2005.02.17 SLIDE 1IS146 – SPRING 2005

New Media on The Go and in The Home

Prof. Marc Davis, Prof. Peter Lyman, and danah boyd

UC Berkeley SIMS

Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Spring 2005http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is146/s05/

IS146:

Foundations of New Media

2005.02.17 SLIDE 2IS146 – SPRING 2005

danah boyd: who am i?

• Ph.D. student of Peter Lyman’s at SIMS

• Ethnographic engineer at Google

• Queer-identified, feminist, activist

• Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT Media Lab (with Judith Donath, Sociable Media Group) => thesis on Faceted Id/entity

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science at Brown University (with Andy van Dam) => thesis on how sex hormones affect visual perception in virtual reality

• Built online communities to support V-Day, a non-profit working to end violence against women and girls worldwide (“The Vagina Monologues”)

2005.02.17 SLIDE 3IS146 – SPRING 2005

danah boyd: what do i do?

• Buzzwords: social networks, context, identity, (sub)cultures, youth cultures

• Areas of focus: blogging, Friendster, social technologies

• Methodology: ethnography

• Questions: – How do people negotiate a presentation of self in

digital contexts to an unknown audience?– How do social networks affect digital presentation of

self?

2005.02.17 SLIDE 4IS146 – SPRING 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Computational Media

• Today– New Media on The Go and in The Home

• Preview of Next Time– Designing New Media

2005.02.17 SLIDE 5IS146 – SPRING 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Computational Media

• Today– New Media on The Go and in The Home

• Preview of Next Time– Designing New Media

2005.02.17 SLIDE 6IS146 – SPRING 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Computational Media

• Today– New Media on The Go and in The Home

• Preview of Next Time– Designing New Media

2005.02.17 SLIDE 7IS146 – SPRING 2005

What New Media Is Not Defined By

• Digitized analog media

• Media displayed on a computer

• Random access media

• Necessarily having less information than analog media

• Necessarily being able to be copied without generation loss

• Being “interactive”

2005.02.17 SLIDE 8IS146 – SPRING 2005

Manovich on New Media

• Numerical representation– Can be described formally (mathematically)– Can be manipulated algorithmically (programmability)

• Modularity– Constructed out of substitutable components

• Automation– Automation of media creation, manipulation, and access– Low level (bits) and high level (semes) automation

• Variability– Media objects can have potentially infinite versions– Media database, separation of data and interface,

customization/personalization, branching-type interactivity, hypermedia (links), periodic updates, scalability (e.g., resolution)

• Transcoding– … Media => Data => Media …

2005.02.17 SLIDE 9IS146 – SPRING 2005

• Movies change from being static data to programs

• Shots are inputs to a program that computes new media based on content representation and functional dependency (US Patents 6,243,087 & 5,969,716)

Central Idea: Movies as Programs

Parser

Parser

Producer

Media

Media

Media

ContentRepresentation

ContentRepresentation

2005.02.17 SLIDE 10IS146 – SPRING 2005

AutoBuddy Dialog-Based Cutting

• AutoBuddy analyzes the Driver and Gunner audio to determine who is speaking at each point in movie

• Produces a stream of speech events with durations and values (Driver, Gunner, both, or neither)

GunnerDriver Pause Both Gunner Pause

time

Gunner

2005.02.17 SLIDE 11IS146 – SPRING 2005

Computation for Designing Artifacts

• Four computational ideas/techniques from Carlo Sequin– Procedural generation– Parameterization– Optimization– Evolutionary power

2005.02.17 SLIDE 12IS146 – SPRING 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Computational Media

• Today– New Media on The Go and in The Home

• Preview of Next Time– Designing New Media

2005.02.17 SLIDE 13IS146 – SPRING 2005

Questions for Today

• How do theories of culture help us do ethnography?

• How does ethnography help us do design?

2005.02.17 SLIDE 14IS146 – SPRING 2005

Questions about the iPod

• Who is the iPod ad targeting?– How do you know?

