies and rhetorical tactics that well-rounded experience architects should possess. Similarly, an educator might frame those general and specific learning outcomes within the domains of particular types of problems present within an institutional culture, such as a creative agency. This agency might deal with ongoing problems such as converting web impressions to sustained sessions, keeping participants engaged during interactive animations, or minimizing frustrating distractions in web applications. The types of experiences necessary to solve each of these problems might span a number of traditional academic disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, architecture, and technical communication. However, the experiences of building specific interventions to address these types of problems require learners to integrate these various approaches in order to produce project deliverables. A problem-solving perspective can also be used to consider the cultural context and embedded values learning-oriented initiatives hold for those outside the organization (e.g., non-employees). This type of outreach might be done for a number of reasons, such as raising public awareness or contributing to the greater good of society. For example, one problem noted by Mozilla is the lack of web-literacy skills across a broad spectrum of Internet users. Some of the Mozilla organization’s core values, such as the desire for a democratization of Web content and a demystification of digital media technology, drive their approach toward both tool design and teaching. These core values act as additional forces that drive the design process in particular directions. Thus, even if a teaching instrument were shown to be effective at training individual learners, it might still fail. For instance, if the instrument violated internal cultural ideals (perhaps by obfuscating technological details or closing connections to the community) then this tool would not have the ongoing sustainability and validation needed to succeed. When we consider Mozilla’s values from the perspective of solving problems, then, it is clear that there are more than just gaps in learner skills that are influencing the design of the curriculum. Several of these factors, such as community feedback and institutional culture, can drive policy decisions that can create both challenges and opportunities for the students immersed within the coursework. Fundamental to this philosophy, too, is an

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idea that learning is the objective of the curriculum, and that the artifacts and creations developed by participants using the tools are merely byproducts of that learning process.

Case Study: Mozilla Webmaker Although specific academic programs to train UX designers are “nearly non-existent” (Getto et al., 2013), we can study learning systems that have similar goals for learners, such as web design and development, to learn more about how UX and XA skills are taught in experiential settings. These types of environments allow participants to learn while experiencing what it is like to move a project from inception to completion. Often, these formats also require students to consider what it will be like for audiences to experience what they build. For instance, when students learn to design and develop web sites, they are thinking not only about how to effectively shape and display information online, but also how to provide satisfying experiences to audiences who interact with that content. Since the nature of hypertext demands immediate and ongoing participation from its readers, effective UX and XA design skills are critical for students. When learning online content creation, students must experience content creation on their own as designers and developers while also envisioning the experiences of their hypothetical audiences in order to learn. This concept of making in order to learn, or making as learning, is a theory embraced by Mozilla, the open source technology company responsible for creating the popular Firefox browser. As a non-profit, Mozilla aspires to its Manifesto that declares, “The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.” Through its products and programs, it aims to improve access to, understanding of, and protection of this universal resource. One complicating factor for considering the relationship between experiential learning and a large-scale industry nonprofit is the immediate need to consider global audiences in addition to local ones. This has major implications for how one approaches the task of defining and categorizing experience, even from a basic understanding of what terminology is used to describe certain experiences. For instance, Mozilla has noted through field research in Kenya, Bangladesh, and India that many people around the world cannot identify when they are using the Internet (de Reynal, 2015). When asked if they “use the Internet,” they answer “no,” but are quick to describe how they employ Facebook in their work and social lives. It is possible that these users equate Facebook with the vastly more diverse concept of the Internet because their experience of the Internet is limited to use of a single social network designed for keeping users within its walls.

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Mozilla’s concern is that because of this perceived sameness, “the next billion,” or emerging Internet users coming online for the first time in developing markets, have a limited way to perceive and participate on the Web. In turn, this hinders creative, social, and economic possibilities. Mozilla hopes to address this problem by encouraging web-making skills within a framework of digital literacy. One method of ensuring universal access to digital literacy has been the creation of Mozilla’s mass-market app called Webmaker. Webmaker facilitates making on the web with a free online tool with which users create projects (essentially websites) using a “tile map” paradigm (Figure 1), a visual way of creating relationships between pages. Content can be placed on individual tiles and linked to other content, a structure intended to encourage an awareness of both macro and micro interactions: how does the experience work and feel in this one small context, and how do all of these pieces come together to create a holistic experience? Learners are invited to think about these questions without any explicit instruction, but as a necessary step in their making process. The experience of making, then, becomes at once familiar. Many of our very first experiences with design were based on the simple interactions of touch—moving and rearranging construction paper, gluing materials together, pinching and bending pipe cleaners, and so forth. The tile map paradigm therefore seeks to remediate the familiarity of touch as an accessible method for beginning to understand design for the Web. At the other end of the project life cycle, final Webmaker projects can be simple or quite complex. They might end up as a choose-your-ownadventure game structure, a narrative exposition, or a series of steps in a recipe. The making process is intentionally prescriptive (dictating that participants must build within tiles) as well as open-ended (how each participant links content is up to each individual person). This ensures both a low barrier to entry for beginners and a high ceiling of creativity for more advanced users. This is another important experiential aspect of the tool; it starts out using the familiar mechanic of touch, but it scales in complexity as the participant becomes more familiar with the toolset and its capabilities. The Webmaker product focuses on a non-linear learning path, providing access points to improve digital literacy skills no matter where a person begins. In Mozilla’s user-experience architecture, the ability to start making things immediately (without conceptual prerequisites) is paramount. Even if learners know little about building a website, they can still participate through the user interface, which offers a gentle onboarding experience. A visitor can also be an expert developer and still use Webmaker’s tiles to bring her creative vision to life. The focus is on the end product, not on the skills needed to make something.

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Figure 1: Webmaker’s tile paradigm for learning-as-making. Attention to different types of learners and skill levels, or a diverse audience, is deliberately addressed by designing for both gradual exposure to and quick access to complex web-building skills. For example, in choosing colors for a page background, participants can initially make a selection from a set of pre-selected options, as an artist might choose paint from her palette. With another click or tap, learners can open a color picker, allowing a bit more fidelity in selecting just the right hue or tone. Finally, by clicking or tapping a lightning bolt icon, participants can enter into what Mozilla’s designers and engineers refer to as “Tinker Mode” (Figure 2). This enables the entry of a hexidecimal (hex) code for an exact color or visual selection of a hue from a slider, which will update the hex value. Alternatively, participants can switch to an rgba mode where they can adjust the amount of red, green, blue or transparency, an act that subtly reinforces the concept of how hex color codes are constructed. While “Tinker Mode” is a phrase exclusively used by the internal team building the app and is not explicit in the interface, it represents a playground for learners who have mastered basic concepts and who want to be able to do more. It serves as a gateway to more advanced web building skills and experiences.

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Figure 2: Webmaker’s Tinker Mode.

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In addition to designing for the distinct goals of audiences with different backgrounds and capabilities, it is worth noting that in contrast to an academic setting in which curriculum is carefully constructed and controlled, a mass-market application like Webmaker must respond quickly to the needs and desires of an increasingly savvy and fast-paced consumer market. The public expectation of the standard to which mass-market applications are designed and built is a further hurdle to building a successful and effective learning program, and it is often the content that suffers in the rush to keep up with a rapidly changing product landscape. An important exigency within Mozilla’s design economy, then, is market forces and community expectations. In terms of content, Mozilla is not alone in its theory of making-as-learning, which began as a trend embraced by other leading software learning initiatives such as Scratch (Resnick et al., 2009) and Codecademy (Wortham, 2011). These initiatives, along with Mozilla, purposefully eschew lecture-style curriculum for more hands-on activities. These organization and programs privilege and reinforce experiences of “doing” rather than “seeing” or “hearing.” However, in addition to this teaching technique that capitalizes on hands-on experience, Mozilla recognizes the influence of traditional education settings and the need to appeal to a segment of traditional educators. Mozilla has worked with this community to develop a framework for learning digital web skills called the Web Literacy Map (Figure 3).

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Figure 3: Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map. The Web Literacy Map outlines web skills as they might be organized in a more formal curriculum, as sets within three overarching themes or columns. While this framework was built with input from formal educators, what is not apparent at first glance is that it embodies an ethos of making-as-learning, shorthand for “reading, writing and participating” on the web. The Web Literacy Map lends an air of authority to the conceptual underpinnings of Mozilla’s programs, but each skill is ultimately designed as a “tag” that allows for linkage and discovery of new skills, and as entry points to making. While there are suggested linkages between skills, there are no formal prerequisites or preparatory work required that prevent participants from jumping directly into learning about any skill of interest. One further point of departure from a traditional academic model is Mozilla’s focus on sustainability. Where the lifespan of a student’s experiences in formal academia is (usually) intentionally short, the career of a designer or developer once they have entered the industry must sustain itself for decades. Assuming those who learn with Mozilla products follow that path, the reward and end-goal for these people is clear: they must obtain and retain the skills necessary for continuous learning over the span of a long career. It is also worth noting that the pervasive notion that online media should be free, as with open source software, has a tremendous impact on the funding model of most consumer-facing organizations (Hippel & Krogh, 2003). As a non-profit, however, Mozilla sidesteps some (not all) of this type of thinking and can focus on the curriculum, the approach, and the sustainability of its programs from the perspective of what is good for learners. Lastly, how does Mozilla measure what is good for learners as they experience these learning tools? In contrast to academic models in which validation is generally done by a single instructor or a small curriculum committee, the validation of Mozilla’s programs is largely assessed by tra-

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ditional consumer mechanisms. How well-received are Mozilla’s applications and programs by the public? How well do these initiatives retain their users? And how enabled are communities to invest in the very systems that brought them these skills by participating in the open web? These questions embody many subtle complexities, and they are investigated by Key Performance Indicators, Google Analytics, and other measures of engagement. However, it is largely a matter of first gauging public interest. If the interest is there, the next step is determining how to apply the learning content to the outside lives of Mozilla’s user base. In this next section, we will look at how this strategic implementation of a Mozilla learning initiative reflects the values of an experiential learning environment.

Discussion: Exploring Experiential Learning through Webmaker

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While Mozilla Webmaker is clearly an interesting system for teaching certain UX and XA skills to learners, what does this tell us about experiential learning? Further, how can we use this knowledge to better understand the opportunities and challenges for such an educational model? As before, we can apply Dorst’s method of framing to oscillate between a high-level, general perspective and lower level details that provide information about our test case. A broad analysis of Mozilla Webmaker suggests that while the range of topics is expansive and covers a number of useful topics for future experience designers, the structure of the pathways between modules and the required prerequisites are potentially complicated and intimidating for new users. This is a challenge of experiential learning technologies; since experience itself is so personal and idiosyncratic, the number of pathways and possibilities within learning material can often be overwhelming, particularly for beginning learners. Also interesting to note in the Webmaker curriculum is a focus on repetition and redundancy. Such a philosophy is in clear opposition to many agile design strategies, such as lean UX (Gothelf & Seiden, 2013), which stresses the elimination of waste. A rhetoric of experiential development, however, suggests that what is considered waste in an industrial production context is often necessary in an industrial learning context. The in-betweens, rough works, duplicate projects, and non-optimal solutions can be conceptualized as evidence of learning, particularly by individuals who do not yet have expertise in that area. Similarly, it is often the case that a student needs to be exposed to tools and ideas multiple times, in multiple different contexts, before fully understanding them. Similarly, it is often more important for beginners to experience repeated failure than it is for them to experience immediate success. By iterating through the failures

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and responding to design challenges in a repeated fashion, they are simulating the experiences they will undertake in the professional world. Another important observation drawn from this case relates to the rhetorical function of credentialing and how experience relates to one’s perceived suitability for a role. In industry, formal education matters little compared to an ability to perform effectively. How one arrives at this level of performance is for the most part irrelevant. Practical skills, along with the potential for growth that includes a conceptual underpinning and general adaptability, are hallmarks of success. To that end a formal education is not necessary to succeed in industry, where it is often regarded that even the best crafted syllabi cannot keep up with the fast pace of changing technology, and that the most effective way to maintain a relevant skill set is to learn on the job and especially to leverage the Internet in doing so. A user case helps to illustrate this point. Take for example, Jane, a rabbit-farmer in Kenya. Jane needed new knowledge to kickstart her business, but she did not need a formal education. Instead she was able to glean skills from a popular Facebook page, Mkulima Young, which supports local young farmers. “She did not know anything about farming, and learned all she could through Facebook. She intends to use Facebook to promote her new business and sell her rabbits” (de Reynal, 2014). Technology, and the Web, was a conduit for Jane’s new skills, but what ultimately mattered for Jane’s livelihood was her ability to raise and sell rabbits. It was critical, then, for Jane’s training to map well to her everyday lived experiences, an appropriate set of content for an appropriate audience, and to her ability to find success in her business.

Figure 4: Mozilla’s field research.

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Lastly, the impact of organizational culture on its framing of experiential learning was significant in this case. The principle of free and open access is a preeminent concern in all Mozilla initiatives, but especially in Mozilla Webmaker and the more recently developed teaching initiatives at teach.mozilla.org. Such a philosophy is important for building awareness and contributorship to Mozilla’s initiatives, but it is especially crucial to Webmaker because of the platform’s design as a social learning and making tool. Experiences are leveraged not just in isolation, but also in relation to one another, through community feedback and moderation. Similarly, these skills are not intended to be developed in isolation, but rather as steps toward a final artifact that can be shared and built upon by other learners. On many levels, it is good that Mozilla is not alone in its desire to democratize online educational resources. Khan Academy, Code.org, and Skillshare are exemplars of a thriving online industry that has become an incredible source of information, and as the spirit of self-guided, experiential learning becomes more culturally embedded, the public is more likely to participate in using these tools. Such a market introduces a competitiveness amongst platforms where best practices and program learnings may not be readily shared. While Mozilla embodies a spirit of collaboration as an open source organization, it must still take actions to remain competitive, which might mean introducing cutting edge technology or catering to more advanced user experiences that novice learners are not quite ready for. As a final note, it would be remiss to suggest that Mozilla’s motives revolve entirely around making, as learning experiences are often designed with much intentionality (usually within a framework of contribution—or making in order to participate). The Mozilla Foundation’s Executive Director, Mark Surman, has laid out a vision for the organization’s programs, saying, “I do not want the next three billion people to think that the Internet is Facebook and nothing more. I want them to be able to imagine—and wield—everything the Internet can do. [ . . . ] We need to imagine Mozilla as a global classroom and lab for the citizens of the web” (Surman, 2015). In Mozilla’s teaching philosophy, the learn-by-making approach reflects values of openness, inclusivity and independence (Mozilla, 2015), values which must be proven by a public that reflects these values in its support of such initiatives.

Conclusion and Recommendations Based on this case at Mozilla, we can begin to outline some of the components of a sound experiential model for teaching XA. For example, we learned that selecting and framing appropriate experiences is a complex process that involves not only audience analysis, but also cultural analysis

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and multiple types of evaluation and assessment. We found that the amount and availability of content is critically important and that the content must be framed in a way that resonates with learners’ prior experiences and that also allows them to integrate and experience the content on their own as designers and developers. Finally, we discovered that redundancy and repetition, markers of waste in corporate accountability studies, are in fact critically important characteristics for experiential learning since they allow participants to experience failure and learn how to properly iterate through bad designs to eventually reach good ones. One exercise that may be helpful in developing an experiential theory for teaching XA would be to differentiate such experiential models from more traditional types of instruction. Future research might explore this subject in more detail. For example, it would be useful to summarize the differences in approaches to traditional, classroom-based pedagogy versus experiential learning along the five dimensions discussed in this chapter. Contrasting traditional academic learning spaces to experiential models for digital literacy education, like Webmaker, might provide additional ideas for developing effective experiential training for XA. Although the focus of this chapter was on an industrial model for experiential learning, there are plenty of experiential models for teaching and learning within academia as well. The service learning movement, for example, has promoted experiential learning for many years. The best model for experiential learning will likely result as a collaboration between academia and industry, since industry and academia both enable unique experiences for learners. Scholars have previously argued for the importance of academic/industry collaborations for both technical communication and XA (McDaniel & Steward, 2011; Potts, 2014). Experiences from these types of partnerships can be related to students in a variety of ways, from internships and cooperative learning arrangements to courses taught by adjunct professors from industry. Other areas in which students can find additional opportunities to connect their own experiences with relevant learning content include academic “un-conferences,” collaborative grants, and community-based educational meetups such as Mozilla’s Hive Learning Networks. While much of what we know about the teaching of XA is still speculative and borrows from the work done by other disciplines such as digital media, technical communication, and human factors psychology, it is clear that participatory design strategies are best taught in a way that resonates with students’ own ideas about viewing and interacting with the world. As Dewey argued nearly a century ago, effective learning is likely to be found in the careful combination of traditional learning strategies combined with

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new models for personalized instruction, service-learning, and customizable, community-mediated learning spaces. The case covered in this chapter provides insight into how rhetorical readings of emerging, user-centered teaching environments can help us to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of experiential learning, but there is clearly more work to be done in this area. Although there is no single magic formula for success, one thing is certain: if we can find an effective way to educate and prepare new professionals for the workplace and for society, we will be serving ourselves later in life with more usable products, effective technologies, capable systems, and lifelong learners. The question of how to best align education with experience, while challenging, is well worth attempting to answer. This chapter has proposed a number of elements that should be considered when developing a theory of experiential learning for XA.

References

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de Reynal, L. (October 2014). Bangladesh field research. Webmaker User Research. Retrieved from http://mzl.la/bangladesh de Reynal, L. (November 2014). Kenya field research. Webmaker User Research. Retrieved from http://mzl.la/kenya de Reynal, L. (January 2015). India field research. Webmaker User Research. Retrieved from http://www.mzl.la/india Dewey, J. (2007). Experience and education. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dorst, K. (2015). Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Getto, G., Potts, L., Salvo, M., & Gossett, K. (2013). Teaching UX: Designing programs to train the next generation of UX experts. Proceedings from SIGDOC ’13: Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication. New York: ACM. Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J. (2013). Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Hippel, E. V., & Krogh, G. V. (2003). Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation model: Issues for organization science. Organization science, 14(2), pp. 209–23. Kouprie, M., & Visser, F. S. (2009). A framework for empathy in design: stepping into and out of the user’s life. Journal of Engineering Design, 20(5), pp. 437–48. McDaniel, R., & Steward, S. (2011). Technical communication pedagogy and the broadband divide: Academic and industrial perspectives. Complex worlds: Digital culture, rhetoric, and professional communication, pp. 195–212.

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Mozilla Foundation (2013). Web literacy map (overall framework). Retrieved from http://webmaker.org/resources Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., & Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: programming for all. Communications of the ACM, 52(11), 60–67. Rosenfeld, L., & Morville, P. (2006). Information architecture for the World Wide Web. (3rd Edition). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Potts, L. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. London: Routledge. Surman, M. (2015). Mozilla and Learning: thinking bigger. Commonspace. Accessed 1 June 2015. Available: https://commonspace.wordpress. com/2015/01/15/mozilla-and-learning-thinking-bigger/ Unger, R., & Chandler, C. (2012). A project guide to UX design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making. San Francisco: New Riders. Wortham, J. (2011). Codecademy Offers Free Coding Classes for Aspiring Entrepreneurs. Bits (blog), New York Times. Retrieved from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/ codecademy-offers-free-coding-classes-for-aspiring-entrepreneurs/

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16 Memorial Interactivity: Scaffolding Nostalgic User Experiences William C. Kurlinkus

Memory and Meaningful UX

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hich rhetorical bearings lead to memorable designs? How do experience architects plan for storytelling? How might designers better create objects that record personal accounts of use? And what do users rhetorically do with such memories? Starting from user-centered designer Donald Norman’s prefacing claim that the most meaningful objects in our lives (from faded blue jeans to tattered recliners) are alive with intimate history, in this chapter I present three techniques through which experience architects might build creations that harness positive interaction memories—a UX concept I call memorial interactivity (MI). The playground, for instance, is prototypical MI, for adults, particularly Americans, have a hard time talking about playgrounds without reminiscing. As Brenda Biondo recounts in Once Upon a Playground, a book that documents the decay of mid-century play equipment, “Although I spent plenty of free time on playgrounds as a child in the 1960s and ‘70s, I didn’t give them much thought until . . . with my young daughter. It wasn’t long before I noticed that the type of playground equipment I loved when I was growing up was nowhere to be found” (2014, p. 1). In Savage Park, Amy Fusselman similarly contrasts the international trend of making playgrounds more creative, risky, and even dangerous (“adventure playgrounds”) to safety-obsessed US parks. In marking this disparity, she occasionally flashes back to her more adventurous childhood,1 playing army and throwing rocks. Early in the book, for instance, the design of 15-foot-high tree houses in Tokyo’s Hanegi Playpark triggers sentiment in Fusselman (2015, p. 37). Perhaps because nostalgia—a longing for a lost past—only comes with change, the divergence between the Japanese park, a Brooklyn park her son plays at, and the parks of her youth, critically mediatizes the design: “It was like a confrontation 1. This scene in which the park is mediatized for Fusselman is an example

of what I call a nostalgic contact zone: a space in which conflicting nostalgias collide. In this case, the memorable experience the Japanese children are having now (and that will be nostalgic in their future) conflicts with the values of the memorable childhood Fusselman hopes to create for her son (see “anticipatory nostalgia” below). 274

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really, in that it made all the structures that had previously been invisible to me, visible . . . opened up my whole thinking about how my children were playing and why” (Moss-Coane). More on playgrounds later, but for now, consider this aging equipment meaningful because it somehow stores and evokes fond personal memories and, thereby, causes critical reflection upon the present. In The Meaning of Things, sociologists Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg relatedly survey “the role of objects in people’s definition of who they are, of who they have been, and who they wish to become” (p. x). To do so, the researchers asked three hundred Chicagoans, “What are the things in your home which are special to you?” (p. 56). Through a rich taxonomy, Cziksentmihalyi and Rochberg discover that the most meaningful objects are “contemplative,” used for meditation rather than action, and that the largest group of contemplative objects are memory things: “They are the first two chairs me and my husband ever bought, and we sit in them and I just associate them with my home and having babies and sitting in the chairs with babies”; “It is very old. It was given to me as a present by one of the oldest black families in Evanston. They thought I would take care of it . . .” (pp. 60–61). Looking at these interviews through MI, one might wonder, if the most important designs in our lives are full of memories—objects that metamorphose from action to reflection—how can designers better plan for memory, increase psychic investment, and aid in this transformation? In the past, UX architects (Manovich; Deforge; Chisnell) have called such transformations “interactivity,” the ways in which composers create openings for users to customize texts. Thus, the concept I outline in this chapter—memorial interactivity—is how rhetorical designers scaffold the memories that make texts meaningful. To illustrate this strategy, I divide MI into three types: 1) narratability (the appetite to tell stories about meaningful interactions), 2) craft (memories associated with building an object), and 3) connoisseurship (participating in consumerism that requires memorable protocols as badges of membership). Though these encounters are often considered user-powered, I argue that each can (and should) be designed into objects as well. Thus, each segment of this essay dissects several analog and digital designs that harness narratability, craft, and connoisseurship, surveying them for rhetorical moves that might nourish students of UX and rhetoric alike. Further, exploring nostalgia’s potential to encourage critical reflection, I conclude each section by illustrating how the nostalgic rhetoric of users might highlight value conflicts that can lead to more democratic designs.

