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Month July 2008

Entries 3 Total

Environment v. Surrounding

Jul 18, ’08 11:52 AM

There are many different ways to consider the difference between environment and surrounding. Dick emphasizing this in his lectures, especially when discussing the third mode of design (person-environment).

He tells a story of when he was young. How he had this telescope and would look at the stars at night. He was fascinated by the constellations. In the morning, he would tell his mom about it and she couldn’t care about Orion or the Big Dipper. For Dick, the stars were part of his environment. For his mother, they were part of her surrounding.

This is the way I like to think of it:

Surrounding

  • one does not have to be affected by one’s surrounding
  • one should probably at least be aware of it
  • ex: many people are aware that there is a war going on in Iraq, but in many ways, it doesn’t feel like we’re directly affected by it

Environment

  • very similar to what architects refer to as milieu
  • ex: when Ariel from the Little Mermaid sings, “Part of Your World,” she is talking about wanting to be part of Prince Eric’s environment not surrounding

On a more serious note, another example of environment is John Donne’s Meditation XVII. He writes,

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Through an awareness of the “other,” we can choose to bring something that is in the realm of surrounding to environment. Can this be freedom, the constant expansion of our own environment? This topic must be saved for another entry.

Edit on 7/28/08.
Thanks, Imran, for finding this excerpt from Dewey’s Democracy and Education. This is Dewey’s definition of environment:

In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living thing. Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the fish’s activities – to its life. The north pole is a significant element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive existence (suppose there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into his activity as a sustaining or frustrating condition.

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From Clean to Dirty Toilets

Jul 15, ’08 10:05 AM

There was an excellent article in the New York Times this past Sunday, July 13, 2008 titled, “Warning: Habits May Be Good for You.”

In the US, marketers and big corporate companies have always been creating products and trying to get them to be part of our lives. Febreze, the perfumed water used on couches, is one of the most successful examples of habit-creation campaigns.

Basically, when Febreze was first introduced, the company thought it would be in the context of removing odor from smelly clothes. Makes sense. However, researcher at P & G (makers of Febreze) discovered that bad smells simply do not happen as often in consumers’ lives. Here is what Dr. Berning, a P & G psychologist said,

For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed. But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.

Dr. Berning, in these three sentences, has captured the essence of interaction design. It’s not just about the entity of the products, but the whole context of human activity and behavior – the big picture environment (please note that this is different from surrounding – will have to post on this some other time).

Interaction design is also about creating products that do not yet exist as opposed to “bettering” products that are already out there. In the words of Herb Simon, design is the activity of devising “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” that is, dealing with the contingent, not necessary -”not with how things are but with how they might be.”

P & G’s realized that habits have specific prompts. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories:

  1. a specific location or time of day
  2. a certain series of actions
  3. particular moods
  4. the company of specific people

According to a Dr. Wood from Duke, “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are so sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”

P & G’s solution: The perfect cue, they eventually realized, was the act of cleaning a room – a physical and emotional cleaning ritual. This is totally opposite to the original purpose/intent of the product. Hence, the artifact has stayed the same, but the activity of the product was turned upside down, changing the nature of the product (see post on topoi).

Now what does this have to do with toilets? As noted in the NYT’s article, such tactics surrounding the creation of Febreze offer enormous promise in a country like Ghana.

Here is the problem according to the article,

Almost half of its [Ghana's] people were accustomed to washing their hands with water after using the restroom or before eating. And local markets were filled with cheap, colorful soap bars. But only about 4 percent of Ghanaians used soap as part of their post-restroom hand-washing regime, studies showed.

They could talk all day about germs, but this was not going to change the behavior of people in this African country.

An important insight: a sense of bathroom disgust is natural for us living in the states, but in many other parts of the world, toilets are a symbol of cleanliness because they replace pit latrines. The solution in Ghana was to show ads showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched. They played up perception.

I find it interesting how products play a role in creating habits and perception. A century ago, people did not brush their teeth three times a day. But thanks to manufactured habits, this has changed. And products like mouthwash, gum, and toothpaste are all integral parts of our day … at least, for most people ;)

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Not Method to Madness, but Method to Art

Jul 7, ’08 12:35 PM

I have been having sporadic email conversations with Elliott lately and we’ve been talking about some interesting things. Particularly, he has some interesting things to say about thought and action. This topic has been of interest to me and I have blogged about it before under a different title of Theory & Practice.

Elliott writes,

… I quoted Bruce Lee from an interview he did on how martial arts are basically systems to connect the self with actions. He spoke about how thought is usually the intermediary between the self and action, and by creating a tool, a system, such as a martial art and learning to bypass thought and just act, people can be truly expressive of themselves and their true selves. I have definitely experienced this, not in any Eastern martial art i have taken, but in capoeira, which is a Brazilian “dance” comprised of attacks and defenses. I have always been able to tell a lot about someone’s personality by the way they perform in the Rhoda (sparing session).

This conversation reminds me of the anonymous quote,

Sow a thought; reap an action
Sow an action; reap a habit
Sow a habit; reap a character
Sow a character; reap a destiny

Thought and action/theory and practice/thinking and feeling, have been the center of debate and investigation for … a long time. In the design world, some frequent questions that rise again and again is, what is design research? Is it theory or practice? Do designers contribute to theory by their practice? Or is there a more deliberate way to contribute to design theory?

As Elliott observes, there is a distinction between method and art. In the design world, there is much talk of methodologies. In some ways, the heuristic evaluations, the focus groups, the card sortings are all part of this bucket. What if design were an art? Like the martial arts, with years of practice and habit, can design become second nature, beyond just a series of habits?

I remember Dick saying that in the Middle Ages, there were 3 or 4 core arts. I have them in my notes somewhere, but his mentor, Richard McKeon, really delved into the Middle Ages. Medicine was an art as was the study of law. Then there was also theology. People back then didn’t study specific categories of thought like we do today in our respective specialized professions. There is also the old form of architecture called architectonics … which was a generalized study of all sorts of things, a meta-design. These arts produced a different breed of intellectuals; I believe this form of education is what produced the da Vincis and Thomas Jeffersons in times past, people who were able to master a higher form of learning and “play” in any field of subject matter.

I am trying to read a book by McKeon called Rhetoric: Essays on Invention and Discovery as well as the Howard Fineman’s The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country.

Comments (7)