Week 3 blog
I come into this class with a semi-limited theoretical understanding of digital space and a lot of the questions I had after this week’s reading may seem strange to you all. For context, I understand social spheres as being potentially liberating realms where cultural logic can be played with and questioned. And I am intrigued by the relationships between creators and users—do users have the capability to shift the intent of the design? The readings refer to this relationship as dialectic and I felt stimulated by that idea. A lot of this shit is super philosophically centered and theoretically rooted in ideas of world-making so sorry in advanced for the confusing connections that exist in my mind currently.
This week’s readings focused on themes of design and interaction. I was particularly intrigued by the process of design and the world-making component of these processes. I was really fascinated by the creation process because it was often described as being with “carefulness and concern” when approaching reality. Carefulness and concern helps the designer “to recognize alternatives and to be prepared for unexpected events and insights”.
This idea really made me think about the creation of multiple worlds and the potential found in creating digital new worlds. While the design process is particular to the digital realm in this context, I thought about last week’s readings and in-class discussion about how ideologies are integrated into our created digital worlds and how these ideologies are man-made—informed by irl tangible and intangible ways of existing in the realm of irl.
I thought about the potentially limiting aspects of world-making because as we discussed in class last week, our minds are unable to process outside of the ideological enclosures linked to us (we talked about categories and how we cannot organize outside of categories). However, the process of design gives a sort of hope for existing outside of categories and outside of ideological enclosures because the designer is expected to recognize various alternatives outside of one solution. I am really excited by this because in social theory alternatives to the implicate order are constantly imagined and different worlds are constantly challenging our social world as we know it. (See “Differential Consciousness by Chela Sandoval, “Disidentifications” by José Esteban Muñoz). For the designer, whether in the context of social theory or the creation of prototypes, truth is not as crucial—it becomes more necessary to create an image of reality (and in a way emphasizing that “real” doesn’t actually exist? And I am directly referencing Bauldrillard’s theory and conversations about the hyper real).
In a sense then, design allows for creation of different worlds with the practice of imagining different alternatives and solution. Design then, for me is completely linked to social theory and the virtual world becomes a vehicle for the creation of alternative worlds. Which is really exciting!!! But also scary depending on who is creating these digital realms.
Then that brings me to interface. Jan Distelmeyer made an argument about how fluidly and seamlessly interfaces merge physical and virtual realms. I thought about the connection between neoliberal policies and this seamless merging. Does the neoliberal state benefit from this merging? Can users co-opt how the neoliberal state benefits? Does this seamless merging aid in the process of world-making? What then is the function of world-making? It seems to me that the interface is being restructured—it isn’t vanishing—it is becoming less apparent?
That brings me to my final thought around this week’s readings and specifically around affect and interface/interaction. I am curious about immersive interaction and the process of affect for users and how the interface contributes to affective relationships to virtual space.
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