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Narratability: Encouraging Nostalgic Stories

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Nostalgia: A gap in the past to be resolved through story; an authentic trace to be mused over; an experience that one cannot duplicate; a means to pose the self as champion. In his Contagious: Why Things Catch On, marketing professor Jonah Berger explains that, “A word-of-mouth conversation . . . leads to an almost $200 increase in restaurant sales. A five-star review on Amazon.com leads to approximately twenty more books sold than a one-star review . . .” (pp. 8–9). Berger continues that word of mouth (stories about memorable interaction) is more meaningful than traditional advertising because it comes from acquaintances—it’s personalized. Design features that prompt such friendly storytelling are often called “behavioral residue,” the physical traces our interactions leave behind such as movie stubs, ski-lift tickets, and scuffs on leather (Gosling). Thus, one way memorial interactivity works is through easily shareable residue that prompts storytelling. But meaningful residue differs from empty kitsch, as theorist Susan Stewart describes the rhetorical role of the souvenir: “the capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience. . . . We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable. . . . the souvenir must remain impoverished and partial so that it can be supplemented by a narrative” (p. 135). Nostalgia lurks in this striving, but ultimately futile, attempt at returning to a lost past. The chasm between the object as time-traveling talisman and the true past experience calls for closure—calls for story—a concept I call narratability. Surprise Me: Anticipation, Urgency, and the Nostalgic Gap

By definition, remarkable things are worthy of remark. To garner social capital, people share information they think their audience doesn’t expect. Thus, one way to compel users to share stories is through surprise. But what does it mean for a design to be surprising, and what’s the link between surprise and nostalgia? Our brains are hardwired (see Bateson) to pay attention to changes in our environment (Look! A saber-toothed tiger!) and to ignore things that don’t matter and/or stay the same (there’s that cabbage again). Thus, uncertainty and flux keep surprises surprising, and by breaking with expectation, designs become more memorable. Service UX, for example, sometimes offers “delighters” (a term from economist Noriako Kano) to loyal customers—from a random hotel upgrade to a free sample included with a purchase. No one misses delighters if they’re not implemented, but they make a great difference when present because they feel like gifts. Delighters, however, become less successful, less delighting, and less narratable when they are expected—why tell a story everyone knows? They mutate

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into what Kano calls “table-stake features,” those that must be present for the product to be good. Rewards like frequent flier miles, for instance, aren’t delighters because customers expect the result. Thus, the best gifts follow variable reward; they plan for randomness and loss; they follow a nostalgic stream by creating a longing for a unique past that can’t be duplicated. When users know that the event they’re experiencing isn’t likely to happen again, they’re more likely to record that event and share it through story. Delighters, then, follow slot machine logic. By being awarded money at random rather than fixed intervals, gamblers become addicted to anticipation. Such anticipation is innately nostalgic: something good happens à  I look back positively on that good event à  a psychological itch is created as I hope that event will occur again. Indeed, as discovered by James Olds and Peter Milner, people become addicted to gambling because the nucleus accumbens is activated, a brain region triggered by anticipating rather than receiving a reward. Humans thrive in nostalgic gaps. But more than its addictive component, what makes surprises useful for UX is that people love to share stories about them; setting themselves in the role of the lucky winner or the trendsetter who has “discovered” a secret. In the nostalgic narrative, in particular, the narrator becomes the hero; as an experiment by Vess, et al. demonstrates, “nostalgic reverie led to faster categorizations of positive self-attributes than did contemplating a future positive event.” (p. 13). Paradoxically, then, surprising, insider, and “secret” knowledge generates more buzz than direct publicity because it enjoys more social capital. Recently, for example, a set of popular bars have modeled themselves after prohibition era speakeasies by removing all signage, a trend known as “secret urbanism” (Beekmans). To access San Diego’s Nobel Experiment, for instance, patrons enter an adjacent restaurant, go to the bathrooms, and push a fake beer keg wall. Without knowledge of this secret entrance, the bar is completely hidden. In terms of social capital, urgency is created by this secret because the potential patron knows the site won’t stay a secret for long. Clientele swarm the bar in anticipation of a nostalgic loss when it becomes mainstream. This metacognitive nostalgia for the present is what psychologist Constantine Sedikides calls “anticipatory nostalgia” (Tierney). When something is rare or fleeting, users know that they will remember it fondly and, thereby, realize that they should take advantage of (and archive) the opportunity. One reason Facebook and other micro-blogs are so popular, then, is because users feel compelled to archive the moment in hopes of achieving an authentic and fixed future tradition in an age of digital speed and ephemerality (see Rosa’s “social acceleration”). Where nostalgia is typically a critique of the present on behalf of the past, anticipatory nostalgia is a critique of the future on behalf of the present.

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Personalizing the Viral: Nostalgic Recall Mechanisms

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At the heart of narratability is devising a nostalgic story to share; at the core of MI is the personalization of products through memory. Thus, though providing a memorable story is good, the best design stories, as Stewart suggests, are personal. Digitally, one sees this in the success of viral slacktivist campaigns. Take the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Association’s Ice Bucket Challenge, which swept Facebook in the summer of 2014. To raise ALS awareness and funds, in the Ice Bucket Challenge slacktivists poured a bucket of ice water over their heads, took a video of it, posted it to Facebook, and challenged their friends to do the same or donate. The dare soon went viral. 2.4 million videos were posted by the likes of George W. Bush, Lebron James, and Kermit the Frog. Though only roughly 40% of those participating donated, the ALS Association raised over $88.5 million in under a month (Stenovec, Goldberg). The challenge went viral for many of the same reasons other “slacktivist” campaigns do: it was easy, spoke to people’s sense of social currency, and provided a communal story to enter. But more than a story, the Ice Bucket Challenge was easily personalized—ice water was dumped from helicopters as part of comedic skits, and Californians used other liquids such as milk to speak to the region’s drought. Memes like the Ice Bucket Challenge, by nature, act as a form of collective memory, providing a structure and set of values that are enacted through replication and upon which individual memory might improvise (Halbwachs; Coser). Thus, the most viral of the viral is virality that personalizes.2 The nostalgic impossibility of pure replica—the gap between the original video and the copies—makes the meme personal, meaningful, and (ironically) possible (see Dawkins; Vie). Indeed, speaking of copies, the fact that the Ice Bucket challenge required recording and sharing a video—the production of behavioral residue—further anticipates nostalgic reflection. Of course, how deeply such capricious campaigns have imbedded themselves in our collective memory is up for debate, but the fact that Facebook has a variety of MI features (from Throwback Thursday to Timehop to Look Back movies) to recall meaningful interactions that would otherwise be lost to the archive, makes digital nostalgia more likely. Other digital designs similarly plan for the construction of such nostalgic narratives. Canon’s “hybrid auto mode,” for instance, is a camera function that takes 4-second videos before and after a photo. Photographers, thereby, don’t just get a still shot but also the voices, playfulness, and 2. Indeed, because of the conscious participatory nature of many so-called

“viral” campaigns, Jenkins, Ford, and Green challenge the passivity of the viral metaphor—memes aren’t self-replicating, there’s usually a user performing the replication.

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constructedness—a memorable story—that rhetorically position the picture in context. Nostalgic Countersignification: Memorial Contact Zones

The most common critique of nostalgia is that it is uncritical, that it masks negative pasts. But memory theorist Svetlana Boym distinguishes between such credulous “restorative” nostalgia and a more “reflective nostalgia”: “Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging. . . . Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt” (p. xviii). Thus, I argue that if designers pay more attention to nostalgia—seeking out nostalgic user stories—they might see the positive memories of different groups conflicting in spaces I call nostalgic contact zones. When design becomes a nostalgic contact zone, the designer’s job becomes rhetorically mediating and harnessing such values—a purposefully more turbulent form of participatory design I call rhetorical design. Returning to the playground, for instance, in many ways Fusselman and Biondo are “reflectively” nostalgic; they use memory to be critical of the past and present. However, through a lens of nostalgic contact zones the rhetorical-designer might ask, who isn’t nostalgic for these dangerous parks? One conflict appears in the fact that nowhere in Fusselman’s or Biondo’s books are access or disability mentioned. By welcoming and pluralizing nostalgia, we see that the pure restoration of mid-century playgrounds might be a bad idea, as many of their features are inaccessible to people with disabilities. However, Biondo’s and Fusselman’s nostalgic values—risk, trial-and-error, and free play—might be explored in more accessible ways. When designers don’t plan for such contact zones, it’s tricky, and sometimes comically crucial, as they tend to crop up anyway. In the summer of 2014, for instance, the New York Police Department started the Twitter hashtag #myNYPD, hoping to garner stories of positive interactions with the city’s protectors. Instead, they received a countersignification of the forum. As defined by Bryan Pfaffenberger, in “technological countersignifications,” users tell stories that are “an act of mythos substitution that decomposes and rehistoricizes the meanings of embodied artifacts” (p. 300). Thus, critics of #myNYPD rhetorically deployed an ironic nostalgia. A photo of a woman getting her hair violently yanked by an officer reads, “The #NYPD will also help you de-tangle your hair. #myNYPD” (McSwagsalot). Whereas an officer sleeping on the subway is marked: “An officer from Precinct 114 once ticketed me for doing this exact thing on the N train. #myNYPD” (Stuckey).

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Ideally, this feedback might be used to redesign the NYPD’s UX and, thereby, its ethics of interaction.

Crafting Nostalgia Nostalgia: Positive reflection about personal labor. Earned experience. Products that mature as they age and that last long enough to gain a patina of meaning. Consumption as stewardship. In a 2012 study, brand psychologists Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely uncovered “the IKEA effect.” In tasks from assembling IKEA furniture to folding origami, subjects highly valued things they built, viewing “their amateurish creations as similar in value to experts’ creations, and expected others to share their opinions” (p. 453). When participants assigned monetary values to their designs, they “over-valued” the positively memorable design experience attached to the product as compared to subjects who did not build objects. I say “positively memorable” (nostalgic) experience because the researchers also found that, “labor leads to love only when labor results in successful completion of tasks; when participants built and then destroyed their creations, or failed to complete them, the IKEA effect dissipated” (p. 453). The IKEA effect is just one example of how our economy is shifting from service to experience. From Build-a-Bear to customizable Nikes, users are not only willing but often crave to participate in the production of their goods. But why? 280

Craft as Care: Labor and the Aura of Nostalgic Production

A classic example of a nostalgic design3 that illustrates the IKEA effect is the mixtape. As described by music critic Nick Hornsby, the composition of a mixtape was a highly ornate craft: “I spent hours putting that cassette together. . . . making a tape is like writing a letter—there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. . . . You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention . . . and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it . . . oh, there are loads of rules” (pp. 88–9). The actual technological process of creating the tape paralleled the toil of composition—you had to select songs, yes, but you also had to record those songs from one tape or the radio to another tape—rewinding, fast-forwarding, erasing. Thus, for Hornsby what makes the mixtape a craft is not the final product but the delicate experience behind it. Craft is care and the creation of a nostalgic image of the composer’s effort—an 3. Interestingly, nostalgia for analog music began almost immediately

after the CD was introduced into popular culture, see, for instance David Lander’s 1983 Rolling Stone lament “Digital Discontent.”

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awareness of medium that Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call “hypermediation.” Importantly, hypermediated craft is pocked with leaked constructedness, residue of production (from smeared ink on the tape’s tracklist to a long silence between tracks) that can be read by the user as labor. Such signs initiate the recipient into the collective memory of the object. This is perhaps the key difference between a mixtape and a mix CD or playlist today. There’s a value in making something difficult, in having your user do more, when that difficulty equates to individuality and effort that can be transferred to someone else. As composer Dean Wareham describes, physical effort implies emotional labor: “It takes time and effort. . . . The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient. It might be a desire to go to bed, or to share ideas. . . .” (p. 28). Thus the intricate calculus of craft: Labor + intricacy + memory = meaning. Or perhaps better put: thoughtful labor = thoughtful product. This level of care is what differentiates craft from other making. Indeed, I argue craft is defined by such self-reflective nostalgia, choosing a purposefully more laborious mode of creation when machines that mediate the “risks” (Pye) of production are available. Contemporarily, it’s interesting to consider how UX architects use this craft formula to evoke emotional reactions in their users and, thereby, prevent them from leaving a service through nostalgic loss aversion. When a user tries to quit Facebook, for instance, the company deploys MI to prevent departure, highlighting how “the collection of memories and experiences, in aggregate, becomes more valuable over time” (Eyal, p. 147). When a user deactivates her account a screen appears with pictures of her most cherished friends and a message that reads, “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account . . . Your [number] friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you.” Each of the pictures of one’s friends has a message above it, reading, “Krista will miss you,” “Nene will miss you,” etc. Despite the fact that this is a fairly rote customization (every user gets the same message; an algorithm has filled in a template), the message still feels meaningful because it causes the user to contemplate the time and “work” they’ve invested. Inheritable UX: Aging Gracefully, Repair, and Stewardship

Eternally Yours is a design collective seeking to extend the lives of everyday objects, producing products that will last and be passed down generationally: inheritable UX. If the most important objects in our lives are those that collect memories and if collecting memories (ostensibly) takes time, this other face of craft, the quest for long-lasting designs that improve with age, is imperative. Eternally Yours posits three dimensions that contribute to inheritability: 1) “Shape n Surface”—materials that age beautifully (leather) instead of those that look ugly with the first blemish (the polished chrome of

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a Mac Book); 2) “Sales n Services”—services that span the lifetime of the product including repair and updates; and 3) “Signs n Scripts”—products that embrace life-time narratives (this design will survive) rather than cutting-edge stories (newest is best). Revolutionizing shape n surface, for example, artist Simon Heijdens’ “Broken White” is a series of flatware that are pure white when purchased. As they age, tiny cracks bloom into intricate patterns: “The cracks slowly begin to form a floral decoration that grows like a real flower. . . . the cups or dishes you love most will stand out. . . . it is not a state, but a never-ending process” (2004, n.p.) Many products (wine, whisky, musical instruments) get better with age, but it often takes shifts in taste (cultural “signs n scripts”) to realize this enjoyment of decay. Products that age with grace and uphold long-term emotional contracts are a first step towards inheritable UX, but such products (especially digitally) will inevitably need to be maintained. Several manifestos (see “The Maker’s Bill of Rights”) have been written on the responsibility of designers to create repairable goods: “Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included. Cases shall be easy to open. Batteries shall be replaceable . . .” (Make). Designer Pim de Ruigh, for instance, is working with Volvo to create a future in which car manufacturers profit through the maintenance of vehicles rather than original sale (pp. 416–35). Yet, currently, consumers think so little about user-driven auto repair that only since 2012 has the US Right to Repair Bill required car manufacturers to give consumers access to the same manuals and diagnostics as dealerships. Responding to this void with craft nostalgia, there has been a resurgence of repair culture. Sparked by Amsterdam native Martin Posta, for example, “repair cafés” have appeared internationally in which experienced volunteers train patrons to fix things—from computers to sweaters—rather than throw them away. Learning to personally repair a product creates a more special and lasting relationship with that creation—the IKEA effect—leading to more meaningful design engagements. As Kyle Wiens, creator of the repair website iFixit, states, “If you can’t fix it, you don’t really own it. You’re just possessing it a little while until it passes on” (Sturrock). Another goal of nostalgic UX, then, is to create this true ownership, consumption as stewardship. Such stewardship is what differentiates meaningful MI from other types of customization and is one answer to Donald Norman’s criticism that “manufacturers have tried to overcome the sameness of their product offerings by allowing customers to ‘customize’ them. What this usually means is that the purchaser can choose the color or select from a list of accessories. . . . Are these customizations emotionally compelling? Not really” (p. 118).

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Nostalgic Countersignification: Crafters’ Rights

We’ve looked at craft as an equation that leads to personal significance and an ethic that aids long-lasting products, but, historically, craft has also been rhetorically deployed as a set of rights, as a way to nostalgically countersignify current labor conditions (see Kurlinkus, 2014). In their “Digital Artisan’s Manifesto,” for instance, Richard Barbrook and Pit Schultz argue for the craft rights of digital workers, disenfranchised laborers who fulfill coding tasks ordered by their employers without being able to stretch their imaginations. Barbrook and Schultz write, “[T]he joys of consumerism are usually constrained by the boredom of most jobs. . . . Under neo-liberalism, individuals are only allowed to exercise their own autonomy in deal-making rather than through making things. We cannot express ourselves directly by constructing useful and beautiful virtual artifacts. . . .” (pp. 6, 8). To counter this turpitude, the authors call upon the history of craft: “The revival of artisanship is not a return to a low-tech and impoverished past. Skilled workers are best able to assert their autonomy precisely within the most technologically advanced industries. . . .” (p. 11). Again, we see nostalgia is a resource for resistance, a rhetorical available means of persuasion from which to argue from an apparently better past towards a better future. The rhetorical-designer listens for these nostalgic conflicts as assets (creating occasions for resistance) and uses them to ignite participatory design. Why study how nostalgia is rhetorically used? Because when nostalgia is invoked, it often means something is wrong, as Simon Reynolds defines, “Nostalgia can project the absent ideal into the past or into the future, but mainly it’s about not feeling at home in the here-and-now, a sensation of alienation” (p. 370).

