Reading Buxton’s preface to “Sketching User Experiences” felt like someone had crawled into my head and clearly articulated the messy thoughts that have been accumulating. He writes, bolding by me:
Some academics, such as Hummels, Djajadiningrat, and Overbeeke (2001), go so far as to say that what we are creating is less a product than a “context for experience.” Another way of saying this is that it is not the physical entity or what is in the box (the material product) that is the true outcome of the design. Rather, it is the behavioural, experiential, and emotional responses that come about as a result of its existence and its use in the real world.
Before arriving at ITP, I wrote in my statement: “To design an experience—whether it be architectural, social, digital—establishes a context for relationships to occur between people, between people and space, and between people and technology. Opportunity for interactive technologies resides in amplifying how individuals position themselves in this context. “
Fundamentally I think this interest in context and frameworks—the establishment of possibilities or constrains—is constantly being questioned through my work here at ITP
For example, this (work-in-progress / yet-to-be-realized) idea of an “endless” loom provides a framework for users to alter the ruleset which creates a pattern. They are actively engaged in generating the content while simultaneously adjusting the framework. These adjustments are recorded into the system for future (and past) users to examine, creating a visual artifact of the various interactions.
The question that keeps coming up when I consider these frameworks or contexts for experiences is: how much control does the user have to alter the framework itself? On the sliding scale of reciprocity between action and reaction, where does the framework fall?
Under what circumstances is it helpful for the user to alter the context itself, and under what circumstances is it not? Sometimes you just want a thing to work.