{"id":251,"date":"2013-02-01T16:28:21","date_gmt":"2013-02-01T23:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=251"},"modified":"2013-04-12T07:56:20","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T14:56:20","slug":"pointing-and-clicking-on-curious-rituals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=251","title":{"rendered":"Pointing and clicking on Curious Rituals<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHaunted\u201d interfaces, sensor tricking, and cell trances are just a few of the gadget-enabled gestures cataloged in the fascinating online publication\u00a0Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday<\/a>.\u00a0<\/i>Produced by researchers working last summer at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA\u2014Nicolas Nova, Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon, and Walton Chiu, along with Dan Hill and Julian Bleecker\u2014this recent work investigates the pervasive\u2014but often overlooked\u2014gestures and behaviors that emerge from our co-habitation with electronic devices, such as waggling a dying remote in front of a TV, or rapidly inserting and ejecting wonky DVDs as an \u201cobsessive fix.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Haunted<\/p>\n

The impetus for the project in part is the cultural misperception that digital devices and their interfaces somehow render users passive, even paralyzed. As one of the researchers frames in the introduction to\u00a0Curious Rituals<\/i>, casual use of the term \u201cdigital\u201d often neglects its original definition\u2014manual manipulation:<\/p>\n

The hidden assumption behind the use of such an adjective is that these digital artifacts are not very engaging from a physical standpoint. That is, people sit at their desks with their laptops; couch potatoes play games on their sofas; commuters stare at their smartphones in their smart-phone with blue-glow faces. But is this clich\u00e9d version of the everyday life true? Are we really so immobile when using the vast panoply of digital apparatuses?<\/i>\u00a0(7)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As Curious Rituals<\/i> confirms, digital interfaces are digital in the fullest sense, providing affordances<\/a> for physical behaviors and actions that may come from other contexts\u2014such as \u201cpinching\u201d a touch screen\u2014or simply emerge from human adaptation\u2014such as hip-checking a security door or turn-style to scan an ID tag in one\u2019s pocket. Some devices even encourage sympathetic or \u201cuseless\u201d body movements and behaviors for which the interface has no use\u2014what the researchers call \u201chaunted\u201d interfaces.<\/p>\n

Video game designers and players likely recognize this phenomenon from observing \u201cexcessive\u201d player actions: ducking, twisting, turning, and other spontaneous reactions in the heat of game play\u2014\u201cinputs\u201d that non-motion-sensitive interfaces in particular would find inscrutable. But this surfeit of bodily interaction has its uses; according to the authors, observations of player movements influenced the design of the latest generation of touch and motion-control interfaces. As the array of current video game controllers attests, one interface\u2019s \u201cghost\u201d can become another\u2019s \u201cembodied\u201d resident.<\/p>\n

Beyond the scope of the Curious Rituals<\/i> project, however, lurks another ghost: interfaces and gestures that, through obsolescence, have become lost or replaced. TV side-slapping as a \u201cna\u00efve fix\u201d for horizontal and vertical hold, for example, went into decline with cable, but the gesture was both an expression of skillful finesse and a cultural icon of media frustration. More recently, the iPod click wheel has become an endangered interface, now only appearing in the \u201cclassic\u201d line. The loss is acutely felt (and eloquently mourned<\/a> by fan communities), as the click wheel expertly paired the orbiting thumb with the security of cradling the device with the rest of the hand. The largest barrier to device adoption\/adaptation may have nothing to do with learning new interface schemas and their attendant gestures\u2014ultimately, forming new habits\u2014but rather having to someday (all too soon) let them go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHaunted\u201d interfaces, sensor tricking, and cell trances are just a few of the gadget-enabled gestures cataloged in the fascinating online publication\u00a0Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday.\u00a0Produced by researchers working last summer at the Art Center College of Design … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}