Connoisseurship: Nostalgia, Ritual, and Expert Consumption Nostalgia: Ritualistic consumption in the face of cultural loss. A tradition of consumer knowledge. A collective consumer memory leading to right of ownership. If the last section focused on Eternally Yours’ “Shape n Surface” and “Sales n Services,” in this section I examine “Signs n Scripts,” the cultural and communal trends that make consumption as stewardship possible. For instance, connoisseurship—apprenticeship in a collective memory of taste—transforms consumption into a lasting holy rite. As anthropologist Susan J. Terrio writes, “In the pursuit of social distinction, connoisseurship . . . drives demand for the prestige goods associated with it by reinforcing their rarity and conferring cultural capital on those who consume them” (p. 71). Again,

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we see the relationship between rarity, cultural capital, and tradition. Particularly in connoisseurship (see Veblen), a gated tradition is often posed as threatened or lost in the face of mass culture; only collective ritual and trained taste can recover this better past and the set of values it embodies. Rituals of Stewardship, Collective Remembering, and Triggering

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In 2013, Kathleen D. Vohs, et al. tested how ritual affects the consumption of goods from lemonade to carrots. In one experiment, for instance, the researchers had subjects eat chocolate. Some participants were asked to perform a ritual before eating (“Break it in half. Unwrap half of the bar and eat it. Then, unwrap the other half and eat it.”) while others were not (p. 1715). Those who performed the ritual enjoyed the experience more, thought the chocolate tasted better, savored it more, and were willing to pay more. Rituals expand the enjoyment of consumption because they make the UX more focused, self-aware, and, remarkably individual. As memory theorist Stephan Feuchtwang writes, “Ritual endures, accommodating change, precisely because it is prescribed action, not exegesis. . . . into these are fed our personal and individual experiences and events that are new, unique, personal, or contingent” (285). Like the meme above, then, ritual relies on individuality. Christians, for example, may be encouraged to remember and record Christmas traditions (anticipatory nostalgia), but they have unique celebrations within that structure (when they open presents, what they eat, etc.). Coincidentally, the history of chocolate connoisseurship is an interesting example of MI. Terrio, for instance, describes how French chocolatiers invoked ritual in order to link themselves in the collective memory of French consumers with the steward consumption of wine and cheese. As Terrio writes, in the 1980s “Facing the intensified international competition . . . French chocolatiers and cultural taste makers attempted to stimulate new demand for craft commodities by promoting ‘genuine,’ ‘grand cru,’ or ‘vintage’ French chocolate” (p. 68). To reinforce this standard beyond new labels, chocolatiers developed a specific tasting process based on wine consumption (rub the chocolate, sniff the chocolate, etc.) to teach proper French consumption. Ritual nostalgia, thereby, cloaked the fact that France did not have a particularly crafty chocolate past. For instance, chocolatiers created a then non-existent tasting scale for cacao beans (favoring French dark chocolates) that paralleled wine varietals. Thus, there was a specific decision to nostalgia-ize the chocolate UX, to make French chocolate memorially interactive by playing upon French collective memory and the values of stewardship there within. The French make their chocolates meaningful by instructing consumers in an artificial (yet, apparently timeless) taste stan-

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dard that, importantly, favors French chocolatiers’ tastes (bittersweet) over the Belgians’ (sweet) (Terrio, p. 70). Thus, the creation of quality does not in itself propagate connoisseurship, rather UX architects must create a ritual of consumption that trains the connoisseur to distinguish between good and bad varieties (percentages of cacao, for instance) and, in doing so, teaches the apprentice a nostalgic value set. Beyond education, however, such ritualization acts as a memorization process that can be called upon to trigger consumption. One can see this in numerous less-cultured products that present a correct consumption process: Oreos (separate the cookies, lick the cream, dunk the cookies); Blue Moon beer (add an orange). Guinness beer goes so far as to provide a fact sheet for an intricate six-step pour. As seen in Vohs’ experiment, such ritual is less about cultured taste and more about the affective pleasure one gets from engaging memorized processes, which is closely related to the idea of “triggering” (Eyal), a need to use the habit-forming product when memory is engaged. When contemporary netizens find their affective memories activated, feeling boredom (or loneliness, or frustration, or confusion, or anger, or happiness . . . ), for example, they often check Facebook to resolve that feeling. Nostalgia intensifies this affect because Facebook has seemingly resolved these emotions in the past. Transformation through Knowledge-ization: Training to Consume

Closely associated with the production of connoisseur rituals is the production of systems of education from which those rituals (and the values therein) can be learned. In this way consumption becomes skilled. thirdwave coffee is an excellent example of this knowledge-ization. Studded with nostalgia for well-groomed simplicity,4 third-wave coffee began in response to second-wave coffee’s overly complex espresso-driven zealotries (see Starbucks’ Iced, Half Caff, Ristretto, Venti, 4-Pump, Sugar Free . . .). In contrast, third-wave coffee (marked by in-house roasters and simple pour over coffee) is controlled on the barista’s end, offering fewer options but more knowledge that what one is getting is the best. Thus, where the second-wave focused on fair trade, third-wave coffee is often direct trade (coffee houses purchase directly from the grower). Importantly for MI, in both fair trade and direct trade, quality is associated with the object memory of the crop and purposefully selecting a bean that one can feel good about, a bean with an ethical labor aura and, thereby, cultural capital. Thus, like the second-wave (Ristretto? Four-Pump? Quad?), third-wave connoisseurs have to be initiated into a highly-specialized vocabulary (Crema? Extraction? Silver Skin?) 4. A simplicity that notably counterpoints the desire for craft interactivity

mentioned in the last section.

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if they want to be able to feel good about consumption. To gain this knowledge, many houses host “cupping” sessions that induct newcomers into a tasting protocol that must be memorized in order to truly enjoy as connoisseurs. This intricate protocol, again, presents the idea that thoughtful consumption, participating in a tradition, and putting effort into use translates to a more meaningful experience. In a sense, third-wave coffee culture, like any highly-specialized consumer-knowledge culture, might contemporarily be labeled “geek”—implying that its members memorize the intricate pop knowledge of a minute subject and use this knowledge to maintain insider status and product exclusivity. The TV show Lost is a particularly good example—captivating viewers’ attentions across television and web platforms through a set of slowly released mysteries, urging fans to collate data to solve these riddles, and, thereby, taking a mass-consumed program and transforming it into connoisseur UX that urges what Jason Mittell calls “forensic fandom.” Thus, the knowledge set of a connoisseur (in part because of its rhetorical production of rarity and secrecy) can transform the mass good into the meaningful good. Rewarded effort leads to nostalgic UX. And, as mentioned above, once one learns these esoteric protocols (and forms a connoisseur identity around them), investing time and effort, they are also less likely to switch to a new product.5 Geeking Out: Connoisseur Contact Zones 286

Though creating loyal consumers clearly has its benefits, geek culture is almost by definition combatively nostalgic—brand change gets labeled as selling out, and aficionados rue the popularization of their niche. This causes problems for some brands, creating nostalgic contact zones that serve as examples of why contemporary designers must also be rhetoricians practiced in mediation. Star Wars geek-ism is a prime example of this nostalgic resistance in that a set of “original” Star Wars fans became so invested in the brand that when it began to change—particularly with the Jar Jar Binks laden The Phantom Menace—they posited participatory ownership and became brand enemies. As Paul Nunes and David Light write in Harvard Business Review, “It would be one thing if your product’s biggest fans loved it unconditionally. But they don’t; they expect that love to be rewarded with respect for their preferences.” Thus, in order to maintain loyal fan bases while welcoming newcomers, the rhetorical-designer needs training in conflict mediation— balancing nostalgic permanence and innovative change. 5. This type of educational loss aversion is a relatively unexplored

contributing factor of Harvey Graff’s “literacy myth.”

Memorial Interactivity

Another element of connoisseur countersignification is positioning connoisseur identity to expand the boundaries of traditional taste. The anticipation of nostalgic loss that drives the cult of connoisseurship ironically turns out to be a platform from which to critique restrictive standards of taste. The purposeful connoisseur consumption of low culture to oppose class elitism through a nostalgia for simplicity is a good example of this resistance. A recent instance of almost anti-intellectual connoisseurship, for instance, is Budweiser’s 2015 anti-craft-beer Super Bowl ad, which pits nostalgia for lower-class culture6 against the nostalgia that drives craft beer, unapologetically claiming, “Proudly a macro beer. It’s not brewed to be fussed over. It’s brewed for a crisp, smooth finish. . . . Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale, we’ll be brewing us some golden suds.” Though this campaign has been criticized, its nostalgia for simple beer in many ways parallels the much praised (and notably upper-class) third-wave coffee movement. Somewhat strangely, then, Budweiser sets itself up as the losing side of a taste war, thereby producing a nostalgic longing/protectiveness in consumers for the age when Bud was the “King of Beers.” Budweiser uses taste for another brand to promote a connoisseur war that critically plays one nostalgia against another—relishing the contact zone while intensifying loyal consumer identity.

Conclusions In the end, nostalgia turns out to be a profitable lens through which to examine UX because it accentuates the tension between critical and passive consumption; focuses on visceral feelings that consumers are willing to share; gets designers thinking about the ways their products will last into the future; and begins to lay bare the framework upon which collective consumer identities are formed. I conclude, then, with a note on the direct role that rhetoric might play in such UX. Throughout this chapter I’ve mentioned two basic applications for memorial interactivity: 1) creating meaningful products and 2) exposing design value diversity. The distinction between the designer and the rhetorical designer, thereby, is that the rhetorical designer is ethically vested with provoking, mediating, and harnessing value conflicts rather than dodging difference. Rhetoric’s game is seeking deliberative democracy by listening for difference. Thus, I hope I’ve illustrated that sentimental remembering is not in and of itself a problem. Rather, the snare of nostalgia lies in uncritically following dominant nostalgias as apolitical truth while refusing to listen to competing minority nostalgias, labeling them overly-emotional, tradition6. Interestingly paralleling Pabst Blue Ribbon’s uptake by hipsters as

nostalgically authentic beer.

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al, and/or deterministic. Ultimately, because nostalgia is an inescapable response to technological change, particularly in this “golden age of dead media” (Sterling), UX theorists need to not only pay attention to it as passively experienced but also need to theorize how and why it is used rhetorically to build a piece of permanence in a constantly changing world.

References

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17 Designing Digital Activism: Rhetorical Tool as Agent of Social Change Douglas M. Walls, Delia M. Garcia, and Amy VanSchaik

Introduction

R

esearchers/designers understand, discover, and advocate for the needs of the user and how the user interacts with systems (Hart-Davidson, 2013). By allowing the researchers and designers to build paper prototypes and perform usability tests, they help to reduce additional time that may be spent fixing functionality in systems after they have been built (Richardson, 2013). The creation of research agendas that design and develop ecosystems is essential in certain kinds of build experiences (Jones, 2013), and, as Salvo (2004) has pointed out, critical action in information architecture requires more than descriptive research, it requires actual intervention with active participants. Morville & Rosenfeld (2006) point out that bad design can come from the design/development team not fully understanding the needs of the user. This is especially important in situations where groups have been traditionally marginalized, often invisibly so, by technology and information systems (Eubanks, 2011). Design team members must understand how people make meaning of information and how they create relationships between information and people (Albers, 2009) to properly align interface and information in the service of social justice needs. Cushman advocates positioning rhetorical scholars as “agents of social change outside the university” (Cushman, 1996), encouraging rhetorical scholars to engage communities in ways that address social problems. While scholars in technical communication have a long and robust history of ethical questioning (Katz, 1992; Dragga & Voss; 2001), they have also recently given voice to critical perspectives merging Cultural Studies (Scott, Longo, & Wills, 2007) and Critical Race Theory (Haas, 2012; Williams and Pimentel, 2014) to address historical and marginalizing problems of information design and technology. Others have made moves to address and place technical communicators and UX designers as user advocates (Hart-Davidson, 2013) in the critical building of tools for the needs of citizens engaged in the everyday knowledge work of communities (Diehl, Grabill, Hart-Davidson, & Iyer, 2008) or the specifics of principles of usability that support public deliberation (Simmons & Zoetewey, 2012).

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In this chapter, we encourage rhetorical scholars to make digital projects that become agents of social change outside the university by realigning rhetorical activity through the development of new digital platforms that disrupt and challenge established rhetorical action in new ways. For example, applications like Loveland (formally Blexting) challenge the way that neighborhoods engage with local governments by involving citizens in tracking urban blight (Gannes, 2015) while apps that focus on labor practices such as ROC United Diners’ Guide (Rutsch, 2015) track and distribute information to consumers by giving additional information about how businesses treat restaurant servers. We ground our conversation in the development of Fair & Square, an activist application. The goal of Fair & Square is activism through the leverage of consumers’ choices to support businesses that support fair labor. Through the app, consumers can become low-barrier organized “activists” by electing to support local restaurants, grocery stores, or markets based on how restaurants source their food stuffs and the personal cost to the farm workers who sourced them. Although uncompleted, we see Fair & Square as part of a growing scholarship dedicated to making digital artifacts that focus on the alignment of human social interactions and relationships with information design. UX provides rhetoricians the possibility to not only be agents of social change themselves but also to create UX designs that lower the barriers for others to become agents of social change in their own right with the right decision making tools. We extend the notion of impact of design beyond “the user” to encompass social and economic impacts, in Fair & Square’s case, farm workers that may be impacted by user choices. We expand Morville & Rosenfeld’s (2006) concept of good design to one focused on the UX design of social justice projects that require integration of the project design, the data within the design, and the impact of various populations that are affected by design privileging. To visually explain the concept the graduate students have developed an interactive prototype: http://invis.io/4CKL3J2W. We also outline key research moments that guided the development team in making impactful project decisions.

Project Description The average person does not devote much time or energy to the investigation of the products in our food supply. Though there are many forces that contribute to creating and maintaining this lack of critical consideration, at least two primary factors can be identified: one from the level of the consumer and one from the level of distributors, grocers, and restaurants. From the consumer’s standpoint, the ease with which consumers can access food in stores or in restaurants contributes to a level of habituation that

Designing Digital Activism

results in a lack of critical consideration. The typical questions for consumers generally relate to the quality, taste, price and popularity of a restaurant or grocery store. From a business and marketing standpoint, large chain distributors, grocers, restaurants, and farms are served by obscuring the realities of food production. As the system currently exists, the actors involved in food production, distribution and consumption operate, knowingly or unknowingly, to maintain a power asymmetry that adversely impacts farm workers. Consumers/users who have the financial means and the leisure time to frequent local restaurants can be considered a privileged group in relation to farm workers. Similarly, large grocery chains, distributors, and restaurant chains are also privileged in the food production network and are well aware of the market conditions that drive their profit margins and work to maintain and increase that interest. Consumers, on the other hand, are largely unaware of the relationships in our complex food system and the impacts of individual food choices on the lives of farm workers. Understanding consumer/user needs and interests is a critical first step in creating a good design (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006) and in ensuring that the design of the Fair & Square app will have the intended impact on the lives of farm workers. As consumers, we’ve grown accustomed to social lives that center around food. When the setting is informal, the kitchen is often the place where people naturally gather and it is a site that has critical discursive capacity (Ackerman, 2003). When the setting is more formal, it is customary to gather around the dinner table. Restaurants have become the public spaces where we gather, meet, and celebrate. In describing Activity Theory, Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006) explain that operations inform actions and that actions in turn drive activities. They note that individuals do not consciously perform the steps required to complete an operation. Fair & Square acknowledges that the generic everyday operations involved in choosing foods at stores or in restaurants are habituated or internalized. The actions that consumers take related to food purchases are based on a fluid series of operations that are not conscious. However, Bødker (1989) notes that through conceptualization, operations can be made conscious and consumers can change their actions to ultimately alter an activity. This is the point where Fair & Square seeks to intervene and destabilize the existing system of food production/consumption. The ease and ready access to food effectively diminishes any general push to question where food products are sourced and the conditions under which the farmworkers who harvest these food products live and work. We see this issue as fundamentally an information design issue. As food chains

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become more complicated, ethical decisions about food purchases and labor issues become harder to make. Not all food sourcing issues fit neatly into bins like “organic” or “fair trade.” Additionally, because eating food is an everyday activity, information about sourcing and labor can quickly become overwhelming in terms of information. In such a context, helping users make good decisions by designing user experiences that take information architecture of food sourcing and labor practices seriously becomes incredibly important in lowering the barriers for people to move through supporting their own ethical commitments through their food purchases. Food, like rhetoric, is a staple of everyday social life and it is also a centerpiece for the spaces where we choose to spend our time relating to and communing with others. Like the description of everyday rhetoric (Cintron, 2003), the food choices that we make become invisible, and the information that we have related to food products is partial. Further, complex situations are oversimplified and reified (Cintron, 2003), and operations become standard practice. Through repetition, these operations become entrenched and thoughtless. Farmworker advocacy groups who informed this project consistently indicated an awareness that they are not employing technology in the service of their cause. While they acknowledged that technology can help to raise the visibility of farmworkers causes and that as organizations they are not leveraging those opportunities, they also expressed a severe lack of expertise in this area. Many of these organizations are grassroots, community efforts that do not have large operating budgets. Based on descriptions from farmworker advocates, the design team understands the daily lives of farmworkers to be incredibly complex. Aside from harsh working conditions and low pay, living conditions, health care, legal status, and the lack of English literacy skills are all a part of this complex web at the individual level. At the next level, distributors of these food products create a complex maze that obscures the realities of food production and distribution. Finally, at the most distributed level, consumers fuel the producers and distributors and by default, reinforce and perpetuate the practices that oppress farmworkers. Lack of transparency and the invisibility of relationships are hallmarks of the local food production complex. The design team seeks to expose the lines of distribution and bring transparency to production methods. Creating a digital space like Fair & Square where rhetorical action could lead to social change could effectively shift thoughtlessness to consciousness by adding rich informational content about sourcing.

Designing Digital Activism

Research and Design Contextual Inquiry

The design team engaged in a contextual design approach with the various stakeholders involved in the food production process. We take the stakeholders in the food production process to be farmworkers, farmworker advocates, producers, distributors, and consumers, but we did not come to this definition at the outset. Understanding that it is critical for designers to understand the activity in enough detail to not only design a system that will work well but will also allow for innovation (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1993), the design team dwelled with the stakeholders as circumstances allowed. Talking with individuals who participate in different levels of the system, from food production through food preparation, revealed relationships at different levels that ultimately revealed the overall activity of local food production. The design team noticed patterns emerging at each of these levels, lending validity to the information that was received from each group of actors. Our participatory approach to designing Fair & Square valued the expertise of each of the stakeholders involved in the food production/consumption system. Farmworker advocates served as surrogates to advise us on the issues that farmworkers face day to day. Farmworker advocates from various local and national organizations identified the primary issues as the lack of English language skills and issues of fair labor. Given the clear connection between the products of farmworker labor and the direct local impact of consumer choice on restaurants that rely on the fruits of farmworker labor, we decided that leveraging consumers to support fair labor was an avenue for indirectly impacting the issue of fair labor for farmers. Since we were removed from the farmworkers yet were trying to build a bridge between farmworkers and consumers, we dedicated a significant amount of time to understanding the complex relationships inherent in the local food production system as well as the information relationships (Albers, 2009) that frame the everyday rhetorical practices that surround food consumption. A few local restaurants and markets are transparent about where the food products they sell or prepare were sourced. The average consumer may or may not value the rhetorical and informational significance of those facts, but for those who work within the food production network, this information is highly significant. These particular restaurants and markets know the farmers and farmworkers who produce, source and grow their products. They know their families, and they’re conscious of the conditions on each of their source farms. Each of these micro-ecologies exists as a series of relationships that can be easily traced from the ground to

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the table. The visibility and transparency of these relationships ensures fair working conditions. Unfortunately, we found that these types of transparent relationships are uncommon within the local food production system, and it is the lack of transparency that contributes to conditions fraught with injustice. While our design team was able to dwell with the producers who are transparent, we were unsuccessful in reaching mid- to large-size producers and distributors. The lack of information from the mid- to large-size companies was punctuated by the fact that access to information relationships and food production systems was as simple as asking for information in the cases described. Restaurant Selection Metrics

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In an effort to design a better informational experience for food shoppers, research was conducted with consumers in order to better understand how consumers make choices related to restaurant selections. Consumers were contacted and asked to notify a member of the design team while in the midst of making a decision about which restaurant to select for a given meal. Once contacted by the consumer, the design-team member noted the following generic information: name of the consumer, time of day, and whether or not the consumer was alone. In addition, the design team member asked the consumer how hungry she was on a scale of one to ten with ten being the hungriest. The consumer was also asked to indicate any other meals previously eaten that same day. After that point, the consumer was asked to think out loud through the decision-making process. Though the consumer led the discussion in each case, the design team member was able to ask probing questions to ascertain all of the points involved in making the decision. The responses for each of four consumer case studies were captured in a table, and the consumer case study information was subsequently analyzed by the design team. The following metrics emerged consistently and with the highest scores in consumer decision-making related to restaurant selection; in order of importance they are: location, type of food, budget, availability, consistency, specials, familiarity, outside seating, full bar, and trying a new place. Analysis and Modeling

All of the metrics noted across all consumers and the relevant scores were applied to each consumer and were visualized using polargraphs. Visualization of the data gathered from each consumer highlighted the points of convergence and divergence across consumers. The design team aggregated the data and the results showed that location, type of food, budget, and avail-

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ability were the most important to consumer decision-making in selecting a restaurant. Due to their importance in making food choices, these four criteria were used as the primary filters for the Fair & Square app. Understanding what the users valued in selecting a restaurant led to the design of a paper prototype. User research is needed in order to address the concerns and interests of the user prior to software development, reducing interaction errors in a completed product (Richardson, 2013). Designers, as subject matter experts, may make assumptions about the user’s interests, but actually listening to the user’s needs addresses areas that may be overlooked, such as an interest in budget. Engaging in this exchange between designers and users results in a user friendly product that informs the user about restaurant choices and creates a “useful” product that will engage the consumer and eventually impact the intended audience (Hart-Davidson, 2013). In addition to the metrics highlighted above, the design team noted the need to add a fair labor metric or score as a key level of rhetorical intervention in order to incorporate the social justice element to the app. There is currently no system in place to rank farms, distributors, grocers, or restaurants on a fair labor scale. The lack of information categorization became a significant consideration for the project on both rhetorical and UX levels as this additional metric was the critical element in addressing the social justice concern for farm workers. The consumer interaction could not be designed as a “direct impact” and could not be made directly in the farm worker environment. However, adding a fair labor feature adds “value” to the app by understanding the information flow and how each step of transfer of that information directly impacts the consumers and stakeholders (Hart-Davidson, 2013). Paper Prototypes

The original prototypes of Fair & Square incorporated the main features that consumers described as most important in making food choices. The general idea was that consumers would choose “find restaurant,” then see the map that would show them the restaurants in their vicinity at that time. If that was not selective enough, consumers also had the option to select “filter,” which would allow them to use the filters, type of food, budget, and availability to narrow their choices. All of the screenshots were placed in front of the consumers who participated in the case studies to solicit their feedback. Consumers felt that the app design was easy to navigate and would be easy to use in the midst of making a restaurant selection. Users also noted that the “pick for me” option would not be useful since consumers want to make informed decisions regarding restaurant selections rather than leaving it to chance. The most

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significant feedback received was a clear indication that consumers want the opportunity to post information regarding specific restaurants that others could see and reference in making conscientious selections. This aspect of the feedback was encouraging as the consumers who participated in the case studies were eager to participate as non-expert moderators (Potts, 2009) and contribute to amassing information on the fair labor practices of the restaurants that they frequent. Given the level of obscurity of information and the complexities of the local food production system, the success of the app will depend largely on the participation of non-expert moderators. Consumers who participated in the case studies indicated that they would be unlikely to support a restaurant that had been given poor fair labor scores by other consumers. It was also evident that the participating consumers, who had not previously considered the issue of fairness for farm workers, were quick to agree that having fair labor information would impact their restaurant selections. We hope that this small sample is representative of the interest that larger groups of consumers will show for supporting the information gathering component of this app. Wireframes

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The original prototype was redesigned to incorporate the recommendations made by consumers (Figure 1). Most significantly, the redesigned version of the app provides not only the fairness score but also color codes the pins to represent the fairness rating of each restaurant that is mapped so that consumers can make selections at a glance (Figure 2). Figure 3 illustrates how the fair labor score of a given restaurant would be visually displayed and also shows that additional information related to the fair labor score would be included. The “comments” section would provide the ability to post additional information related to a particular restaurant and could be viewed by consumers and restaurants alike. Design team interactions with users/consumers were critical in making improvements to the app. The design team, as researchers, listened to what the users wanted from the software and also observed the users interacting with the prototype to understand the user’s underlying needs (Richardson, 2013). These interactions resulted in features that would assist the user in making informed decisions about their restaurant selection. To visually explain the concept, the design teams have developed an interactive prototype: http://invis.io/4CKL3J2W.

