Context
Human-centred design (HCD) is a central paradigm in interaction design research, teaching, and practice. HCD focuses on the characteristics of the users of the medium or tool being designed, their needs and wants, contexts of usage, and their tasks and workflows. HCD is concerned with learning processes and cognitive stresses and tries to develop products that accommodate humans and are ready-to-hand, promoting user-friendliness, facilitation of workflows, comfort, and a mental state of flow. The successes of HCD philosophies and methodologies, and their role in shaping the current media landscape are undeniable, but they are not without downsides.
The application of HCD methods can result in media and tools that are conducive to hedonistic loops — the optimisation and normalisation of what is already known and familiar to users — and to the overuse of strategies and patterns that exploit computational media’s potential for persuasiveness. This may result in diminished critical thinking and metacognition in users. Mistaking usability with effortlessness can lead to negative impacts on diversity and to increases in radicalisation, as well as to a dilution of the ergodic potential, impairing the creation of meaning and the development of creative processes, as well as increasing alienation, something which is paradoxically opposed to one of the main goals of flow theory. Ultimately, HCD’s methods can incentivise shallow relationships with digital media and other humans, leading to unreflected interactions and convergent thinking.
Interaction design’s influence on most human activities is paramount. The way computational tools and media are designed increasingly impacts what we are able to create with and for them due to their affordances and how they expand human creativity.
Examples can be found in how generative artificial intelligence systems are brought to creative software and how algorithms mediate interactions on social networks and digital media, with impacts on culture, politics, ecology, and a growing number of other fronts. This research intends to expand the methods available to HCD and to develop tools for countering these shortcomings.
Break The Loop Research Project
This project intends to bring contributions from other disciplines, chiefly game design, to interaction design. Game design often suffers from excessive facilitation and the commodification of flow”, but it is a field where these negative effects have a far more direct impact on the quality of products. As such, there is a growing body of research focused on inconvenient play, transgressive and no-fun games, abusive game design, and other strategies to induce friction in games and to lead to increases in meaningfulness and the quality of experience. Relevant bodies of research are also being developed in fields adjacent to interaction and game design, such as computational arts, electronic literature, or digital narrative.
This project’s main research question is: How can friction, inconvenience, and playful strategies stemming from game design be used in interaction design as inducers of meaning, reflectiveness and higher-order thinking by users? Secondary questions include: How can flow be constructively interrupted and moderated through the use of friction in the interaction with digital media? What are the purposes for breaking flow in digital media? What kinds of teaching and learning materials can be developed for these methods?
This website intends to archive current discourses and practices, providing updated knowledge on theories, models, methods, frameworks, strategies, principles, patterns, or tools, for countering these shortcomings. The focus of the site is on strategies to induce friction in the interaction with computational systems and how this may lead to increases in meaningfulness and the quality of experience with computational artefacts.
doi: https://doi.org/10.54499/2023.14448.PEX
Keywords: Interaction Design; Game Design; User Experience; Design Education and Training.
Participating Institutions
Institute for Research in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS), FBAUP - Leader
Centro de Investigação em Média Digitais e Interação (DigiMedia), UA
Team
- Eliana Santiago
- Fabrício Fava
- Henrique Miguel
- Lara Portelinha
- Miguel Carvalhais
- Pedro Cardoso
- Pedro Sá Couto