[-empyre-] Week 1 Introduction: Compulsion, Ethics, and Mobile App Development

Thu Oct 8 14:44:12 AEDT 2015

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!

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 behind algorithms, ergonomics, and graphic user interfaces that
seek to intensify the traffic between human and machine. 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 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.

Sorry these thoughts are themselves rambling and chaotic! After this week,
I'll have more time to slow down and articulate myself clearly.

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 *Graphesis* (Harvard 2014) on
interface design. Obviously Drucker is on my mind because of her talk
tomorrow. More as I have time --

Patrick Keilty
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Information
Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
University of Toronto
http://www.patrickkeilty.com/

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 6:46 PM, Katie Shilton <kshilton at umd.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I'm happy to be joining the discussion on empyre this week!
>
> 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.
>
> 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, 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.
>
> 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.
>
> For example, something that crossed my path recently: a gamified
> toothbrush app for kids that was *too* successful in employing game
> features:
> http://gizmodo.com/kids-are-getting-addicted-to-an-app-enabled-toothbrush-1730527892
>
> Thanks for having me this week, and looking forward to the discussion!
>
> Katie
>
> --
> Katie Shilton
> Assistant Professor
> College of Information Studies
> University of Maryland, College Park
> kshilton at umd.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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