Designing Digital Activism

Figure 1: Prototype interface has been redesigned to accommodate user feedback.

Figure 2: By combining colorcoding with a star system, users are quickly able to determine fairness ratings.

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Figure 3: Restaurant information screen shows presentation of pertinent user-generated data for each establishment.

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Conclusion

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Rhetoric is uniquely situated to contribute to projects like Fair & Square in terms of its rich tradition of engaging in both social justice outreach projects and the digital. Applications that can shape and change how and in what way communication occurs have the potential to have a large effect on the social lives of workers and users. Here we map out a potential approach for scholars interested in social justice issues to create digital tools that can facilitate justice, diminish violence, lessen oppression, or otherwise alter undesirable social dynamics. Critical action in information systems must understand and engage in larger systems of informational and semiotic interaction to be effective in changing and addressing undesirable social ills. While rhetoric has traditionally been assigned as a critical move in understanding situations of informational meaning making, new information technologies allow for interventions that move beyond descriptive research. The move from critique to design is a powerful move for rhetorical scholars who want to make material impact in people’s lives. The extension beyond the rhetorician to ordinary people to become agents of social change moves the rhetorician “outside the university” (Cushman, 1996) and encourages rhetorical scholars to engage communities in ways that address social problems long after the scholars have left. As we have shown, UX provides rhetoricians a number of exciting possibilities to be agents of social change by creating UX designs that lower the barriers for others to become agents of social change. We see a number of possibilities in rhetoric’s critical edge for UX designers. Rhetorical scholarship and associated methodologies offer robust ways of understanding both material and informational ecologies at larger scales of impact than those offered by traditional UX design. UX designers, like technical communicators, always exist in a space of advocacy and translation between users, information, and clients. The rhetorical impact of work like Fair & Square moves this advocacy into larger systems. This allows for an expansion outside of the user to a broader group of stakeholders and extends content into a deeper level of context. We think Fair & Square’s design process shows how other stakeholders, like farm workers, can have needs addressed and supported while at the same time supporting user decisions. When we expand impact of design beyond “the user” to encompass larger social and economic information needs, multiple stakeholders can benefit. Such a move gives UX designers a more robust view of user experience impacts beyond users and clients. Placing users and clients in larger systems of meaning allows for better nuanced and focused UX design decisions.

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Implications We think Fair & Square could exist at the level of “popular technology” (Eubanks, 2011) that does not seek to persuade through message but rather supports everyday decision making in an ethical manner (i.e., where to eat). Changing habits is difficult for most people. Asking consumers to change a habit because it is adversely impacting an unknown other runs a likely risk, but we think giving users the right kind of information at the right time helps users make better ethical decisions. Bad design can come from the design/development team not fully understanding the needs of the user (Morville and Rosenfeld, 2006). In this work, we extend the notion of the impact of design beyond “the user” to encompass marginalized populations, in Fair & Square’s case, farmworkers that may be impacted by design choices. We expand Morville and Rosenfeld’s concept of good design to one that incorporates the project design, the data within the design, and the impact of various populations that are affected by design privileging, including those who are marginalized. At a conceptual level, the design of Fair & Square took into account both the interests of farmworkers and the habits of consumers and both populations directly and indirectly informed and guided the design process. The design team’s original goal was to create a gaming app that addressed the multiple levels of injustice experienced by farm workers. However, through the design team’s process of dwelling with farm worker advocates, we quickly learned that the idea of using a game to address what amounted to the oppression of a social group would not have the intended effect. Instead, we opted for an app that would put information in the hands of consumers to share with other consumers and attempt to destabilize the activity of food production. While efforts to address fair labor and fair food issues are underway and headed up by professional organizations, Fair & Square is a grassroots effort that calls on average, concerned citizens to leverage their collective, consumer power in support of farmworkers. Non-experts in the role of moderators can help make sense of networks and synthesize information to help separate fact from fiction when an excess of information exists (Potts, 2009). Related to Fair & Square, moderators could verify information that is posted regarding restaurants, distributors, farms, and etc. Once a particular “fact” reaches a critical number of posts, moderators could invite restaurants to provide additional information and/or fact check information posted regarding local farms. The scope of tracking the relationships and associations involved in the food production system is so massive that non-expert participation is critical as part of the initial effort. In the moderator role, non-expert citizens can work to expand local capacity and achieve citizen objectives (Grabill, 2007). At an op-

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erational level, Fair & Square acknowledges and relies upon the power of collective, rhetorical action to challenge dominant social tendencies.

References

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Ackerman, J. (2003). A space for rhetoric in everyday life. In M. Nystrand (Ed.), Towards a rhetoric of everyday life: New directions in research in writing, text and discourse (pp. 84–117). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Albers, M. J. (2009). Information relationships: The source of useful and usable content. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, pp. 171–178. doi:10.1145/1621995.1622027. Bødker, S. (1989). A human activity approach to user interfaces. Human-Computer Interaction, 4(3), pp. 171–95. Cintrón, R. (2003). “Gates locked” and the violence of fixation. In M. Nystrand (Ed.), Towards a rhetoric of everyday life: New directions in research in writing, text and discourse, (pp. 5–37). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cushman, E. (1996). The rhetorician as an agent of social change. College Composition and Communication, 47(1), pp. 7–28. Diehl, A., Grabill, J. T., Hart-Davidson, W., and Iyer, V. Grassroots: Supporting the knowledge work of everyday life. Technical Communication Quarterly, 17(4), pp. 413–434. doi:10.1080/10572250802324937. Dragga, S. & Voss, D. (2001). Cruel pies: The inhumanity of technical illustrations. Technical Communication, 48(3), pp. 265–274. Eubanks, V. (2011). Digital dead end fighting for social justice in the information age. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Gannes, L. (2015, February). Mapping detroit. Recode.net. Retrieved from http://player.theplatform.com/p/PhfuRC/vNP4WUiQeJFa/select/ JajFXNzJyqQL?autoPlay=true Grabill, J. T. (2007). Writing community change: Designing technologies for citizen action. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology a case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3) pp. 277– 310. doi:10.1177/1050651912439539. Hart-Davidson, W. (2013).What are the work patterns of technical communication? In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber, Solving Problems in Technical Communication (50–74). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holtzblatt, K., & Beyer, H. (1993). Making customer-centered design work for teams. Communications of the the Association for Computing Machinery, 36(10) pp. 92–103.

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Jones, D. (2013). From research to design: Building knowledge so that we can build experiences. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 1(4) pp. 22–25. doi:10.1145/2524248.2524254. Kaptelinin, V. & Nardi, B. A. (2006). Acting with technology: Activity theory and interaction design. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Katz, S. B. (1992). The ethic of expediency: Classical rhetoric, technology, and the Holocaust. College English, 54(3), pp. 255– 275. doi:10.2307/378062. Potts, L. (2009). Designing for disaster: Social software use in times of crisis. International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 1(2), pp. 34–47. Morville, P., & Rosenfeld, L. (2006). Information architecture for the World Wide Web. Cambridge; Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. Richardson, K. H. (2013). It’s not about usability. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 1(3), pp. 54–56. doi:10.1145/2466489.2466500. Rutsch, P. (2015, February 12). Like Yelp for labor rights: This app rates how restaurants treat workers. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/ sections/thesalt/2015/02/12/385739008/like-yelp-for-labor-rightsthis-app-rates-how-restaurants-treat-workers Salvo, M. J. (2004). Rhetorical action in professional space information architecture as critical practice. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 18(1), pp. 39–66. doi:10.1177/1050651903258129. Scott, J. B., Longo, B., and Wills, K. V. (2007). Critical power tools: Technical communication and cultural studies (illustrated edition.). New York: State University of New York Press. Simmons, W. M., & Zoetewey, M. W. (2012). Productive usability: fostering civic engagement and creating more useful online spaces for public deliberation. Technical Communication Quarterly, 21(3), pp. 251–76. doi:10.1 080/10572252.2012.673953. Williams, M. F., & Pimental, O. (2014). Communicating race, ethnicity, and identity in technical communication. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing.

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18 Badges as Architectures of Experience: From Signaling to Communication Stephanie Vie, Rudy McDaniel, and Joseph R. Fanfarelli

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n recent years, interest in the rhetorical underpinnings of games has increased. In rhetoric and composition as well as technical communication, games have been researched as rhetorical objects, including attention to their design and the user experience constructed within (deWinter & Moeller, 2014; McAllister, 2004; Moberly, 2008; Ruggill & McAllister, 2011; Thompson & Ouellette, 2013). Concurrently, with the rising prevalence of social networks, elements of sociality have increased within games (Juul, 2010), leading to significant jumps in adoption of socially networked and mobile-based games. These games must be carefully designed to create and maintain an engaging, immersive experience for players that encourages social interaction among users and continued interaction between players and the system itself. Given the centrality of audience participation and participatory design within user-experience design, we can apply these studies of games and rhetoric to experience architecture as cases to study. Specifically, we can learn from these strategies when thinking about how to design compelling experiences for emerging media products and social media technologies. One such participatory design element that draws upon the embedded sociality of games is badges. While used frequently in games-based systems, they can be implemented outside these systems as well, such as in an online course or in community review sites. These visible markers of achievements are rhetorical objects that provide meaningful information about both designer intent and user experience. That is, as designed objects, badges provide insight about designers’ value systems. Similarly, badges illuminate users’ interests and activities in an environment (or, in some cases, what the designers believe users’ interests and activities might be). In this chapter, we propose that badges can be designed in order to sustain ongoing conversations between systems and users as well as among the users themselves. Our analysis addresses how badges can be used to foster communication and continued activity (bi-directional interaction) and not just signaling (one-way messages). As a result, badges can be seen as rhetorical and communicative objects, not just mechanical, signaling architectures of experience. The chapter proceeds as follows: We first articulate a theory of badges as designed objects that draw from rhetoric and experience architec304

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ture. Next, we describe how badges can be efficiently designed using principles from the rhetorical canon and from design literature in order to build better, more meaningful badges. Finally, we offer two case studies of badging systems drawn from socially networked environments; these examples showcase rhetorical elements such as design and aesthetics, visual unity, and style and tone.

A Theoretical Approach to Designing Badges Digital badges are objects that rely on both rhetoric and experience architecture. As objects prevalent in gaming systems and social networks, badges draw deeply on rhetoric because they are aimed at motivating players’ behaviors (Takatalo, Häkkinen, Kaistinen, & Nyman, 2010). The most effective badging systems integrate ideas from rhetoric, design (Lidwell et al., 2003; Norman, 2013; Hickey et al., 2014), and the social psychology of badging (Antin & Churchill, 2011). These effective badges are thus rhetorical and communicative, rather than just mechanical and signaling, architectures of experience. That is, well-designed badging systems rely on and amplify the social elements of the systems within which they reside; they encourage communication within that social network—between the humans in that system and between the participants and the system itself (bi-directional interaction), not just one-way signaling from the technological system to the users within. Experience architecture for socially networked games and systems moves beyond simple game mechanics and instead attends to larger interpersonal concerns to create immersive, interactive spaces that include badging design. Along with relying on experience architecture, effective badging systems incorporate rhetorical principles. In particular, the canons of rhetoric serve as a way to analyze interfaces, user experiences, and digital culture (Potts & Harrison, 2013), with multiple rhetorical scholars reclaiming or remediating these rhetorical canons as a framework for considering communication design in technologically mediated spaces (see Bolter & Joyce, 1993; Brooke, 2009; DeVoss & Porter, 2006; Yancey, 1993). Porter (2009), for example, offered a theoretical framework for digital delivery that addresses five elements: body/identity, distribution/circulation, access/ accessibility, interaction, and economics, all of which are crucial aspects of successful digital badging design. Similarly, Potts and Harrison (2013) mapped aspects of technological systems onto the traditional rhetorical canons, such as delivery (technology type), memory (recall), arrangement (structure), and style (of content). In doing so, they articulated a framework that allows researchers and designers to study how to best support the

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already existing features of a community through the creation of technological elements such as badges. Along with the rhetorical canons (and remediations thereof), badges—as visual and socially embedded objects—use design elements drawn from psychological theory to help them communicate among human audiences, not just between humans and technological systems. For example, Casilli (2013) described how badge designers must consider visual and information design as they create badge pathways that rely upon descriptive, rather than prescriptive, approaches—ultimately seeking to create “desire pathways” with the greatest capacity for knowledge and system emergence as users navigate systems featuring badges. Similarly, the completion logic (Hamari & Eranti, 2011) behind badges, the action that must be executed or event that must take place in order to earn the badge, signals what the designers find most important in the system, or how they anticipate users may interact within a system. However, as Norman (2007) noted, there is a fundamental difference between signaling and communication, and this distinction is useful in the evaluation of badging. For badges, signaling is relatively easy, while useful communication is often quite difficult. Crawford (2012) likened good interactivity, metaphorically speaking, to good conversation. It is easy to use a badge to provide performance feedback (one-way conversation). It is harder to use a badge to change behaviors in order to sustain an ongoing interactive conversation between systems and users, or even between users and other users (a two-way conversation). In Figure 1, for instance, we see an example of a typical badging system within a social environment that relies mainly on performance feedback, a one-way conversation. This badging system (drawn from a consumer product review site, BzzAgent) shows badges offered to the user upon completion of a particular task; most of these achievements are simply provided automatically when a certain number of tasks have been performed, such as “first Facebook brand page post” or “10th review.”

Badges as Architectures of Experience

Figure 1. Badges in BzzAgent product review site These achievement possibilities are not visible to users prior to their earning; that is, until a user has achieved a badge, she is not aware of its potential existence. This element of surprise can encourage participants to explore gaming environments, for example, by looking around different levels or poking around and prodding various items in an attempt to discover hidden badges. However, in non-gaming environments such as the product review site pictured, the surprise aspect of these badges can be demotivational: Why bother looking around or interacting in particular ways, a user might ask, if I’m not even sure if anything will happen in the end? Additionally, if achievements are unlocked at regular intervals (such as every tenth tweet or every five product reviews), but are then removed at a later point, the user may become further demotivated (Fanfarelli, Vie, & McDaniel, 2015). And while social elements are available in this badging system— such as sharing the achievement on networks like Facebook and Twitter—as Figure 2 shows, the user is merely able to share their badge with others in a preformatted template that is not constructed to encourage additional communication among users.

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Figure 2. Pre-formatted Twitter tweet from BzzAgent.com

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These examples illustrate that badges are key informational components of the conceptual “system images” (Norman, 2013, p. 31) that suggest options for how users can interact with designed content. Further, well-designed badging systems are constructed with the users and their interactions in mind; as they are rhetorically constructed, they impact the methods participants use to share information. Socially embedded digital badging systems, for example, can bring together task completion, visible rewards, and group identification to encourage users to participate in particular ways and to interact with other users and the technological system itself in appropriate ways (Fanfarelli, Vie, & McDaniel, 2015). Figure 3 shows a digital badging system, the Nike+ fitness app, used within a community of runners. In this example, task completion, visible rewards, and group identification all play a part: users are rewarded visibly (and can share results with friends in their social network) for completing running goals such as finishing a 10K run or running every day for a “streak” of time. Other runners can quickly scan these badges as a form of in-group identification, seeing rapidly, for instance, whether a user is a beginning runner or one who mainly runs short distances versus a more seasoned runner who completes longer distances like 15K (9.32 miles) or 20K (12.42 miles) runs.

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Figure 3. Nike+ Fitness App badges What is crucial here is that the badges are not only signaling, or providing feedback (as in Figures 1 and 2), but that they are also engaging the user in a prolonged experience within which that user must also reciprocate (Figure 3). The system encourages users to perform particular tasks by awarding badges (“speaking” to users). Badges appear once the users do those things, and if the badges are well designed, a user will theoretically continue to “listen” to the system’s desires and adjust her behavior accordingly to earn new badges. A runner who uses the Nike+ fitness app and who achieves her first

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trophy for running one week in a row, for instance, is likely to continue this streak in order to achieve the next level badge. Indeed, Nike’s tagline for the app, “Do more than before,” speaks to this design element that is meant to motivate users to continually chase the next level. Similar health and fitness applications like MyFitnessPal or Runkeeper rely on what Whitson (2011) described as the process of “collecting, collating and analyzing minute data and providing feedback on how to better care for one’s self” (p. 167). MyFitnessPal rewards users for logging in for long streaks of time to tally their daily caloric intake and exercise goals, proclaiming “[username] has logged in for twelve days in a row!” visibly to the other participants in the network. Runkeeper similarly showcases user-generated data such as personal achievements (see Figure 4), which other participants in the network can comment on if the user shares these achievements with his social network.

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Figure 4. Runkeeper personal achievements In each example, we see how the system speaks through its design, while the users speak through their mediated behaviors and activities. Each must listen to one another, think about new data, and respond accordingly in order for the overall interaction to be effective. And particularly for socially networked systems within which users are encouraged to participate as quantified selves—their bodies as sources of data like distance run, pounds gained or lost, or number of days logged in—users are encouraged through the design of the system and its badging elements to always strive for more: Moreover, becoming the victorious subject of gamification is a never-ending levelling-up process, guided by a teleology of constant and con-

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tinual improvement, driven by an unending stream of positive feedback and virtual rewards, and fuelled by the notion that this process is playful (Whitson, 2011, p. 169). As artifacts of user experience enmeshed within socially networked technologies, badges can reveal patterns about how products and technological systems are actually used by people. As the movement toward more and more data surrounding the quantified self, and badging systems that celebrate and encourage the continued collection of and action upon this data, however, it is crucial that badging designers account for important issues such as privacy and surveillance. Thus, as Potts (2014) argued, “As the industry moves toward producing more participatory tools, we must reassess how we can architect for those experiences” (p. 99). Badges are no exception. In the next section, we ask how we can build better, more meaningful badges using what we know of experience architecture and rhetoric, particularly principles of usability. To answer this question, we argue that we must use our knowledge of rhetoric and experience architecture to better account for users’ future functional and emotional needs (Norman, 2007) and put these needs in useful conversation with design practices. In doing so, we address both the informational and practical goals of a designer while also allowing for compelling interactions and experiences from users. At the same time, however, we must be cognizant of crucial issues raised in networked systems regarding user privacy and data management. This section offers several case studies of badging systems; here, we investigate how rhetoric and experience architecture combine to create immersive, interactive badging systems. We describe the use of design guidelines, such as those proposed by Lidwell, Holden, and Butler (2003), giving special consideration to the impact of visual design on aesthetics and information transmission for two-way communication and conversation. Discussions include how, for example, alignment, proximity, color, and highlighting may be used to enhance the effectiveness and usability of badges. We also address strategies for effectively using social media and game-related elements to connect with users and implement participatory design practices. Finally, we note that the shift toward embedded sociality in games and moves toward the quantified self further underlie the necessity of participatory design to ensure badging systems can build an “actual experience that real, live users use to better their lives” (Getto, Potts, & Salvo, 2013, p. 66) while remaining aware that this experience works alongside tensions about privacy and personal data management in social systems.