• What words come to mind about the iPod?

2005.02.17 SLIDE 15IS146 – SPRING 2005

Review of Culture

• “Culture is a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior”

• Meanings and practices

• Encoding and decoding, interpretation

2005.02.17 SLIDE 16IS146 – SPRING 2005

Identification

• Cultural meanings + identity

• Advertising – Cultural language speaking for the product– Wants to address the buyers– Must create identification between customer

and product

2005.02.17 SLIDE 17IS146 – SPRING 2005

iPod Print Ad

2005.02.17 SLIDE 18IS146 – SPRING 2005

Adbusters

2005.02.17 SLIDE 19IS146 – SPRING 2005

Parody Ads

2005.02.17 SLIDE 20IS146 – SPRING 2005

Facebook

2005.02.17 SLIDE 21IS146 – SPRING 2005

Goal of Ethnography

• Ethnographers seek to understand culture, identity, and social practices– Similar to advertisers?

• Why do people do what they do, think how they think and how does this connect to culture?– Theory helps us ground observations

2005.02.17 SLIDE 22IS146 – SPRING 2005

Challenges for Ethnographers

• Access– Ability to ‘see’ and gain trust

• Interpretation– Bias and reflexivity

• Moral imperative – Ethnographers care about the people they

study

• Inexactitude of method• Thick description

– They aren’t just stories

2005.02.17 SLIDE 23IS146 – SPRING 2005

Your Interviews

• How did you gain access?

• How did you interpret, produce meaning?– How do you identify with the subject?– What knowledge did you have that helped?

• What were your biases?– Did you expect a certain result?– How did you phrase the questions?

• How did you convey what you learned?– Who was your audience?

2005.02.17 SLIDE 24IS146 – SPRING 2005

Ethnography for Design

• Understand people, culture, practices, technology and the interconnections– Think from the subjects’ perspective

• Challenge technological determinism– Show that technology is not on a path towards

progress, but culturally situated – Situate design in users’ worldview, not

designers

2005.02.17 SLIDE 25IS146 – SPRING 2005

Design for People

• Who are you designing for?– Why does that population matter?– What is the culture of that population?– How will the design affect that culture?

• How are these people (un)like you? – How are their needs different?

2005.02.17 SLIDE 26IS146 – SPRING 2005

Design for Flexibility

• Create flexible cultural artifacts– Allow different interpretations for different

people in different situations

• Expect the unexpected

• Iterative ethnography

2005.02.17 SLIDE 27IS146 – SPRING 2005

Allen Lew on Mackay

• Throughout most of the reading, Mackay presents two schools of thought on new technologies and how they affect our interactions with the outside world. One idea says that technology opens up new realms of communication to more people than before. The other one says that it actually enforces more isolation and privatization into our own personal spheres. Which of these opinions do you agree with? Why?

2005.02.17 SLIDE 28IS146 – SPRING 2005

Allen Lew on Mackay

• Mackay mentions several of the early conceptions of how a new technology would be used in everyday life, many of which turned out to be incorrect. Where did these ideas come from? Why did they not pan out the way they were intended?

2005.02.17 SLIDE 29IS146 – SPRING 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Computational Media

• Today– New Media on The Go and in The Home

• Preview of Next Time– Designing New Media

2005.02.17 SLIDE 30IS146 – SPRING 2005

Readings for Next Time

• Donald A. Norman. Why Interfaces Don't Work. In: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, edited by Brenda Laurel, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1990, p. 209-219. – Discussion Questions

• Stacy Anker• S. Joy Mountford. Tools and Techniques for Creative Design.

In: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, edited by Brenda Laurel, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1990, p. 17-30. – Discussion Questions

• David Hsiao• Laurie Vertelney and Sue Booker. Designing the Whole-

Product User Interface. In: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, edited by Brenda Laurel, Addison Wesley: Reading, Massachusetts, 1990, p. 57-63. – Discussion Questions

• Nicole Schwartz