Interaction design and the failure of post-modernism

Review of Gerhard M Buurman, Ed, Total interaction: theory and practice of a new paradigm for the design disciplines. Birkhäuser, 2005, 367pp, 135 colour illustrations, 105 line drawings

Here the ambition is as weighty as the book itself. In his Foreword, professor Gerhard M Buurman, who since 2001 has run the interaction design programme at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Zurich, says that it aims for a comprehensive definition of the concept of interaction design, and, also, to  ‘define our solutions’. So far, so good!

Cocking a snook at SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction run by the US-based Association for Computing Machinery, Buurman goes on to attack the position on interaction design that, he says, is ‘commonly found in the English-speaking countries’. It is, he says, ‘confusing’. Us Anglos, you see, only design computer interactions by trying to improve control of the steps involved in computer use. The ‘European tradition’, by contrast, is the one upheld by the book. And what is that tradition? Well, ‘it focuses on the design-aesthetic dimensions of the problem’.

What these dimensions are is not discussed. Buurman’s defence of them turns out to be as perfunctory as his dismissal of SIGCHI, which he spells as SIG-CHI, consigns to brackets, and refuses to put in the index. Every so often in the book there are misspellings: we even get to read, in Lev Manovich’s otherwise excellent essay on Flash, of a computer game hero by the name of Lora Craft (page 73).

Over 367 pages, a few misspellings are forgivable. But this book also displays a sloppy attitude to words, back-up arguments, footnotes and the visual representation of the thematic links between different chapters.

The translators have battled well and hard. The real fault lies with the obscurantist, post-modern thought, and post-modern language, favoured by artistically inclined academics nowadays – both ‘European’ and ‘English-speaking’. There is no sense of cost, there are no dollar signs, and there are very few companies mentioned anywhere in the book – apart, notably, from one named Electronic Art (p138; what is meant is Electronic Arts). Fierce, brief and elusive assertions are made against adversaries who are not even named. Footnotes often quote sources from the 1990s, on issues around which there have naturally been important developments since that time. The diagrams setting out the place of each chapter in the whole book are almost unreadable.

For all these faults, the book does contain some genuine nuggets of brilliance. At least Buurman notes that the famed porosity that now exists between different design disciplines means that ‘out of our own insecurity, we forge creative yet (mostly) arbitrary links from one subject or branch of science to another’. He is right about the arbitrariness and relativism that now prevails in design, and even in the sciences. And though I might cavil at his insistence that interactivity must be entertaining, it is about ‘intelligent, situation-adapted interrelations between systems and users’.

In the opening chapter, Michael Friedewald, project director at Karlsruhe’s Fraunhofer Institute, also combines brilliance with some highly questionable assertions. He gives a wonderful history of the contributions of Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay to human-computer interaction, showing in particular the debt owed by Kay to Marshall McLuhan and Seymour Papert (well, we all have problems). Yet Friedewald also opens with a dismissive attack not just on technological determinism, but also on unnamed ‘social’ determinists, who, he says, are guilty of reducing technology and society ‘to a linear system with fixed cause and effect’. Rather, Friedewald insists that we see science and technology ‘as a culture with its own rationale of individual development’.

It is left to Kiel aesthetics professor Norbert M Schmitz to show what that means. Echoing the French post-modern sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Schmitz holds that design is a form of ‘symbolic capital’. It is never only about being better and more beautiful, it is also about – ‘above all’ – being different and new.

So design is not about progress, but rather about difference. It emerged not with the industrial revolution and the development of a division of labour, as one might imagine, but with ‘modern science, an independent system of art, capitalism and many other fields of instrumentally rational action in the Early Middle Ages in the cultural centers of Flanders and Italy’. It also emerged ‘far back into an era predating the beginnings of modern industrial culture’. And interaction design? It ‘can be understood as the expression of a qualitatively new and specific communicative relationship in a post-industrial society’. Thus, much less than industrial design, it is ‘less and less tied to location and material costs’.

There we have it. Once one lives in a post-industrial society, there’s really no need to think about all the time that is today spent at work developing new kinds of human-computer interaction, or the money equivalent of that time. Instead, all that is solid melts into air. As Buurman says in his own essay, ‘The new media-based information and transaction systems enable participatory structures, since they dissolve or minimize the traditional relationships between producer and consumer, author and reader, designer and user. If we are all able to acquire, understand and use these new technologies, there is great potential for creating societies that consist solely of authors, designers, producers and other artistically creative individuals’.

Perhaps the authors of this very book should get out more. If they had watched the last Davos Forum, they would have heard disinterested commentators such as Gordon Brown and Rupert Murdoch also eulogise the new era of IT-based consumer empowerment – just as other commentators have eulogised it ever since the early days of dot.com firms; indeed, since the birth of the Apple Mac. What a bore to hear all this again!

In ‘Visual perception and virtual worlds’, Bern university professor Bernd Kersten has much more to offer. First, he presents a wonderful illustration of coloured cogwheel-like forms, which fairly make your eyes go loopy. He then gives an excellent treatment of cognition in general, and the role of colour and of the face in particular. Like music specialist Daniel Hug’s later chapter on the enormous power of sound in interaction design, Kersten’s chapter is recommended.

In this book, the later chapters on special technologies associated with interfaces – simulations, chemical reactions, a kind of joystick, and educational robots – are, characteristically, the most impenetrable. These chapters confirm that, sadly, Total interaction fails in its stated, pragmatic ambition.

This is little surprise. Why? Because post-modernism, its language and its innumeracy cannot be comprehensive, any more than it can define real solutions – about interaction design or anything else. Post-modernism disaggregates enquiry. It ridicules the idea of progress. But let Lev Manovich, a professor at San Diego university, put it his way:

‘I am not advocating a revival of modernism. It goes without saying that we don’t want to simply replay Mondrian and Klee on our computer screens. The task of the new generation is to integrate the two key aesthetic paradigms of the 20th century: (1) belief in science and rationality, emphasis on efficiency and basic forms, idealism and the heroic spirit of modernism; and (2) scepticism, interest in “marginality” and “complexity”, deconstructive strategies, baroque opaqueness and the excesses of postmodernism (1960s). At this point all the features of the second paradigm have become tired clichés. Therefore a partial return to modernism is not a bad first step, as long as it just a first step toward developing new aesthetics for the new age.’

I might not go even the limited distance that Manovich goes, here, in defending modernism. I also think, and am sure Manovich thinks, that interaction design must mean more than just aesthetics. But it is about time that everyone, from the artistic academy onward, took Manovich’s words seriously, and sounded the death knell of post-modernism – everywhere, and especially in interaction design.