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Examples of Effective Badging Systems

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In recent years, with the increase in wearable technologies for health and fitness (such as the Fitbit activity tracker), the quantified-self movement has taken off. The quantified-self movement involves individuals who engage in “the self-tracking of any kind of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information. There is a proactive stance toward obtaining information and acting on it” (Swan, 2013, p. 85). An individual may wear a Fitbit activity tracker to capture the number of steps taken in a day, then modify his or her behavior (like taking the stairs instead of an elevator or parking further away from a store) so as to increase the number of steps over time. Not all quantified-self data gathering is exercise and fitness related: for instance, several popular mobile apps allow women to track their menstrual and ovulation cycles while others let users track their sleep cycles and wake them during periods of light sleep. Many of these wearable technologies and mobile applications for health, fitness, and exercise offer digital badging systems to encourage users to reach particular goals and strive for further success. The Fitbit activity tracker offers badges in five categories: daily steps, daily climb, lifetime climb, lifetime distance, and weight goals. A similar product from Nike, the Nike+ Fuelband, gamifies exercise by offering activity points that unlock achievements. Runtastic allows participants to compete and show their scores on a leaderboard that compares their scores with those of their friends; also, much like the Fitbit and Fuelband, Runtastic showcases badges such as “Pushups hero level 1” (for 250 push-ups completed). Many connect with social networks like Twitter and Facebook, allowing users to share their achievements with friends. Figure 5 offers one example of an automatic push update from Runtastic that points to the app’s ability to track a user’s sleep patterns.

Figure 5. Runtastic Twitter push update These technologies make it easier than ever before to track massive amounts of personal data, share it with an audience, parse the potential meanings of these data, and work to act upon them as well.

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Applications such as these that use digital badging systems that have been designed with rhetorical and experience architecture principles in mind are frequently successful not only for one-way communication (providing feedback to the user), but also two-way communication between the user and the technological system as well as multiple users within the system. In their analysis of multiple participants using activity trackers with badging systems (Fitbit, Nike+ Fuelband, Striiv), Fritz, Huang, Murphy, and Zimmerman (2014) found that these individuals developed significant attachments to these devices and the attendant badging systems, often modifying their behaviors through what they call “durable changes” like walking more, taking the stairs more frequently, or standing while working (p. 5). Furthermore, the authors noted that long-term users relied heavily on social networks as a motivator for change, but finding the right networks with which to share their data was sometimes challenging. Simply sharing with real-life friends and family was often not the best approach, and instead finding motivational communities of like-minded individuals—as well as allowing for changes in these social networks over time—was more appropriate. Here we use aspects of Porter’s (2009) remediated elements of digital delivery and Potts and Harrison’s (2013) updated canons for socially networked communities to examine several popular badging systems associated with activity trackers. Porter articulated a series of five elements related to digital delivery: body/identity, distribution/circulation, access/accessibility, interaction, and economics. Table 1. Porter’s Elements of Digital Delivery Body/identity

concerning online representations of the body, gestures, voice, dress, and image, and questions of identity and performance and online representations of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity

Distribution/ circulation

concerning the technological publishing options for reproducing, distributing, and circulating digital information

Access/accessibility

concerning questions about audience connectedness to Internet-based information

Interaction

concerning the range and types of engagement (between people, between people and information) encouraged or allowed by digital designs

Economics

copyright, ownership and control of information, fair use, authorship, and the politics of information policy

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Potts and Harrison’s (2013) examination of the interfaces of social networking communities Reddit and 4chan uses four of the five canons of rhetoric (invention, delivery, memory, arrangement, and style) as a heuristic for analyzing the rhetorical implications of interface design. While we do not examine memory in our analysis of digital badging systems here, we see delivery, arrangement, and style as crucial elements for such systems— these elements allow for the most effective creation of badges within social technologies. Table 2: Interface characteristics and the canons of rhetoric

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Delivery

Memory

Arrangement

Style

Platform

Affordance

Layout

Text

System

Meme

Template

Images

These two approaches to designing technological systems are highly effective as a framework for experience architects creating successful digital badging systems. After all, badges are implemented in order to create change. Whether it’s behavior, perspective, knowledge, or feelings toward the system, badges are meant to transform the user or their experience. Persuasive in nature, the rhetorical canons describe the process of creating such transformations. Through the invention, arrangement, styling, memorization, and delivery of information, both badges and speakers are equipped with the power to create meaningful change. Porter’s (2009) focus on delivery is particularly useful for badging. Delivering a badge is not straightforward. It occurs amidst a complex transactional process that is affected by the actions that take place both before and after its occurrence. Consider the factors surrounding a badge’s delivery. The designer will predefine the actions that must occur in order for a badge to be awarded. The participant may or may not be given access to view the required actions. If access is provided, this information may be easy or difficult to locate (e.g., large highlighted text presented in the center of the screen versus text accessible through a series of menu items), a quality that may be further affected by individual traits (e.g., expert computer operators, people with good vision, and dedicated seekers interested in badges may have more success finding obscurely placed badge requirements). The user may then complete or fail to complete badged actions, either aware or unaware that the actions they complete will award them a badge, and may complete them in an order that was not predicted by the badge’s designer. These factors are impactful, introducing uncertainty that could derail any intended progressions in the presentation of information or system inter-

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actions. Further complications arise when badges can come from different sources—a situation where a badge’s value and effectiveness may depend on the ethos of the badge’s awarding entity. The list goes on to include factors in visual design, user-to-user communication (e.g., the processes and decisions made by users sharing badges), and so on. Porter’s focus on delivery provides a breakdown of the specific factors to consider when developing the process of badge awarding. The rhetorical canons are complementary to Porter’s framework, providing a more generalized, yet still specific, view of the steps required to navigate the complexity of badging to arrive at a design that promotes meaningful change in the person or the user experience. The rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—each are linked to the badging process in several ways. Consider this: As participants undergo the processes required to list badges on their public profiles, they are effectively presenting an argument based on ethos. We know, for example, that badges can be used to form a number of arguments tied to credibility, from indicating social status (“I am important”) to expertise (“I am good at this”) and beyond (Antin & Churchill, 2011). Similarly, as participants decide which badges to acquire and use on their profiles, they work through the process of invention. Selectively hiding and showing badges enables participants to make public only the badges that support their argument. Badges may be deemed more or less evidential based on their styling. A candidate for a job in the legal field who is using her profile to show her professionalism and qualifications may choose to hide badges that use overly colorful presentation with cartoon-like shapes and designs. Their tone can influence the candidate’s perceived identity, negatively impacting ethos. In contrast, a candidate may choose badges which are relevant to the position’s duties and which use clean lines and tasteful colors. Badges may be even more appropriate if they include indicators of ethos noting that they were awarded by a well-respected entity, providing evidence of the candidate’s qualifications from a trustworthy source. After badges have been selected, their arrangement can perform two rhetorical functions. If many badges are displayed, it is possible that those reviewing the profile will only examine the first few badges. Here, the badges that provide the most substantial evidence for an individual’s character may be displayed first, with less critical evidence being displayed later in the progression. Alternatively, badges can be arranged to present evidence according to another criteria for ordering. For instance, just as a résumé may be structured in chronological order to show a consistent work history, badges may be displayed in chronological order to show a person’s commitment to a cause or progression through the ranks. Consider a series of badges that show that a student won the high school science fair, was

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awarded with a scholarship, won an undergraduate research competition, and was a graduate of an Ivy League university. If these badges are placed in the described order, they present a narrative of a dedicated individual who consistently worked hard and excelled throughout his academic life—a narrative that provides strong evidence that this person will continue to excel in his next role. Finally, memory and delivery are inherent to the badge’s platform and are less reliant on the human who was awarded the badge. After a participant selects which badges should be hidden or displayed and their order, the platform will save the preferences (memory) and open the badges for observation by others using the platform. As others view the badge earner’s profile, the badges are displayed and the evidence is delivered. Porter’s framework addresses complexity in delivery, lending insight into this step of the process. The result of the rhetorical process becomes self-contained in the memory of a web page or other system. Badge earners must consider how and when they can provide access for outside individuals to see the badges they have collected. In the case of a job applicant, an individual may enhance her ethos by including a link on her résumé. In essence, such an inclusion delivers an argument to the employer (i.e., providing access to the desired audience) just as she is searching for the candidate’s qualifications (kairos). As the information is delivered, so is the argument, and the rhetorical process is completed. In addition to these smaller case study examples, we analyze two specific examples in more detail in the last section of our chapter. The following two cases employ rhetorical analyses to investigate the use of specific design elements that enable two-way communication in health-based applications. The digital badging systems we analyze are Nike’s Nike+ Running app, a running-based fitness application, and Lose It!, a weight-loss tracker application. Both systems are excellent examples of quantified-self technologies that allow users to gather large amounts of longitudinal health and fitness data that can then be used to change user behaviors. Also, both systems feature digital badging systems that are integrated into socially networked environments. Such environments create a support network for participants that allows for better two-way communication (between users and the technological system and/or users and other users) as compared to other digital badging systems that simply provide one-way feedback from the system to users.

Nike+ Running App Global fitness company Nike released the Nike+ Running app in September 2010 as a way for users with a GPS-enabled phone to track their mileage

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and running activity. “Track, get motivated, and improve with the ultimate running app” states the Nike+ website, which is integrated with the app and allows users to more easily track and share their results with others. Offered for both iPhone and Android smartphones, the Nike+ Running App allows users to track their participation against others in their social network, challenge friends to a race, and receive badges for successful completion of tasks. Some of these badges include time- or distance-based achievements (such as a “night rider” trophy for running between 10:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m.) or even date-based achievements (a “Trick or Treat” Jack-o’-lantern for running on Halloween). When considering rhetorical delivery, the platform has been streamlined to allow for greater numbers of individuals to participate as compared to earlier in the product’s lifecycle. That is, when Nike+ first offered an activity tracker in 2006, it required the purchase of a special transmitter device that had to be embedded in the runner’s shoe; this transmitter would then transmit data to an Apple device or a Nike+ wearable technology like the Sportband or Sportwatch. The limitations of this early platform meant that delivery to the greatest number of participants was throttled: Having to buy special technologies from Nike and Apple presented economic barriers to some potential users of the system. But in 2010 when the Nike+ Running app was offered—which did not require any specialized equipment aside from a smartphone with GPS capabilities—the interface opened up to a much wider swath of possible users. The arrangement of the Nike+ Running app is streamlined and uses a bold red-and-white color scheme throughout (see Figure 6). Runners can challenge friends in their network to races; can share their runs to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest; and can see their badges (or “trophies”) earned. While the app uses a consistent color scheme, the badges do not contain visual design elements that unify them as a single system. Fonts, colors, designs, and even art styles vary between badges. However, these badges are not meant to be displayed amongst badges from other systems, and a unifying element may not have been deemed necessary by the designers—they did not expect that their badges would be in a position where they are co-located with badges from other systems and could be potentially confused with those badges. However, they did implement grouping within the badging system, using shape to create distinct categories (e.g., circular badges for efficient workouts, hexagonal for workouts on holidays). Such practices enable viewers who are part of the community (and have a general familiarity with its badging system) to recognize what kind of achievements the earner completed.

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Figure 6. Nike+ Running App

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Lose It! is a popular online database and front-end software system used to track calorie and nutrient intake as well as exercise and fitness data. Participants enter data using the online website or through applications that can be downloaded to their smartphones. While the primary focus of this application is on calorie tracking, the system also depends heavily on social interaction and community feedback. The website claims that the software has helped its over twenty-four million members lose more than forty million total pounds since its introduction in 2008.

Figure 7. Lose It! Badges

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An application that aims to help people lose weight through calorie counting must persuade these individuals to achieve a net calorie loss over a period of time. One method that Lose It! employs to encourage this is a badging system that provides positive feedback when participants adopt healthy lifestyle changes. Examples might include implementing a regular exercise regimen, eating more vegetables, competing in community challenges, or losing an amount of weight and keeping it off for a period of time. Rhetorically speaking, Lose It! badges are successful in part because their delivery helps to reinforce the habits of use necessary for success in a weight loss program. For instance, the awarding of badges for eating lots of vegetables helps to demonstrate the importance of veggies for those days where participants are hungry, but don’t have a lot of extra calories to spare. Since many vegetables can be consumed at the same caloric “cost” of less nutritionally wholesome foods, such as cupcakes and chips, badges help to highlight positive foods by delivering this positive feedback when Lose It! users are eating foods deemed acceptable by the system. Stylistically, Lose It! is also smart about using icons and images that individuals will find familiar and comfortable. Pictures of shopping carts, automobile trunks, and grocery bags are all common and recognizable objects already integrated into the everyday lives of the busy individuals tracking their inputs and outputs through the software. By showing these containers as overflowing with healthy vegetables, the system images of the badges are suggesting how one might replace bad shopping habits with good ones, thereby continuing the possibilities of continuous net calorie loss using the system. While the images are familiar, little is done to promote categorical unity. The badges are unified, system-wide, through their distinct starburst shape, but there are a number of visual inconsistencies between badges that are awarded for similar purposes (e.g., writing log streaks mostly use clipboards, but sometimes break the pattern by including train and geyser images). Thus, while the application does a good job of relating to the everyday experiences of participants, there is a design opportunity here to better stylize these badges for a more consistent experience across genres and levels of badging.

Conclusion Rhetoric provides a useful framework from which to consider the design of communication-based badging interactions as potential tools within the experience architect’s toolbox. When designed and used effectively, badges can be developed to motivate participants, to shift attention to particular parts of an interface, to encourage community collaboration, and to shape and

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mold participant interactions in any number of interesting ways. As experience architects, then, it is vitally important to understand the parameters in which these powerful design tools are most effective. Analyzing badging through the rhetorical canons and from the perspective of experience architecture provides new insights for how we might design badges for more effective two-way communication. By integrating modern understandings of visual design, badging systems may be constructed to deliver clear messages as they are implemented in communicative scenarios. Especially in social media, such badging is effective in fostering meaningful communication both between participants and between designers and participants. Such discourse informs us about the values and expectations of badge designers, earners, and sharers. This information is important given that a better understanding of both participant and designer values and expectations is necessary, perhaps even critical, for catalyzing new basic and applied research projects relevant to experience architecture more broadly considered.

References

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Antin, J., & Churchill, E. F. (2011). Badges in social media: A social psychological perspective. Gamification Workshop, CHI 2011, 1–4. Vancouver, BC, Canada. Bolter, J. D., & Joyce, M. (1993). Hypertext and the rhetorical canons. In Rhetorical memory and delivery: Classical concepts for contemporary composition and communication, pp. 97–111. London: Routledge. Brooke, C. G. (2009). Lingua fracta: Toward a rhetoric of new media. Hampton, NJ: New Dimensions in Computers and Composition. Casilli, C. (2013, April 28). Badge pathways: Part 2, the “quel” [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://carlacasilli.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/ badge-pathways-part-2-the-quel/ Crawford, C. (2012). Chris Crawford on interactive storytelling. Berkeley: New Riders. DeVoss, D. N., & Porter, J. (2006). Why Napster matters to writing: Filesharing as a new ethic of digital delivery. Computers and Composition, 23(1), pp. 178–210. deWinter, J., & Moeller, R. M. (2014). Computer games and technical communication: Critical methods and applications at the intersection. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Fanfarelli, J., Vie, S., & McDaniel, R. (2015). Understanding digital badges through feedback, reward, and narrative: A multidisciplinary approach to building better badges in social environments. Communication Design Quarterly, 3(3), pp. 56–60.

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Fritz, T., Huang, E. M., Murphy, G. C., & Zimmerman, T. (2014). Persuasive technology in the real world: A study of long-term use of activity sensing devices for fitness. Proceedings of CHI 2014, pp. 1–10. Vancouver, b.c., Canada. Getto, G., Potts, L., Salvo, M., & Gossett, K. (2013). Teaching UX: Designing programs to train the next generation of UX experts. Proceedings from SIGDOC ’13: Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication. New York: ACM. Hamari, J., & Eranti, V. (2011). Framework for designing and evaluating game achievements. In Proceedings of DiGRA 2011, pp. 1–20. Hilversum, Netherlands. Hickey, D. T., Otto, N., Itow, R., Schenke, K., Tran, C., & Chow, C. (2014). Badge design principles documentation project. Center for Research on Learning and Technology. Indiana University. Retrieved from http://dpdproject.info/files/2014/05/DPD-interim-report-v4-january.pdf Juul, J. (2010). A casual revolution: Reinventing video games and their players. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lidwell, W., Holden, K., & Butler, J. (2003). Universal principles of design: 100 ways to enhance usability, influence perception, increase appeal, make better design decisions, and teach through design. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers. McAllister, K. S. (2004). Game work: Language, power, and computer game culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Moberly, K. (2008). Composition, computer games, and the absence of writing. Computers and Composition, 25(3), pp. 284–299. Norman, D. A. (2007). The design of future things. New York: Basic Books. Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. New York: Basic Books. Porter, J. E. (2009). Recovering delivery for digital rhetoric. Computers and Composition, 26(4), pp. 207–224. Potts, L. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. New York: Routledge. Potts, L., & Harrison, A. (2013). Interfaces as rhetorical constructions: Reddit and 4chan during the Boston marathon bombing. In Proceedings of SIGDOC ’13, pp. 143–50. New York, NY: ACM. Ruggill, J. E., & McAllister, K. S. (2011). Gaming matters: Art, science, magic, and the computer game medium. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Swan, M. (2013). The quantified self: Fundamental disruption in big data science and biological discovery. Big Data, 1(2), pp. 85–99.

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Takatalo, J., Häkkinen, J., Kaistinen, J., & Nyman, G. (2010). Presence, involvement, and flow in digital games. In R. Bernhaupt (Ed.), Evaluating user experience in games: Concepts and methods (pp. 23–46). London: Springer-Verlaug. Thompson, J. C., & Ouellette, M. (Eds.). (2013). The game culture reader. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholar’s Press. Whitson, J. (2011). Gaming the quantified self. Surveillance and Society, 11(1/2), pp. 163–76. Yancey, K. B. (Ed.). (2006). Delivering college composition: The fifth canon. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

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19 Relocations: (Re)visioning Rhetoric in a Modern Amusement Park Jill Morris

Introduction

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t the completion of World War I, a British aviator by the name of John Barlett immigrated to North America in order to build his dream—a roller coaster that functioned without tracks and instead ran inside a twisty chute not unlike a bobsled (Parkworld, 2013). After filing a patent in 1926, the first model was built with John Miller and opened in Lake Side Park (in Dayton, Ohio)ä in 1929 under the name “Flying Turns.” The ride was an immediate success with the public and went into production. The bobsled “trains” were designed to look like planes—the ride, according to Bartlett, was meant to feel like flight. Although colloquially called a “bobsled coaster” in later iterations with steel troughs, the ride emulates the Figure 1: Flying Turns Logo. Image courtesy of feel of a fighter pilot, not a Knoebels Amusement Resort. bobsled ride. Rides quickly opened at Euclid Beach, Rocky Point, Riverside Park, and even Coney Island. They even opened overseas. The ride was fun and gained even more popularity through its seating arrangement wherein two guests sat on a small bench seat front to back—with adequate time for couples’ cuddling. The Flying Turns proved to be thrilling but safe—it felt dangerous but was not as dangerous as many rides built at the same time. Although since the 1990s very tall and very fast (exceeding 300 feet tall and 90 mph) roller coasters have been built in increasing numbers, the 1920s and 30s are seen as the golden age of roller coasters and amusement parks in America. Experimentation was far more important than safety in those days, and some writers even refer to this time period as “when roller coaster riding was a blood sport” (Brumfield, 2014). Deaths were not uncommon, and parks kept nurses on hand to deal with guests that fainted as a result of excessive g-forces (or maybe just from riding in a girdle). Instead

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of deterring riders, having doctors and nurses on hand was ultimately a successful marketing move for parks that wanted to be seen as having the most extreme thrills around. While today’s rides are very safe, having few restraints and no computers meant that rides at the time could, in fact, be fairly deadly. Eventually, six Flying Turns-style coasters were built. Unfortunately, the one at Steeplechase Park was consumed by fire only five years after it had Figure 2: Riders enjoy a ride on the Flying Turns been built. By the late 1960s, shortly after it opened. Photo courtesy of Knoebels the only one left standing after Amusement Resort. park closures and ride replacements was at Euclid Beach in Cleveland. It became common for parks—usually landlocked by other developments—to tear down rides in order to build faster, newer models. Unfortunately, this means that many rides have been lost, and many more were lost to fire and closures. The last Flying Turns coaster was lost in such a closure—Euclid Beach closed for its final season in 1969. Some rides were relocated, like the Racing Derby that was taken to Cedar Point, but many more were lost permanently. Or that’s what we thought. In 2006, Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysburg, Pennsylvania began construction on a new Flying Turns roller coaster created from original blue prints and designs by Miller and Bartlett. Knoebels was able to 324 procure one of the original cars from the coaster that had run at Euclid Beach. Engineers hoped to study it to be able to recreate the trains for the new ride, as well as determine the best structure for the coaster’s lift and trough. Using that car and blueprints of the original, they began to redesign Flying Turns from the ground up to meet modern safety guidelines and guest expectations. The ride’s completion is a story of perseverance in and of itself—it did not open until 2013. Although the initial track only took a year to build, making the trains safe by today’s standards was a task that would take much more time. Dick Knoebel—park owner—was determined that this particular attraction deserved to thrill riders again and has created a living history exhibit as one of the centerpieces of his park. But why? To what end? What

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could guests experience via this ride that they could not on others? What could they learn? Be persuaded of? And how can park designers bear witness to the past while not alienating new guests experiencing this ride (and others like it—Knoebels houses many antique rides)? Amusement park design today borrows a lot from the work of Walt Disney—who was an experience architect in spirit if not by name. He devised methods of park structure and layout to guide a guest through the park and control “traffic” (for example, he placed “weenies”—structures that drew the eye and got people to move towards them like Cinderella’s castle—at key points in the park when he needed guests to keep walking to get to other attractions). Although most coaster designers today are less concerned with how rides look than Disney Imagineers are, most parks apply his concepts (and hence XA) to some extent. At Knoebels, rides are chosen and designed to create an “old-fashioned” atmosphere, and rides such as Impulse and the Flying Turns are located on main pathways and attract park visitors to move toward them. In this chapter I examine how park designers have (re)created the past in one park, Knoebels, through experience architecture and rhetoric as a suggestion to how educational and fun environments can immerse us in a surprisingly complex story. While Disney World is the archetype for environmental storytelling through ride experiences, Knoebels introduces guests to the idea that their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were just as thrill-seeking (and perhaps more) than they themselves, that our past designers deserve recognition and rejuvenation, and that amusement parks need not host the biggest, tallest, and fastest rides to still be the best.

