<div dir="ltr">Katie, Henry, Murat, Thanks for your posts! We're off to a great start. Apologies for the delay. Toronto is currently hosting both the American Studies Association and Babel conferences this week, and I'm responsible for coordinating a talk by Johanna Drucker. I am totally spread thin! <div><br></div><div>Katie, I wanted to pick up on the topic of ethics because I think it's an important one. It's certainly the case that designers make strategic choices <span style="font-size:12.8px">behind algorithms, ergonomics, and graphic user interfaces that seek to intensify the traffic between human and machine. </span><span style="font-size:12.8px">Schüll's important book on gabling in Vegas does an excellent job of describing just how this works. I don't have the book in front of me just at this moment -- it's at my office, and I am typing from my bed -- but I remember </span><span style="font-size:12.8px">Schüll discussing the ways in which the graphical interface of many penny slot machines have been designed with a kind of overflow in mind. I attach a picture so that we can all visualize what I am talking about. Players can win along multiple axes; so many axes that it's impossible to calculate the statistical chances of winning without a computer. All the while, the machine is of course soliciting its audience through music, noises, and the constant changing of images. The total effect is one of chaos and overflow, a rambling and chaotic cacophony of audio-visual sensations. Pornographic video streaming sites have a similar design. Again, I attach an image so we can all see what I am talking about. Partly what interests me is the way both interfaces feature rows and columns, seemingly a kind of ordering and system, while at the same time making the viewer feel over-whelmed with choice and/ or statistical possibility. With porn, the solicitation occurs under the aegis of getting what one wants but in excess of it. In Gambling, the solicitation occurs under the potential for winning. Yet, as Schull shows, gamblers don't want to win. Winning disrupts the flow of play. In compulsive porn viewing, there's a promise of satisfaction, but satisfaction is illusive: one forgoes the pleasures of the known for the pleasures of the unknown. The search repeats, desire is recursive. While porn and gambling are different in many ways, I am interested in the way designers design for anticipation and recursiveness, how they design something that looks ostensibly systematic but feels chaotic. What might be the ethics of such a design? I don't think we can easily draw lines between choice and compulsion, free will and technological affordance. Porn and gambling (and as we'll see later, video games) blur these lines and make the ethics of design a messy thing. This is because the machine transforms us as a subject and we transform the machine as an object. The machine becomes a different object when we engage with it. We become a different subject when we search for porn or play penny slots. Designers can transform subjectivity, but viewers can transform the design. It just reminds me of Drucker's work on probabilistic materiality -- that we perform the object when we engage with it. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">Sorry these thoughts are themselves rambling and chaotic! After this week, I'll have more time to slow down and articulate myself clearly. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">At some point in this discussion, maybe tomorrow when I am back in my office and have access to my books, I want to compare the two interfaces I shared in this post with Drucker's chapter in <i>Graphesis</i> (Harvard 2014) on interface design. Obviously Drucker is on my mind because of her talk tomorrow. More as I have time -- </span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><span></span><span></span>Patrick Keilty<div>Assistant Professor<br>Faculty of Information<br></div><div>Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies</div><div>University of Toronto</div><div><a href="http://www.patrickkeilty.com/" target="_blank">http://www.patrickkeilty.com/</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 6:46 PM, Katie Shilton <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kshilton@umd.edu" target="_blank">kshilton@umd.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div dir="ltr">I'm happy to be joining the discussion on empyre this week!<div><br></div><div>My research is in technology and design ethics, and recently I've been focused on the culture of ethical debate and self-regulation in mobile application development. Mobile app development interests me because apps are largely unregulated, and developers are extremely diverse, ranging from single-person shops to huge companies. Many mobile app developers are contractors who must navigate both worlds. This makes app developers interesting ethical agents, as they are often in a position to make decisions with ethical import: how much data to collect, how long to keep that data, whether to sell it; what sorts of apps to develop and what demographics to target (or exclude); and most relevant to this discussion, whether and how to design for flow, engagement, and compulsion. </div><div><br></div><div>As I was reflecting on the theme after talking with Patrick, I kept thinking about a Q&A session I attended at an Android developer conference last year. The topic was privacy, but (as I've noticed privacy conversations are prone to do in these venues) conversation soon veered into other ethical issues. A developer stood up and expressed his anxiety that, by designing an Android game that would be popular, successful, and also profitable, he would cross into the complicated ethical territory of encouraging addiction and gambling. I am really interested in the challenges that developers face when compulsion is a design value that equates with success. As Patrick's introduction mentioned, <span style="font-size:12.8px">Schüll's work is an exemplary exploration of industries that deal with this tension. I've now become interested in how developers who don't think of themselves as part of the gaming industry grapple with these tensions in their work practice. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">And indeed, as Patrick's post on the word "compulsion" indicates, designing for exorbitant desire has complex ethical valence. As Murat's reply suggested, designing for compulsion could have positive connotations. The positive side of compulsion is often engaged in discussions of "gamification" as a tool for motivation.</span></div><div><br></div><div>For example, something that crossed my path recently: a gamified toothbrush app for kids that was <i>too</i> successful in employing game features: <a href="http://gizmodo.com/kids-are-getting-addicted-to-an-app-enabled-toothbrush-1730527892" target="_blank">http://gizmodo.com/kids-are-getting-addicted-to-an-app-enabled-toothbrush-1730527892</a></div><div><br></div><div>Thanks for having me this week, and looking forward to the discussion!</div><div><br></div><div>Katie </div><div><div><br></div>-- <br><div>Katie Shilton<br>Assistant Professor<br>College of Information Studies<br>University of Maryland, College Park<br><a href="mailto:kshilton@umd.edu" target="_blank">kshilton@umd.edu</a></div></div></div>
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