Literature Review Nielson and Norman (2015) of the Nielson Norman Group define user experience as a concept that “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with a company, its services, and its products.” Experience Architects (XA) study the interaction of the user with an entire place, product, website, or space in order to better understand and design for users’ real needs—those things that they actually do versus the things that they say that they want in surveys and interviews. People in this and related fields might study visual design by looking at the aesthetics of a user interface (in the case study here— an amusement park ride) and making sure that it “looks good, communicates the right image to users, and conforms to any brand guidelines” (Macefield, 2012). Additionally, they might look at usability as well—how many and how well can people use the product? They might develop usability surveys, study what users want, and might use software and statistics to study their results. In the case of amusement parks, usability engineers mostly study patterns

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of how and when guests ride certain rides, how often they ride them, what food they buy, what they ride and in what order, where guests are from, and so on in order to develop a picture of how guests use the park. They also try to improve accessibility to rides for guests with disabilities. In the amusement industry, no one does design work and theming better than Disney—at least on the surface. They have seemingly reached the pinnacle of usability and user architecture, constructing a storytelling experience for each guest that enters the park. Many of the elements of Disney parks are found elsewhere (for example—smells that are intentionally added to the atmosphere are present on Main Street U.S.A. in Walt Disney World as well as Disneyland, but are also parts of rides in other parts of the country; smells were added to the Knott’s Bear-y dark ride at Knott’s Berry Farm in 1975—of course their inclusion was likely due to the influence of Disney Imagineer and ride designer Rolly Crump), but nowhere else are they so completely combined as in the Disney parks themselves (Crump & Heimbuch, 2012). What is special about the Disney parks (and after them Universal and Busch) is their ability to create a complete, virtual world. At Disney, this is done through the process of “Imagineering”—a portmanteau of “imagine” and “engineering” (Crump & Heimbuch, 2012). WED Enterprises (standing for “Walter Elias Disney”) was eventually shortened to Walt Disney Imagineering and is responsible for the design of Disney attractions at theme parks worldwide as well as the design and implementation of past Disney attractions at various World’s Fairs and other international attractions. Walt Disney, if what one of his lead imagineers, Rolly Crump, has to say is true about him, was probably one of the first experience architects:

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He just came up with these wonderful things. That’s why he was so successful when he first started out. He used his imagination to tell a great story in the cartoons, and then in films, and then eventually in the Parks. He really had you go through the gauntlet of emotions with his work. He made you cry, he made you laugh, and he scared the pants off you. He did that in his films, and he continued to do that with the rides at Disneyland. He covered all the bases. I think the one thing that Walt taught me more about than anything else was the big picture. He had a vision, he knew exactly what it was going to be and how he was going to get there. It was almost like he’d slice through it and he knew every ingredient that was there because he lived it himself to create it. (Crump & Heimbuch, 2012, Location 3579–3586). Disney parks create immersive worlds (and thus their own “semiotic domains” if we are to follow the work of Gee, 2003), but do so by having a reliance on outside stories. While you can follow the story of Disney rides

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and parks without knowing the movies they are based upon, it is far more difficult. For example, “Under the Sea: Journey of the Little Mermaid” at Walt Disney World tells the partial story of the movie The Little Mermaid. It is a dark attraction wherein guests board seashells and ride through several scenes from the movie starting with Scuttle, the seagull from the movie, serving as a narrator and jumping us into the story. Ariel is seen wanting to join the human world while we are still above water. We spin around and go through the water line (represented by a temperature change and a tilt in the ride vehicle—a really interesting and simple effect—alongside lighting). We then see Ariel visiting Ursula, and being seemingly convinced by Sebastian that the best place to live is “Under the Sea.” This last bit is an impressive immersive scene filled with moving fish and music, and it is easily the best and longest of the entire ride. It’s easily recognizable from the movie and is one guests would want to experience—so meets the needs of XA— but doesn’t really progress the story. The ride then quickly shows Ariel being transformed into a human, her trying to get Eric (the Prince) to kiss her, and finally a quick glance at Ursula being defeated and the wedding of Ariel and Eric. The last bits are so speedy that it is almost possible to miss Ursula’s defeat if you are not watching it. Of course, guests want to experience their favorite parts of the movie—not just any part of the movie—so while it tells a story it does not tell the complete story. For that you will need to see the movie. Scott Lukas (2012) defines a world as a place that is inhabited by beings. In Disney parks, those being are put there by the Imagineers—we see those characters that are familiar to us from other Disney media. Worlds are also “complete, diverse, consistent; it has a background or history, and a culture. It is ever-changing or evolving and is characterized by relationships and forms of interconnection” (Location 170–172). When immersive worlds are designed, there must be attention to detail as well as believability and realism, but most importantly, people must be excited to visit that world. Immersive worlds are those in which guests can become fully engaged or absorbed—and that must be true for any guest, not just specific ones. According to Lukas, the best thing about historic Coney Island was that it was a place where (in the words of Guiseppe Cautella), “‘democracy meets . . . and has its first interview skin to skin,’ meaning that people—rich and middle class, men and women, black, white, and other ethnic groups—could all enjoy the attractions that had been created for them. Some of the rides there, like the Human Roulette Wheel, in fact literally threw people together. Talk about immersion!” (2012, Location 227–230). Coney Island was a model that many American theme parks and amusement parks were based off of. While several parks opened and closed on that island during the early 1900s, all of them had an influence on the design of later parks whether

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that be the inclusion of thrill rides like roller coasters or the placement of themed rides like dark attractions. The earliest aquatic park (Sea Lion Park) even appeared in that space. But worlds in Disney are not experienced as monolithic structures wherein every guest has the same internal experience. Guests will choose which rides to ride (some will find them too intense, too boring, or just to have too long of a line). There is not one single “right” way to experience these parks and rides, and so while the ideal park guest for a user architect might be one that goes through the park in some way that was “intended,” the average park guest will never meet that goal. Therefore, it is important that the parks are designed in such a way that guests can insert themselves into the story in a number of different ways in order to be immersed. In Adam Berger’s book Every Guest is a Hero (2013), Berger notes that Walt Disney was well aware that guests would naturally want to personalize their time at the parks and that he would be unable to ultimately fully control their experiences even as he assured that they would see the same things, smell the same things, and hear the same things. As a result, “He knew that they would not only enter the stories told at Disneyland (and in other Disney theme parks yet to be conceived), but would themselves become the heroes of those stories. He even hinted at this sense of personal ownership in the speech he gave on the park’s opening day on July 17, 1955. Walt’s words are memorialized on a plaque that is permanently mounted at the base of the flagpole in Disneyland’s Main Street Square. It begins: “To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land” (2013, p. 11). Disney wanted people to experience his parks in a number of different ways and left multiple routes for them to insert themselves into multiple stories. Furthermore, a park based upon a single story might not even be as successful as these parks that housed many stories at once with many ways into them—infamously, a park based upon The Wizard of Oz regrettably never opened (Jennings, 2013). According to Rolly Crump, Ken Anderson (another original Imagineer of Disneyland and Walt Disney World) envisioned that when guests were on a Peter Pan ride, that they were Peter Pan. “When you’re riding the little vehicle, you were Peter Pan and you were going through the different things that Peter Pan went through in his film. The same thing was true with Snow White; you went through the ride and you came upon the witch, and she’s swinging around offering you the apple. The whole idea that Ken had was that you were the character” (Crump, 2014, Location 77–81). Of course, you also see Peter Pan as you go through the ride, so this is not a perfect effect. In early rides based directly upon Disney movies, other Imagineers generally believed that if the popular characters were not present that guests would be unhappy that they did not get to see them (probably true).

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In later rides, such as Soarin’ USA, the guest is asked to take a more first person perspective in the ride. This is generally more possible the less wellknown and more general the story is. Adam Berger theorizes that the reason that Disney parks are so successful is because WDI (Walt Disney Imagineering) has perfected the art of combining “theme park magic” with mythic elements (2013). Entertainment technologies are perfectly combined with truly engaging stories in Disney parks, whether rides are more traditional like the Tea Cups (pardon me—Mad Tea Party) or more story-based like Peter Pan’s Adventures. The stories contain “the mythic content of the parks” (p. 27). These stories (and the mythic content) are communicated through “the lands and attractions, and through all the individual components making up the guest experience including the architecture, sets and props, costumes, lighting, landscape design, special effects, and music” (2013, p. 27). The designers of Disney rides work carefully together, often in small “ad-hoc” groups, to create and build attractions in such a way that they tell a complete and complex story. Guests may not be aware of the backstory of an attraction—you don’t have to have seen Alice in Wonderland to enjoy the tea cup ride, for example—but the experience of riding any attraction or wandering through any given “land” nevertheless feels “somehow complete, coherent, fully integrated, and ‘real’ . . . and that all the many parts and pieces belong . . . and that they all fit together to create a seamless, holistic, immersive package” (Berger, 2013, p. 28). Berger argues that Disney rides share one unifying story—the monomyth known as the “Hero’s Journey.” People who go through a hero’s journey are transformed. The myth is popular because it resonates deeply with the human psyche across many different cultures, and so it is an appropriate way of structuring attractions that will be enjoyed by people from many different cultures all over the world (2013). Most stories feature some version of the Hero’s Journey, as we know from Joseph Campbell (2008), and many of the most successful movies feature it. Berger notes that while the effect can be very notable in movies, books, and television—having a Hero’s Journey as part of a 3-D themed attraction that people will be experiencing in first person is even more effective. If the story is immersing and engulfing you—you become the hero even if you are not consciously aware of it. While heroes will often take a physical journey, Berger (2013) and Campbell (2008) both recognize that it is most important that the hero undergo some sort of physical transformation as a result of their ordeal before they return home. First, we must leave our home (the ordinary world) in order to set up a change between that world and the “special” one to come (Berger, 2013). In terms of visiting a park, the journey between home and

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the park signifies this literal leaving of the ordinary world for the theme park you have chosen to visit. Next is the “Call to Adventure,” wherein you are asked (in books/movies/etc. often by a herald) to go on some sort of adventure. Oftentimes this call is refused. Anyone that has stood with a friend or small child outside of the entrance to an amusement ride has experienced not only just such a call, but likely a refusal as well. Once you have decided to go on a ride (or accept the “Call to Adventure”) a number of thresholds must be crossed. In rides and parks, multiple gates are often passed through as we travel to the eventual ride itself. Disney parks feature themed queues that have physical gates that lead to rides, while there is also a threshold to the park itself in the park gate. The hero will also pass through a number of trials. In the case of The Little Mermaid ride at Walt Disney World, the queue is full of small motion-activated screens that guests can play with. They are tasked with helping some crabs gather items for Scuttle. By the use of some Disney magic, guests will hear the items they have collected read off by Scuttle before leaving the queue of the attraction for the ride. As guests approach the “inmost cave” (likely called “the Station” in more traditional parks) they usually will see another gate or challenge. Finally, once they have reached that location they will face the Supreme Ordeal—in our case, that is riding the ride itself. The hero must face his or her deepest fears. In many cases the hero is even asked to die, though likely will be resurrected. Fear of death has been part of the roller coaster experience from the very beginning. While coasters today are very unlikely to end in death, as mentioned before that was certainly not always the case. If they survive, guests move on to the reward (parks everywhere now have guests “exit to merch” where they can buy pictures or other merchandise as a reward of their journey and then must ultimately journey home and return to the real world (Berger, 2013). Disney and other parks do their best to make guests that are riding attractions part of the show. We can hear their screams and see them participating in the story. Berger (2013) notes that the best example of this is what occurs in the Tower of Terror attraction in Disney’s Hollywood Studios. When the elevator in the tower drops, a door in the front of the tower opens that allows everyone in the main walkway to see the guests who are riding the ride. Just briefly they are part of the attraction, even to those who are not physically experiencing it. Disney does a wonderful job of combining elements of the hero myth and their own movies’ stories into the rides, as well as displaying their best elements to the public in hopes of dragging guests into their own Hero’s Journeys. But what about other parks? How do they employ these elements? In a world where a park can be themed to anything, it turns out that “traditional American amusement park” is a theme.

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Knoebels and Its Flying Turns According to Lukas (2012), when a guest enters a space the first thing that must be answered is “What is this place?” He calls this the Mindsetter. In Knoebels, answering that questions is harder than in Walt Disney World (WDW). In WDW, you walk through a gate. Whether you have traveled to the Magic Kingdom via Ferry, Monorail, by bus, or even walking, you travel through the same gate as all other guests. Your entrance is controlled. At Knoebels there is no gate. In the spirit of a more traditional American amusement park mostly long gone, Knoebels has no gate. Parks used to make the most of their money by hoping that guests would ride, and re-ride, and re-ride their attractions—all for a set number of tickets. Because of this, the park can be entered via many directions, and though most guests choose to enter through the side with the parking lot or the side with camping, there are other ways to enter the park that are just as valid. Here, lack of control is a choice in control. If you are at all familiar with other amusement parks this destabilizing gesture suggests (rhetorically I believe) that the ethos of this park is different. Here lies dragons—if you have only been to Six Flags and Cedar Point you are about to experience something very different. Without this initial threshold, the design of the Hero’s Journey does not start when one leaves home and enters the park. In fact, it is possible to visit the park without riding a single ride (while possible at bigger parks it is far less likely—parents and grandparents who are non-riders still must buy $40-$100 tickets at most parks to not ride, so many will not come at all). Guests are also encouraged to bring dogs, which are also welcome in the park and can be part of the hero’s group of traveling companions if they so wish. You must buy tickets or a handstamp, so now park guests (if they have not bought their tickets in advance at local Weis supermarkets) now wander the park in search of a ticket booth. In so doing, they see rides, games, and food stalls they might want to try later in their day. If they arrive early enough these things might not even be open yet. Once tickets are purchased, most will line up for a major attraction that is not yet open for the day (such as the Flying Turns or one of the other roller coasters like the ever-popular Phoenix). Other than buying tickets the choices are limitless. Lukas (2012) suggests that a “cascade” of questions about what can be done or what is meant by the environment in general. Knoebels does not answer these questions, at least not easily. Anything can be done. You can walk anywhere. No part of the park is closed off to you in the morning. You can ride their latest ride—a steel roller coaster by the name Impulse—or one of the oldest ones. This destabilizing gesture of infinite opportunity is one that was employed by George Tilyou and the other proprietors of Coney Island but that is mostly not used today.

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Figure 3: Dick Knoebel stands next to the Flying Turns. Photo courtesy of Knoebels Amusement Resort.

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In comparison to other parks, Knoebels uses fairly few “weenies.” “Weenies” (another concept coined by Walt Disney) are a practice of placing large structures at the end of paths to direct guests’ attention and foot traffic further into the park (Crump & Heimbuch, 2012). When guests can enter a park from multiple directions, weenies are harder to place. The best weenie example is likely Cinderella’s castle in Walt Disney World—it stands at the center of the “hub” that connects several lands of the park and draws guests toward it from multiple locations. Due to many trees (and shorter rides), Knoebels lacks many such controlling structures. The Twister (another caster in the park), is visible from fairly far away but difficult to reach as you must traverse a creek in order to do so. Since you do not have to ride anything in the park at all in order to get your money’s worth, the Hero’s Journey begins when you select a ride and cross its threshold. Here we will specifically examine the Flying Turns in terms of mythic content and rhetorical appeals. The entrance to the ride is literally a wooden tunnel. It is styled to look like the inside of the troughs you will ride later on. This queue features multiple such arches, thresholds, and tunnels. They are slightly dark inside, as well as slightly echoey. Once inside the first arch, you are completely sur-

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rounded by the ride. Most of the outside park is completely invisible. Much like the ride it is based upon, Knoebels Flying Turns has an aeronautical theme. The outside of the ride features several modern nods to air travel while the inside of the queue does not. For example, outside the ride guests may weigh themselves with other members of their party (two people can ride together only if their combined weight is under four hundred Figure 4: Two riders can sit in each car of the pounds—weights are not dis- three-car train. Photo courtesy of Knoebels played, but instead they find Amusement Resort. out if they pass or fail by a light). This is styled precisely like the signs at major airport terminals that feature TSA Pre-check points that allow people to bypass hassles in boarding later on. This is not mentioned again within the queue, however, once the “time travel” has taken place. Once inside the queue, the guest is transported back to the 1930s. This area of the park has several rides—all but one that is visible would have been present at a park during the 1920s and 1930s (and the other that is visible is only visible because it is very tall). This is significant—other parts of the park are not nearly so segregated by decade. From the queue you can catch quick peaks at the Looper—a ride that resembles a human hamster wheel that is the only one left of its kind—and the Flyers, a popular ride that is controlled partially by the guests and that also simulates flight (this is one of the most popular non-coaster rides in the park because guests can “snap” the cables by manipulating the sail on each car well causing a loud bang and a dropping sensation). In short, you are immersed in the rides of a completely different time period. These rides allow more rider freedom. The two that are immediately visible give riders agency in a way that modern rides mostly do not. The Flying Turns itself has cars that are very open as well. However, for the most part you are only going to be able to catch brief glimpses of these rides during your wait. You are inside a giant wooden structure and can watch the ride through tiny gaps in it that only give you brief glimpses of what happens inside the wooden troughs once the ride exits one of the two lift hills. In the queue there are a number of signs that teach the history of the ride.

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By its very existence, Flying Turns argues that rides like it are not only worth preserving, but are worth rebuilding. Across the country (and also globally), older wooden roller coasters often sit abandoned past the years they can possibly be moved. They are expensive to move and therefore often are not, even as steel roller coasters are easily relocated. However, a ride is more than a sum of its parts. Rides can be rebuilt from original blue prints in new locations and still very much be the same ride. Wooden roller coasters have most of their wood replaced during their lifetime—is this Flying Turns any more or less the same ride as the original for having been rebuilt entirely? That is actually up for debate. However, in being built and still being popular in this park, Flying Turns argues for preservation even if original rides have passed from ridability. This provides hope for those SBNO (Standing But Not Operating) roller coasters such as Geauga Lake’s Big Dipper that likely will not run again in their current location but could be rebuilt elsewhere. In the queue, there are also a number of signs that educate the rider about the original ride. The second purpose of Flying Turns (third if you count having fun) is to tell the rider about Euclid Beach and the history of this attraction. Instead of focusing on the building of this ride, which Knoebels could have chosen to do, they direct the rider’s attention to the past instead. They want the rider to form a connection with those past riders—people who are not so different from them. They provide photos of the original ride with brief blurbs. If you look from the pictures on the sign to the surrounding structure you will notice that what you are standing in is nearly identical—you might as well have been transported into the heyday of American amusement parks. Near the end of the queue, you begin to be able to watch the ride ascend the lift hill. This builds antici- Figure 5: Riders of all ages can enjoy this rebuilt attraction. Photo courtesy of Knoebels pation. Guests exit the sta- Amusement Resort.

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tion in the train and come toward those waiting to enter the station before heading up the first of two lift hills. As the first screams start the riders vanish. Before entering the station, riders must cross a final threshold (another tunnel that is very similar to the one that they found at the beginning of the queue) before entering the “inmost cave” of the station itself. The station is a point of contention amongst fans, and is one place where the “theming” of the rebuilt ride somewhat falls apart. Figure 6: Computers are required to carefully The reason that the adjust the speed of each train based upon Flying Turns took so many weight and weather. Photo courtesy of Knoebels years to build is that the trains Amusement Resort. and safety mechanisms for them had to be updated to match current day practices. Each train had to “track” on the inside of the troughs in exactly the same way and had to guarantee that they would not jackknife. In order to do so, the trains had to be redesigned many times. Ultimately, the weighing of guests had to be added so that the heaviest guests ride in front and the lightest in back. The ultimate way this was done was by weighing guests with discreet panels in the floor and then asking them to line up behind “Gates” (as in modern airlines). This is a very technologically complex and sensitive system and does not quite match up with the theme of the rest of the area or attraction. However, most guests agree that if this is how it must run, they would much rather have a surviving Flying Turns that includes these features than not have one at all. The station also features flat screens that let you know when it is okay to enter the “boarding” area. Once you have been assigned your car and are clear to board, you step into the train and hook up your seatbelt. The front of the car is themed to a plane as well, complete with aeronautical instruments on the inside “cockpit.” Shortly after boarding, your train is released and ascends the first lift hill (or the first trial that is not directly related to standing in line!)The first lift is directly ahead. It is short, and before you know it the train has been re-

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leased. You might, however, have a chance to check out the Flyers off to your left. The first trough starts a few seconds after the release, and it is immediately clear that this feels different than other coasters. Once in the trough you circle down to the right, at first very slowly. You might even be disappointed. But the train picks up speed and at the end of this first helix your train is swinging up the wall. Suddenly you are hemmed in by track on either side again and attached to the second lift.

Figure 7: A rider returns from a Flying Turns ride. Photo courtesy of Knoebels Amusement Resort.

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This lift is much taller. Having just gotten an idea of what this ride is capable of, the height of this lift is actually sort of worrisome. You know from waiting in the queue that this is not a long ride—how will you ever descend from this height at a safe speed while primarily swinging back and forth in the troughs? As you near the top of the lift, you see that there is a swift turn to the left into a steeper drop than before. These troughs are also supported at the top, and a warning sign reminds you not of safe behavior during the ride but instead of your current position and elevation! From the first sharp turn to the left, you are quickly thrown back and forth in the troughs all while gaining speed. This is fun. You will not experience “air time” (or being thrown slightly from your seat) as you will on most modern rides. Instead this is a completely different sensation. The ride reaches further and further up the walls of the troughs as it traverses the course of the track. Really, altogether too soon the ride is over, you pull back around into the station, and if you are a true fan you’ll jump in line to experience this amazing past attraction again.

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Knoebels is committed to preserving the past. A visit there will show you that many of the rides that have been removed from other parks because of maintenance costs are still being lovingly preserved. The park features a carousel with ring machine where you can catch a brass ring and win a free ride, a Whip, a haunted house, a Fascination parlor, and even a wooden spiral slide. Young adult park guests often exclaim that they really only thought some of these rides existed in simulation games like Roller Coaster Tycoon—and instead find out that they were once real and present at most parks in America. They also have a local area history museum and carousel museum on site. Knoebels itself is an argument for a type of immersion—the American amusement park as we once knew it is dying, and so a visit to Knoebels is a chance to immerse yourself in that older environment itself.

Conclusion While Berger argues that what happens at a Disney park is better or different than what happens at a traditional regional park, I would argue that in some cases it is not so different. Traditional parks have been slowly disappearing in the face of large corporate conglomerates like Six Flags and Cedar Fair. As a direct result, the “traditional” American park is now a theme within many of those larger parks. King’s Island, for example, once had a “Coney Island” themed section of their larger theme park, and many other parks have areas that are themed to county fairs. At this point, major amusement parks have moved so far from their simpler roots that recreating that “vintage” feeling is part and parcel of the theme park experience. However, for an entire park to maintain that atmosphere is far more rare. Knoebels is one of only a handful of parks still preserving the history of American amusement in a living manner that can be ridden and enjoyed. In continuing to not only preserve but also build historic attractions, Knoebels tells a story—it provides to us more than ample evidence that our ancestors and immediate family sought thrills that were just as death defying (if not more) than many that we, ourselves, seek. We can visit to time travel, if only for a day, back to a simpler time. It argues that history is worth preserving. Fortunately, the Flying Turns seems to be part of a renaissance in bringing back older theming and attractions. For its fortieth anniversary, King’s Dominion recreated part of their original park called “Candy Apple Grove” (impressive given that the park has been sold more than once during its forty year history), including a section featuring four singing mushrooms and a cigar smoking frog playing the piano. This area is kitschy and silly, but was received very positively by fans. Other parks (such as Geauga Lake) have

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taken back old names for their parks and rides, and maintenance crews at these parks continue to lovingly preserve these rides. Flying Turns is proof that rebuilt rides can enforce our connection to the past. I am lucky enough to know that some of my relatives rode earlier iterations of the Flying Turns before they closed and can feel that connection to them through the ride. They rode this, and now so can I. Parks provide an intimate connection to our best past selves, even as they are not perfect themselves. All parks, not just those that are perfectly themed, deserve to be thought of as featuring elements of user and experience architecture, as well as immersing the rider in a hero narrative. Hopefully more parks will follow the call to rebuild and preserve old rides, as well as continue to break attendance and ridership records in the future—the connection to our past is well worth the space, time, energy, and love that has been devoted to this attraction.

References

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Alcorn, S. (2013, December 9). Theme park design: Behind the scenes with an engineer. New York: Theme Perks. Alcorn, S. & Green, D. (2007, October 1). Building a better mouse: The story behind the electronic Imagineers who designed Epcot. New York: Theme Parks Press. Kindle Edition. Baham, J. (2014). The Unauthorized story of Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion. New York: Theme Park Press. Kindle Edition. Berger, A. (2013). Every guest is a hero. New York: BCA Press. Kindle Edition. Brumfield, D. (2014, April 25). Part 3: When roller coaster riding was a blood sport. Theme Park Babylon. Retrieved from http://www.dalebrumfield.net/#!Part-3-When-Roller-Coaster-Riding-was-Blood-Sport/ c154d/85D5816E-32D2–493E-86DD-F3E90912BFEA Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces: The collected works of Joseph Campbell (3rd Ed.). New York: New World Library. Charles and Betty Jacques amusement park collection. (1929, February 28). Amusement Park Management Collection. Retrieved from the Penn State Special Collections Library. Crump, R. (2014). More Cute Stories Vol. 1: Disneyland History: Transcribed from the Original Audio Recordings. New York: Bamboo Forest Publishing. Kindle Edition. Crump, R. & Heimbuch, J. (2012). It’s Kind of a Cute Story. New York: Bamboo Forest Publishing. Kindle Edition. Gee, J.P. (2003). What Videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Jennings, RC. (2013, November 14). The story of the great unbuilt WIZARD OF OZ theme park, as told by the park’s creator, Gary Goddard— Part 1. The Goddard Group. Retrieved from http://www.thegoddardgroup. com/blog/index.php/the-story-of-the-great-unbuilt-wizard-of-oztheme-park-as-told-by-the-parks-creator-gary-goddard-part-1/ Knoebels. (2006, March 17). Flying Turns project. Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060402202841/http:// flyingturnsproject.com/ Lukas, S. (2012, October 12). The Immersive worlds handbook: Designing theme parks and consumer spaces. New York: Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. Nielsen, J. and Nelson, D. The Definition of User Experience. Articles. Nielsen Norman Group. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ definition-user-experience. Macefield, R. (2012, June 18). UX Design Defined. UX Matters. Retrieved from http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/06/ux-design-defined.php MacCallum, B. (2015). Roller Coasters. Euclid Beach Park Now. Retrieved from http://www.euclidbeach.org/roller-coasters.html ParkWorld. (2013, July 11). Knoebels’ Flying Turns. Parkworld. Retrieved from http://www.parkworld-online.com/knoebels-flying-turns/ Potts, L. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. New York, NY: Routledge. Spinuzzi, C. (2015). All edge: Inside the new workplace networks. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ultimate Roller Coaster. (2006). Roaring 20s. Roller coaster history: Early 1900s. Retrieved from http://www.ultimaterollercoaster.com/coasters/ history/early_1900/ Wallace, A. (2013). The Thinking fan’s guide to Walt Disney World: Magic Kingdom. New York: The Intrepid Traveler. Kindle Edition. Wislock, A. (2013, October 7). Flying Turns bobsled coaster arrives at Knoebels. The Morning Call. Retrieved from http://articles. mcall.com/2013–10–07/news/mc-knoebels-toboggan-coaster-flying-turns-20131007_1_european-coaster-club-justin-garvanovic-roller-coaster-database

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Contributors Heather Christiansen is a User Experience Researcher at ACS Technologies, a leading provider of information management solutions for churches, schools, and other faith-based organizations. Dr. Christiansen’s research interests include user experience research and design, usability, visual rhetoric, and the rhetoric of brand communities. She previously served as the managing editor for The WAC Journal and co-editor for The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals. Dr. Christiansen independently consults on UX and branding-related projects in a variety of fields including banking, telecommunications, apparel, consumer products, and higher education. She received her PhD from Clemson University in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design. Erin Friess is Associate Professor of Technical Communication at the University of North Texas. Her research interests include usability, user experience, and workplace decision-making. Her previous research on personas was honored with the Rudolph J. Joenk Award in 2016. Anders Fagerjord is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Director of the Centre for Research on Media Innovations (CeRMI). Fagerjord has published internationally on the concept of convergence; multimodality and multimedia theory; new genres in digital media, and on digital humanities and software studies. His latest book, Digital Humanities, is written with David Berry and will be published by Polity in 2016. Currently, Fagerjord works on locative media and design theory. Outside of academia, he has worked as a radio host and Web designer. Delia M. Garcia is Director of the College of Arts and Humanities Student Advising Office at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and is also a graduate student in the Texts and Technology PhD program at UCF. Her research focuses on Rhetorical Genre Studies and Racial Formation Theory with an emphasis on social justice projects that increase access to higher education and degree attainment for Hispanic students. Cheryl Geisler is Professor of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University where she served as the inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology. She has written extensively on the nature of texts, especially those mediated by new technologies. She was the principal investigator on Designing for User Engagement on the Web: 10 Basic Principles

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from Routledge (2013). A recognized expert on verbal data coding, she is the author of Analyzing Streams of Language (2004) and recently edited a special section of the Journal of Writing Research (Vol 7, No 3) on Current and Emerging Methods in the Rhetorical Analysis of Texts. She has received awards for her work from Computers and Composition, the Rhetoric Society of America, and the National Communication Association. Roger Grice is Professor of Practice in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Communication and Media, where he teaches courses on Human-Computer Interaction, Usability Evaluation, and User-Experience Design. He is retired from IBM Corporation, where he worked as an Information Developer, focusing on large mainframe systems. Tharon W. Howard teaches in the MA in Writing, Rhetoric, and Media program and in the Rhetoric(s), Communication, and Information Design interdisciplinary doctoral program at Clemson University. He is a nationally recognized leader in the field of usability testing research and user-experience design and is Director of the Clemson University Usability Testing Facility. He was awarded the User Experience Professionals Association’s first ever “Extraordinary Service Award.” Howard is also the recipient of the STC’s Rainey Award for Excellence in Research for his work combining UX research and technical communication. Howard is the book series editor for the ATTW Series on Technical and Professional Communication published by Routledge. A few of Dr. Howard’s books include: Design to Thrive: Creating Social Networks and Online Communities that Last, A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities, Visual Communication: A Writer’s Guide, and Electronic Networks: Crossing Boundaries and Creating Communities. 

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Will Kurlinkus is Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Technical Writing at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on the ways in which users’ nostalgia can be harnessed as assets for technological innovation and the democratization of design. When not teaching, Will has worked on UX projects from the redesign of workflow in hematology labs to the production of software manuals. Benjamin Lauren is Assistant Professor of Experience Architecture in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, where he teaches in Professional Writing, Experience Architecture, and Rhetoric and Writing. He is also a WIDE Researcher. His research focuses on how people manage creative and collaborative activities in a variety of professional contexts. Recent projects have focused on mobile appli-

Contributors

cation development, workplace environment design, project management, and social and cultural entrepreneurship.  Andrew Mara is Associate Professor of Technical Writing at Arizona State University. His research interests include user experience, posthuman rhetorics, and institutional innovation. His publications appear in venues such as Technical Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Programmatic Perspectives. Currently, he is working on projects that explore the intersections of user experience, digital indigeneity, rhetorics of health and medicine, and heritage languages.  Miriam O’Kane Mara is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University. Her research interests include medical rhetorics, user experience, and Irish literature & film. Her publications appear in venues such as Feminist Formations; Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalism; and New Hibernia Review. At this time, she is at work on a book examining gendered representations of cancer in fiction and biomedical documents from the United States and Kenya. Cassie McDaniel is Design Director at the Mozilla Foundation, working with a multidisciplinary team toward Mozilla’s non-profit mission of protecting the open web as a global public resource. She studied Graphic Design at the University of Florida and at the University of Leeds then subsequently worked in London, UK and Toronto, Canada at digital agencies on everything from brand and graphic design to user experiences and interfaces for interactive applications for consumer-facing clients like Chevrolet, Reebok and Duracell. At the University Health Network in Toronto she led a team of designers building innovative self-care mobile apps, including the award-winning Bant iPhone application, to help patients manage chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma. While design is her dominant toolset, she regularly speaks and writes on the ever-evolving design and technology industry. Her current projects can be seen at www.cassiemcdaniel.com. Rudy McDaniel is Professor of Digital Media and Director of the School of Visual Arts and Design at the University of Central Florida. His research focuses on digital media, electronic archives, and game-based learning. He is co-author of The Rhetorical Nature of XML: Constructing Knowledge in Networked Environments (Routledge, 2009) and has consulted on interactive media projects for clients such as the US Library of Congress, the IEEE Professional Communication Society, and the Canadian National Centres of Excellence Program. In addition, he has worked as a video game script writer for the Federation of American Scientists and collaborated with personnel on the

343

Contributors

Walters Art Museum in Baltimore on the Discover Babylon learning game project.  Jill Morris is an Associate Professor of English at Frostburg State University, where she teaches courses in digital and technical writing as well as first year composition. She currently researches online communities and the histories that produce them, and spends her spare time playing with her Pomeranians and riding roller coasters. Kristen R. Moore is Assistant Professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. Her research interests include technical communication as a form of advocacy, public rhetoric and writing, and critical methodologies. As a founding member of Women in Technical Communication, Moore also researches feminist mentoring and its potential for advocacy in organizations. At Texas Tech, Moore teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in technical communication, public rhetoric, contemporary rhetorics, and critical field methods. Her scholarship has been published in a range of journals, including IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Technical Communication, Communication Design Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and a variety of edited collections. Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder is Assistant Professor in the school of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University where he teaches courses in rhetoric, new media, and technical and science writing. His research has appeared in Technical Communication, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, Kairos, College English, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly, among other journals. He is also the author of Communicating Technology and Mobility: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation (Routledge).

344

Liza Potts is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. She is the Director of WIDE Research Center and the founding Director of the Experience Architecture program. She is the former Chair of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group for the Design of Communication (ACM: SIGDOC) and a leader in the Women in Technical Communication group. Liza’s work on digital rhetoric, participatory culture, and social user experience has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and published in Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Kairos, Technical Communication, and others. Her book, Social Media in Disaster Response, is the first in the ATTW series by Routledge. She has worked for Microsoft,

Contributors

consultancies, and start-ups as a director, project manager, and user experience architect. Cody Reimer is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout where he teaches courses in the Professional Communication and Emerging Media program. His research combines game studies and technical communication to explore issues involving usability, design, and writing. Cait Ryan is an Experience Architect and Coach who is passionate about cultivating deep connection and understanding between people of all walks of life in order to create a better world. Prior to starting her own business, Caitlin worked as a design researcher, product manager, instructional designer, technical writer, and editor. Her business, Inside Out Explorers, can be found online at insideoutexplorer.com. She holds Master’s degrees in Digital Rhetoric & Professional Writing and Educational Technology from Michigan State University, where she focused on studying user experience research and design. Her research interests include experience architecture, human connection, and storytelling. Michael Salvo is Director of Professional Writing and Associate Professor in the Rhetoric and Composition Program at Purdue University. He is a founding member and on the editorial board of Kairos, the longest continuously publishing online journal in new media, rhetoric and writing; he won the Hugh Burns Award in computers and writing; and received the Ellen Nold Award for research published in Computers and Composition and the Kairos Best Webtext Award. Michael’s research on usability, program assessment, and information architecture has been published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly, and has published many book chapters. He served as 2007 conference chair for the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW).  Jennifer Sano-Franchini is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the undergraduate program in Professional and Technical Writing and graduate program in Rhetoric and Writing. Her research and teaching focus on the relationship among cultural and digital rhetorics, institutional rhetorics, information design, and Asian American rhetoric. Patricia Sullivan teaches methodology, media, and theory in technical communication and also teaches rhetorical history at Purdue University where she is Professor of English. She also directs the graduate program in rhetoric and composition at Purdue and has published recently on mentoring, history, and usability.

345

Contributors

Amy VanSchaik is a graduate student in the Texts and Technology PhD program at the University of Central Florida. Her background is in web design and development, information architecture, usability, and digital media production. Her research interests include human computer interaction, tangible user interface design, user experience, games research, and interactive media tools for education. Stephanie Vie is Chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. She researches social media’s impact on literate practices and is currently conducting several grant-funded national surveys of faculty members’ attitudes toward social media in composition. Her work has appeared in journals like First Monday, Computers and Composition, Technoculture, and Computers and Composition Online, and her textbook E-Dentity (Fountainhead Press, 2011) examines the impact of social media on twenty- first century literacies.  Douglas M. Walls is assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, where he is faculty in the MS in Technical Communication (MSTC) and the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) programs. His research interests are in the design of user experiences for underrepresented or traditionally marginalized groups and nonprofit organizations, especially in social media contexts. Douglas received Honorable Recognition in 2015 for the Ellen Nold Award in Computers and Composition Studies for his article “Access(ing) the Coordination of Writing Networks.” His work has appeared in both traditional and new media forms in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication; Computers and Composition; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; and various edited collections.

346

Index accommodationist vs. constructivist binary, 124, 127–129, 130, 140–141 activism, 290, 292 activity analysis, 57, 70, 77 activity theory, 59–61, 75, 79 additive logic, 9 affinity diagrams, 91, 184–185 agency, 85, 100, 113, 243, 262, 333 agents of social change, 291–292, 300 agile methods, 212, 214–216, 218, 219 Aisle-by-Aisle, 63, 76–77 amateur, 27, 36 Amazon.com, Inc, 51, 276 amusement parks, 10, 323, 325, 327, 331, 335, 337 AMVs, 36 analogies, 17, 23 anime, 32, 36, 39 anthropology, 28, 30, 32, 39, 184, 256 Apple Inc., 3, 8, 48–50, 63, 132, 134, 146, 214, 227, 229, 236–237, 317, 337 archive.org, 63, 75, 79 arhetorical, 111–113 Aristotle, 173 art marathon, 185, 189–190, 192–194 artifact, 6, 58, 144, 250, 252, 270 assemblage, 3 athletic, 22, 247 audience analysis, 9, 45, 113, 115, 270 badges, 11, 275, 304–309, 311–312, 314–317, 319–320 badging systems, 305–308, 311–314, 316–317, 319–320 beckon, 9, 17 Berger, Adam M, 276, 288, 328–330, 337, 338

best practices, 12, 156, 172, 199, 270 Big Data, 241–243, 321 Blackberry, 63 boundary, 27–28, 40, 174 boundary objects, 27, 40 boundary spanning, 27 boundary work, 27–28 Bourdieu, Pierre, 59, 78, 124, 129, 133, 138, 141 Bowman, Douglas, 112, 120 Boyd, Danah, 242, 243, 256 brainstorming, 52, 92 brand community, 124, 134–138, 140 breakthrough innovation, 57–58 Buchanan, Richard, 87, 107, 167, 181, 288 Budweiser, 287–288 built environment, 19 Burger King Corporation, 51 Butler, 9, 12, 31, 38, 311, 321 cache, 23 capacity building, 91 capital, 129–30, 133–138, 148, 276– 277, 284 Chapman, 130, 141 Chilisea, Bagele, 32 chronos, 212 civic engagement, 303 coding strategy, 137, 138 collaboration, 12, 104, 106, 126, 146, 153, 187, 193–194, 199, 205, 213– 217, 221, 270–1, 319 collective memory, 278, 281–4, 288– 289 commercial design, 3 communication design, 22, 100, 305 communication space, 210, 212–215,

347

Index

218, 220 community communication, 11 community literacy, 84 community practices, 12, 161 composition studies, 84, 87, 108, 182 computer-human-interface, 20 concept maps, 91 Coney Island, 323, 327, 331, 337 connoisseurship, 275, 283–7 consumer research, 124, 131, 132 consumption as stewardship, 282, 283 content management, 3, 204 content strategy, 6, 200, 203–4 context, 3, 5, 7, 43, 46, 54, 57–61, 79, 87–91, 114, 122, 146, 148, 154, 167– 179, 187, 197, 211–2, 217, 243, 250, 256–64, 268, 279, 294, 300 contextual, 5, 127, 148, 179, 184, 187– 8, 192, 194–5, 202, 295 contextual inquiry, 5, 184, 194–5 control, 17, 18, 22–38, 53–4, 126, 129, 216, 220, 236, 289, 313, 324, 328, 331 control mechanisms, 17, 23 Cooking with Class, 62–77, 82 Cooper, Alan, 46, 56, 85, 90, 108, 111, 114, 120, 126, 127, 130, 141 core competencies, 11, 207 Crawford, Kate, 242, 243, 256, 306, 320 critical engagement, 105 critical imagination, 85, 88, 107 Crump, Rolly, 326, 328, 332, 338 cultural activity, 58, 62 cultural capital, 129, 136–7, 283, 285 cultural difference, 31

348

data-driven, 22, 112, 115, 120, 185, 241, 246, 250 Day-Timer, 60 decision-making, 10, 114–9, 131, 144–5, 157–62, 175, 197, 216, 220, 242, 296–7 Delta Air Line, Inc., 8 Design method, 174 design principles, 50, 54, 55, 96, 321 design process, 58, 70, 87, 111–23, 130, 141, 157–61, 168–70, 175, 182, 184, 192, 210, 212, 241, 244, 246–7,

251, 262, 300–1 design science, 167, 169–175, 181 design thinking, 87, 100, 107, 167–9, 171–4, 181–2, 202, 206, 208 Dewey, John, 258, 260, 271, 272 diary studies, 113, 127 digital 78, 130; dashboard, 179; environment (network), 3, 5; humanities, 11; interface 5, 84, 124; literacy, 264, 271; media 34, 86; object 21, 316; product, 26; production, 85, 89, 124, 128; space(s), 84; see also virtual spaces; tool(s), 7, 48, 90, 259, 261–262, 264, 292, 300 discourse, 6, 12, 22, 37, 78, 84, 89, 93, 96, 130, 150, 164, 198, 222, 247, 302, 320 discrimination, 32, 88, 90, 108 discursive convention, 37 domains, 17, 19, 21, 23, 177, 262, 326 Dorst, Kees, 261, 268, 272 drama, 25, 26, 235, 289 Dymaxion Corporation, 166, 174, 180 ease of use, 18, 95, 125 ecology, 31, 40, 146, 186, 188, 212–20, 288 ecosystems, 4, 5, 21, 291 educational technology, 7 Ehn, Pele, 8 embedded cultural values, 261, 262 embedded infrastructure, 154 emergence, 150, 170, 225, 306 emergent media, 9 empathy, 30, 38, 114, 172, 206–7, 220 encounter, 9, 17, 19, 26, 30–1, 34–5, 88, 193 engagement, 8, 53, 54, 84, 95, 107, 143–4, 157, 164, 176, 192, 247, 256, 268, 313 environment, 5, 27, 32, 43, 45, 108, 122, 132, 187, 220, 240, 268, 276, 297, 304, 306, 331, 337 environmental work, 27 Equalipop, 93, 96–100 Eternally Yours, 281, 283 ethical action, 7 ethical implication, 6, 150

Index

ethnographic, 7, 18–19, 27, 31, 186 ethnography, 10, 36, 114, 184–8, 195–196 ethos, 42, 48, 90, 101, 113–4, 126, 254, 267, 315–6, 331 exemplar, 51–2, 199, 205–6 existential phenomenology, 124, 132, 133, 140–1 Experience Architect, 6–7, 42, 50–51, 70, 77 145–149, 150, 180, 184–185, 197–199, 206, 215, 219-220 experience architecture, 3–12, 57–59, 140–155, 157–163, 166–174, 182–206, 209–212, 258–263, 268, 270–272, 304–305; bottom-up, 49–51; components, 42; curriculum, 258– 260; decolonizing, 163; defined, 3–5, 168; design 119; documentation, 41; encounter, 17–25; feminism, 86; future, 7–8, 139–140; globalization, 7–8; organizations, 200, 206, 214; participation, 151–152, 305–312; personas, 111–114; place, 130–132, 143–147, 225–228; politics, 198; project management, 213–215; research, 57–59, 122-124; rhetoric, 9, 167; see also Kairos; tactical, 204; signaling, 304–305; strategic, 197; top-down, 49–51; UX, 45, 54 experiential learning, 135, 263, 268, 270–272 expertise, 111–3, 125, 152, 254, 268, 294–5, 315 external audiences, 205–7 F2F, 31 Facebook, 37, 51, 53, 158, 189–90, 225, 263, 269–70, 277–8, 281, 285, 290, 306–7, 312, 317 fair labor, 292, 295, 297–8, 301 fandom, 36, 286, 289 Fargo-Moorhead, 185, 189, 190-3 feminism, 10, 29, 31, 39, 84–93, 96–108, 153, 183, 187 feminist strategies, 107 Filofax, 60 First Monday, 21, 23, 31, 38–9, 290 Fitbit, Inc, 312–13 FitNow, Inc, 316, 318, 319

Flying Turns, 323–5, 330, 331–9 food production, 293, 294, 295, 298, 301 Ford Motor Company, 177–82, 278, 289 Friess, Erin, 111–20, 130, 141 Fuelband, 312, 313 Fuller, Buckminster, 166, 174, 180, 182 gaming, 11, 20, 35–6, 243, 256–7, 301, 305, 307, 321–22 Geertz, Clifford, 30, 31, 39 Geisler, Cheryl, 9, 10, 47, 53–60, 64, 70, 78 gender, 84, 87, 90–7, 100, 103, 106– 7, 118, 149, 313 genre, 11, 22, 186, 188, 226 Goffman, Erving, 26, 39 Google, 101, 103, 104, 112, 118, 120, 189, 190, 229, 268 graphic design, 90, 123, 126, 205 Grice, Roger, 9, 10, 41, 53–6, 78 Grudin, 115, 121, 130, 141 Gunsmoke, 21 habitus, 124, 129–40 Harrison, Angela, 305, 313–4, 321 Haswell, Richard H., 22, 39 health communication, 10 heuristics, 25, 53–6, 158, 162, 184, 251 Hommels, Anique, 148, 154, 163 human limitations, 24 human-centered design, 7, 120 Human-Computer Interaction, 18, 20, 57–63, 84, 89, 90, 99, 107, 195, 225, 239 IBM, 24, 48, 62, 164, 239 identity, 8, 31, 85, 88, 104, 106, 118, 128, 131–6, 154, 163, 286, 287, 303, 305, 313, 315 IDEO, 171, 172, 177, 179, 182, 188, 195 IKEA, 280, 282, 289 immersive worlds, 326–27, 339 in medias res, 209–10, 220 inclusive, 7, 32, 89, 96, 103, 105, 107, 144, 149, 157, 159, 162 inclusivity, 96–7, 103–4, 107, 153, 160, 164, 270

349

Index

incremental innovation, 57–8, 77 indigenous research, 32 industry partners, 128 information architecture, 3, 6, 11, 54–6, 119–20, 168, 187, 200, 203, 259, 273, 291, 294, 303 information space, 42 infrastructure, 32, 35, 86, 143, 144, 147–154, 160, 169, 256 Intel Corporation, 48 interaction design, 3, 6, 7, 20, 26, 46, 53, 56, 84–108, 120, 124, 200, 205, 259, 303 interactive environment, 3 interactive technologies, 36, 56, 86 interactivity, 19, 20, 26, 84, 107, 275, 285, 306 intercultural communication, 147–148, 153 interdisciplinary, 12, 123, 143, 147, 169, 180, 206, 259 interface design, 11, 19, 26, 38, 42, 56, 89, 108, 124, 126, 129, 139, 168, 177, 239, 314 interface errors, 18, 20 interfaces, 5, 25, 32, 124–128, 186, 188, 193, 198, 225, 229, 239–240, 302, 305, 314 internal audiences, 198, 205 interpellation, 124, 128, 135, 139, 140 isolated user experience, 24 iterative design, 38, 57, 126

350

kairos, 9, 202, 210–213, 218–222, 316 Kalbach, Jim, 242, 256 Kirsch, Gesa E, 85, 88, 108, 141 Knoebel, Dick, 324 Knoebels Amusement Resort, 324– 325, 330–334, 337, 339 knowledge-making, 9, 10, 25, 32, 146–147, 152, 157, 158–162 Kolko, Jon, 85–90, 100, 108 Laurel, Brenda, 26, 39, 125, 141 League of Legends, 11, 218, 220, 241–244, 250, 256 learning outcomes, 89, 103, 104, 258, 261, 262 levels of appeal, 49

life logging, 34 linguistics, 116, 118, 130–134, 161 lived experience, 124, 132, 134, 136, 139, 144, 269 locative experience, 225–226, 237–8 locative media, 221, 226–229, 233, 238–240; see also media locus in quo, 233, 235–236 logos, 42, 48, 113, 118 Lukas, Scott, 327, 330–331, 339 marketing, 4, 8, 48, 105, 112, 124, 131–132, 171, 190–193, 205, 246, 276, 293, 324 Meal Planning Central, 72–77, 82 media, 3, 5, 34, 37, 59–60, 65, 153, 156, 160, 225, 227, 233 mediation, 59–61, 64–67, 70, 274, 279, 286–288, 305–306 mediated activity, 60; see also locative media, media meme, 278, 284, 314 memorial interactivity, 189, 222, 274–87 memory, 35, 41, 187, 226, 275, 278, 279–285, 288, 305, 314–316, 320 mental model, 125, 127, 128 Merholz, Peter, 197, 199, 201, 205, 207 metaphors, 17, 23, 28, 260 methodological choice, 150, 169, 172, 174, 177, 180 methodology, 9, 88, 108, 124, 145, 147, 149, 150–153, 162–166, 170–174, 179–180, 302 metis, 9 metrics, 54–6, 254, 296–297 Microsoft Corporation, 48, 146 Milham, 130, 141 milieu, 27, 213 misogyny, 96–7 mixed method, 17, 40, 186, 195, 243 Molich, Rolf, 123, 141 motivated activity, 60 Mozilla, 11, 258-73 Mozilla Webmaker, 11, 259, 263–272 multimedia, 34 museum, 27, 40, 192, 226, 229, 239, 240, 337 Musica Romana, 225, 226, 228, 231

Index

MyLifeBits, 34, 39 narrating stories, 22 narratives, 8, 28, 38, 70, 194, 278, 282, 290 navigation, 19, 20, 50, 74, 76, 229, 230, 231, 236, 237 navigation system guides, 229, 230 Nestlé, 63, 76, 79 Nielsen, Jacob, 53, 55, 56, 159, 164, 207, 229, 240, 339 Nike, Inc, 308, 309, 312, 313, 316, 317, 318 nodal discourse, 29 Norman, Donald A., 3–5, 12–3, 48, 56–8, 62, 77, 79, 86, 90, 108, 112, 121, 198, 204–207, 212, 214, 222, 274, 282, 289, 305–8, 311, 321, 325, 339 Odyssey, 17 open coding, 28, 134, 138 operations, 48–49, 60, 188, 226, 246, 293, 294 Organizational Studies, 24 Orlando Extension case, 157 otherness, 17, 19, 38 Palm Pilot, 60, 61, 63 Paprika, 63, 70 paradox, 17, 22 paradoxically, 22 participant, 25–26, 66, 68, 70, 133– 134, 140, 155, 162, 184, 187–193, 199, 264, 314, 316, 320 participant studies, 25 participation, 13, 27, 47, 91, 98, 144– 147, 151–152, 157–164, 184, 190–191, 195, 210, 213–222, 263, 273, 298, 301, 304, 317, 321, 339 participatory, 7, 36, 143, 144–151, 158–159, 164, 167, 211, 218, 220, 238, 271, 278–279, 283, 286, 295, 304, 311 participatory design, 7, 158, 238, 271, 279, 283, 304, 311 participatory ethic, 36 patch notes, 245–246, 252 pathos, 42, 48–49, 113–114, 118 pattern analysis, 116

pedogogy, 100–103 Pepperplate, 70, 77 personal computer, 12, 25, 35, 41, 48, 207 personas, 10, 27, 46, 111, 114–21, 128, 130–132, 139–40, 148, 184–5 persuasion, 3, 113, 128, 143, 153, 187, 222, 245, 283 place-based methodology, 143–159 Player Beta Environment, 244, 248– 249 politics, 5, 26–32, 37, 39, 85–86, 90, 104, 107–108, 120, 145, 163, 198, 207–208, 213, 238, 240, 287, 313 Pollio, Howard, 132, 141, 142 popular culture, 93–97, 280 Porter, James E, 149–150, 162, 164, 167, 174, 183, 305, 313, 314, 316, 320–321 postmodernism, 182 Potts, Liza, 3, 9, 13, 144–147, 157–158, 164, 167–169, 180–182, 185, 195–196, 199, 214, 222, 259, 271–273, 298, 301–305, 311–314, 321, 339 poverty, 31, 87 practice theory, 59 praxis, 84, 87, 90–91, 149, 221–2 privilege, 31, 84, 144, 150, 266 problem setting, 171–172, 180 problem space, 42–43, 251 procedural control, 21 product developers, 126–128 product interface, 45–46 Professional and Technical Communicators, 7 professional practice, 7, 11, 170 project management, 6, 104, 210, 212, 213, 218–222 project manager, 210–215, 218, 220 Pruitt, 114–115, 120–121, 130, 141 public engagement, 143–147, 151, 157 public participation, 29, 147, 163 public planning, 143, 155 Purdy, James P., 167, 182, 202, 208 qualitative research, 17, 22, 28–29, 39, 150 qualitative studies, 22 quantitative, 17, 29, 40, 52, 55, 195,

351

Index

212, 243 Quesenbery, Whitney, 8, 13, 46, 56, 123, 198, 200–203, 208

352

RAD, 22 radical design, 60 rapid iteration, 241, 245, 254 Reckwitz, Andreas, 59, 79 reddit inc, 21, 251, 314, 321 Redish, Janice, 57, 78, 122, 142, 168, 182, 201, 208 research methods, 9–12, 32, 57, 122– 127, 140, 174, 180, 184, 192 retrospectives, 219 rhetor, 7, 8, 84, 112, 211, 228 rhetoric, 3-13, 252, 283, 300; action, 292, 300–302, 304-305, 311, 319-320; audience, 197–210; canons, 187-188; Ciceronian 226238; decision-making, 167, 169, 172; decolonizing, 162; design, 119, 243–245, 275–6; epistemology, 146; experience, 268; feminism, 107-120; interaction, 84–87; nostalgia, 279; place, 225-238; problem-setting, 179-180; public, 144; tactic, 262; techne, 172-174; see also kairos rhetorical agency, 113, 115, 118 rhetorical balance, 113 rhetorical canons, 187, 305, 306, 314–315, 320 rhetorical design, 113, 118, 275, 279, 287 rhetorical intervention, 7, 297 rhetorical process, 119, 144, 316 Rickert, Thomas, 8 Riot Games, Inc, 218, 241–256 risk communication, 87 rituals, 5, 37–8, 283–285, 288, 290 role-playing, 26 roles, 17, 23–27, 107, 129–133, 138– 140, 163, 199–200, 203–206, 210, 214–216, 243–246, 259 routinize, 58–60, 75 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 85, 88, 108 runtastic, 312 Salvo, Michael J., 144, 146, 167, 291, 311, 353

Schön, Donald, 171–172, 176, 181–182 Science, 38, 40, 169, 289–290 scrum, 210, 218–220 semantic differential, 52, 55 semiotic, 28, 300, 326 sensemaking, 24, 40 service design, 3, 7, 10 sex education, 93–4 sexism, 87–8, 90–91, 96–99, 106 sexuality, 87, 91, 93 Simon, Herbert, 5, 6, 13, 169–170, 182, 272, 281–283, 288 SimpleStupid, 63, 76, 79 smart phones, 21 social circulation, 88, 107 social interaction, 35, 292, 304, 318 social justice, 11, 84–85, 144, 147, 150, 163–164, 291–292, 297, 300, 302 social media, 3, 20, 23, 35, 37, 52, 61, 134, 147, 158, 188, 190, 193, 225, 247, 304, 311, 320 social networks, 38, 129, 179, 186, 263, 304, 305, 308, 310, 312, 313, 314, 317 social roles, 124, 131, 132, 138, 140 sociotechnical networks, 5, 143, 149, 215 software engineers, 125, 126, 127 Southwest Airlines Co., 51 space and time, 216 space as antithesis, 235, 236 space as example, 233, 235, 236 space as metaphor, 233, 236 Spinuzzi, Clay, 155, 164, 188, 196, 213, 215, 222, 339 Springdale case, 153, 157, 158 sprints, 212, 219 stakeholders, 6, 10, 96, 98, 107, 116, 119, 144, 146, 174, 185, 200, 205, 206, 208, 210, 217, 219, 241, 246, 247, 295, 297, 300 storytelling, 8, 24, 46, 132, 274, 276, 320, 325 strategic contemplation, 85, 88, 92 students, 5, 6, 7, 11, 27, 37, 45, 46, 57, 61, 62, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 134, 135, 138, 139, 146, 202, 262, 263, 271, 275, 292

Index

Suchman, Lucy A., 19, 24, 40 Sullivan, Patricia, 7, 9, 10, 17, 19, 40, 84, 87, 108, 141, 146, 149, 150, 151, 162, 164, 167, 174, 183 sustainability, 159, 177, 194, 260, 261, 262, 267 system problems, 87 system-centered, 10, 111, 113 target audience’s experience, 23 techne, 9, 10, 167, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 182 technical communication, 10, 11, 12, 42, 45, 56, 85, 87, 107, 108, 123, 142, 146, 148, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 176, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207, 208, 259, 262, 271, 291, 302, 303, 304, 320 temporal and spatial, 210–212, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220 temporal graphs, 64, 66, 77 The DownLow, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100 The Swatch Group, 57 The Walt Disney Company, 8, 51, 52, 132, 289, 324, 325–332, 337–338, 339 themes, 17, 23, 28, 30, 50, 114, 116, 125, 136–138, 140, 185, 188, 260, 267 theorycrafting, 243–245, 247, 248, 254, 256 think-aloud, 123, 125, 127 Thompson, Craig, 132, 141–142, 304, 322 transdisciplinary, 12 transparency, 29, 96, 103, 159, 243, 252, 256, 265, 294, 296 transportation planning, 143, 145–146, 151 tripartite waltz, 9 Trukese, 19 Tumblr, Inc., 91, 103 Twitter, Inc., 63, 189, 190, 225, 246, 247, 279, 289–290, 307, 308, 312, 317 ubiquitous computing, 35 ubiquity paradox, 112, 120 Univac machines, 48

urban planning, 143, 145, 154, 157, 170 usability, 51-59, 113, 122, 123–128, 146, 198, 325 ; see also usability testing usability culture, 8 Usability Professionals Association, 122, 123, 127, 141 usability research, 9, 24, 57, 58, 123 usability testing, 5, 39, 40, 78, 79, 113, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 146, 164, 167, 168, 170; see also user experience use case, 43, 56, 70, 78, 79, 259 user advocates, 126, 291 user behavior, 18, 242, 316 user centered, 120 user data, 111–114, 116, 117, 118, 125, 184, 242 user engagement, 10, 54, 56, 78 user experience, 3–10, 41, 42–63, 77, 84, 86, 140–144; badges, 304311; encounter, 17–25, 31, 37; ethnographic, 194–211; Imagineers, 325; infrastructure, 144-151; Mozilla, 258-270; nostalgia, 280–300; personas, 111–114, 118–133; public, 160-180; Renaissance, 229; social justice, 300-301; video game, 242250; User Experience Professionals Association, 124, 127, 142 user practice, 36 user research, 17–18, 56, 78, 89, 105, 118–119, 184, 197, 200, 203, 208, 259 user stories, 47, 279 user testing, 18, 19, 25, 95, 114, 233 user-centered design, 4, 6, 7, 10, 41–47, 53–54, 112, 114–115, 119–121, 123–124, 130, 140, 149, 159, 162, 167–168, 225, 259, 274 user-participant design, 8; see also user experience UX see user experience UX debt, 242, 245, 254, 256 Verganti, 57, 58, 62, 77, 79 virtual spaces, 19, 32 visceral appeal, 49 visual, 6, 47, 49, 58, 84, 112, 119, 123,

353

Index

140, 161, 175, 177, 178, 188, 201, 233, 259, 264–265, 305, 306, 311, 315, 317, 319, 320, 325 visual design, 112, 119, 201, 259, 311, 315, 317, 320, 325 visual rhetoric, 6 voice, 19, 112–113, 115, 119, 126, 199, 236, 291, 313 Vortex Communications, 145, 151, 153, 157, 159 Wal-Mart Stores, Inc, 44 Walt Disney Imagineering, 326, 328 Walt Disney World, 331 waterfall approach, 212, 214 ways of knowing, 12, 38, 171, 181 Web 2.0, 47, 53, 63

354

West Prairie case, 157 wicked problems, 85, 87–88, 93, 101, 102, 107, 108, 182 Wild, Wild West, 21 Windows 95, 63 work experience, 23 work problems, 24 work stories, 24 workplace, 3, 10, 24, 90, 100, 106, 155, 163, 169, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 272, 339 writing research, 22, 195, 221 Xerox PARC, 19 Zeisel, John, 167, 175–180, 183

“Rhetoric is a natural choice for UX work.” —Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity

RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE represents the evolving ideas of an emerging area of study. Experience architecture focuses on the research and practice of creating technologies, products, policies, and services that serve the needs of various participants. Experience architecture addresses issues of usability, interaction design, service design, user experience, information architecture, and content management for websites, mobile apps, software applications, and technology services. Experience architecture also represents an emerging context for the practice of a variety of research and practical skills. These proficiencies are incorporated into commercial design and development work as user experience design, which has become an effective workplace moniker for this assemblage of practices. The study of language, and especially of persuasion, grounds experience architecture. Rhetoric sustains the technology-rich discussion of language and design that characterizes the contemporary exploration of the emerging practice of user experience design, and experience architecture enriches discussion of relevant research and methods. Experience architecture is a professional practice merging the newest technologies with ancient knowledge, hence the need for a volume in which rhetoric and experience architecture are in dialogue. RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE includes chapters from twenty-five authors in three countries and eleven US states, representing eighteen universities, research institutions, and design firms.

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RHETORIC and EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

RHETORIC and EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

“I really like the definition of experience architecture. As Potts and Salvo write in their introduction, ‘experience architecture requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single-task scenarios.’” —Donald Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, author of The Design of Everyday Things

Potts and Salvo

EDITED BY LIZA POTTS and MICHAEL J. SALVO Parlor Press