AVOIDING EXTINCTION
by Denise Caruso

c. 1998 International Design Magazine

Interactive media has hit the design world like a meteor -- which, as the 
dinosaurs found out, tends to have quite an impact on community life.

But the smoke is clearing, evolution has kicked in, and -- judging from the 
sheer volume of entrants and winners of this year's Interactive Media Design 
Review -- a new species of interactive designer is learning to thrive in the 
current ecosystem.

The dinosaurs' problem, of course, is that it's hard for them to tell the 
difference between digital media -- that is, traditional media blasted onto a 
computer screen -- and true interactive media, which is digital media's 
ideological opposite.

But the new species has already grokked that the interaction itself, not the 
media, is new media's defining component.

At its most basic, interaction design is about communication and persuasion, 
a combination that tickles our neural networks and convinces us to do 
something. It is a conversation between designers and audience, where 
designers have three vital tasks: first, they must create a "place" for the 
conversation to occur; second, they must overcome human inertia; and third, 
they must give every audience member real and productive control over 
their interactive experiences to keep the conversation lively.

How do interaction designers use technology to push us out of inertia and 
into their conversations? Quite simply, they use the portal of user interface -- 
the connection point where the interaction between people and technology 
actually takes place.

Many years ago, for example, when I sat down to my first Atex terminal -- my 
first computer -- at my first newspaper job, the experience felt more like a 
drop-kick than a push.

Writing was no longer the simple act of rolling a piece of paper into a 
typewriter. I no longer had the luxury of just thinking the words and 
pounding them out on the keyboard. With a computer between me and the 
keys, I had to think about how it wanted me to write, how its software would 
receive my keystrokes. To get the results I wanted, I had to learn a whole new 
lingo of both words and actions: C-prompt. Word-wrap. Command character. 
Scroll. Cut and paste. Send.

Save.

Now there's a concept. Until computers, one did not need to "save" words 
typed on paper, other than by choosing not to light a match to them.

Although, in retrospect, these things seem like a small price to pay for the 
freedom that word processors and computers and the Internet have 
subsequently provided me, I could feel my brain being reprogrammed and the 
sensation was not pleasant.

In fact, I remember a photo taken of me at that time, slumped in front of the 
Atex, woebegone and stymied: I had absolutely no idea how to do my job 
anymore. Yes, I was using a powerful tool and, yes, I learned how to do for 
myself what legions of typesetters used to get paid union wages for. But my 
thought patterns had been changed -- for better or worse -- by the decisions 
made by some software programmer in some fusty cubicle banging away on 
his keyboard late into the night.

This relationship between programmer and user is fundamentally different 
from design in any other medium. A software interface design doesn't just sit 
there being its fabulous self, as does a traditional print design. The raison 
d'être of a software interface is to make us do, not feel. And what we do is 
actually and literally designed by the programmer.

That level of persuasion may not make itself known to most people, but as 
technology infiltrates culture, it unquestionably shapes our thoughts and 
actions. For example, who hasn't been "clicked off" by a cranky little kid 
pointing a TV remote at you? And what graphic designer can't tell -- just by 
eyeballing it -- whether a picture has been PhotoShopped or Kai-Powertooled? 

That's the kind of deep, subtle persuasion I'm talking about, the kind that 
begs the question, "Are you doing the processing, or are you being processed?"

This means of persuasion is celebrated in Steven Johnson's book, Interface 
Culture. Johnson, who co-founded the highly regarded Web magazine Feed, 
believes that software interfaces are a new medium for human expression, as 
significant as anything that's gone before them, from cave painting to the 
novel to television.

His experiences with the Web have convinced him that this conversational, 
art-as-communication medium of the interface is already having a significant 
effect on society and culture.

In Johnson's worldview, hypertext is a grammar for writing and telling 
stories, and the hypertext link is the first significant new form of punctuation 
in centuries; similarly, word processors and graphics programs and HTML are 
deep and profound artistic tools, persuasive in the broadest sense.

Where I was feeling manipulated by interface design, Johnson saw it as a 
metaphor for a new mode of human thought, a filter for us to snap onto the 
lenses of our brains.

But others think of technology and persuasion in much more particular 
terms. One of the most interesting is B.J. Fogg. Now a "visioneer" at Sun 
Microsystems, he also teaches a course in Standford's Human-Computer 
Interaction department. He calls his course Captology, an acronym for 
Computers as Persuasive Technology.

I love this acronym because it makes me think of being captivated -- the very 
best state of mind that an interactive media designer can inspire. Where 
Johnson focused on the ambient effects of interface on the way we think and 
communicate, Fogg pinpoints its more intentional persuasive effects.

Fogg's research examines how product designers can methodically use 
persuasive techniques in everything from airphones to shareware to 
children's software.

At the start, designer must first answer some simple but fundamental 
questions: Who is going to use this thing? For what purpose? And in what 
setting are they going to use it?

For example, some people might feel comfortable sitting on the couch, 
browsing the Web with WebTV -- a public space, more public than a desktop 
PC for sure -- but they may not be as comfortable writing personal e-mail that 
everyone can see while they're sitting on that couch.

And ATMs are public-space devices that can display information we consider 
extremely private. Which explains why you always see people standing close 
to ATM screens, glancing nervously over their shoulder. We don't have 
much choice about using ATMs, but in plenty of circumstances, we aren't 
happy about it.

Other products on the market are doing a better job of using persuasive 
techniques in their technology products (you can see examples aplenty at 
www.captology.org). Parappa the Rapper, one of this year's two top award-
winners, is a wonderful, lighthearted example of persuading players to bop 
along with the music and, in the process, learn some rhythm.

And, by now, most people have seen news reports about the Baby Think It 
Over doll, a chip or two and some software buried inside a realistic-looking, 
rubber "baby." Given to teenagers as a propaganda tool in the fight against 
unwanted pregnancy, the "baby" reminds them constantly when it needs to 
be fed, changed, bathed and played with.

Then, of course, there's Tamagotchi. Talk about persuasion -- I still shudder 
to recall the U.S. News and World Report story that I read at the height of the 
Tamagotchi craze: one father of a couple of fanatics had to return a puppy to 
the pet store because his girls preferred to "feed" their Tamagotchis.

Or visit a video arcade or a casino. The noisy, flashing screen that pitches such 
a fit as you walk by actually has a name -- it's called "attract mode" -- and its 
sole purpose is to make you stop and slip a quarter into its slot.

Now think about how powerful it would be if we could use such seductive 
computing techniques to both seduce Web site visitors and keep them 
coming back.

For example, a banner ad that just screams "Click me now! Really, I mean it! 
Click me now!" -- and doesn't bother to tell me why -- is just eye noise. And, 
of course, it tips me off that I'm about to be done-to in a way I probably won't 
like very much.

I suspect that if designers trained themselves to look at interactive media 
with persuasive and seductive design concepts in mind, the world would 
turn into an idea factory for products that really connect to people and 
engages them in this new form of conversation.

Of course, I would be remiss to encourage the use of such powerful 
techniques without also acknowledging their dark side. The ethics of 
persuasion is a deep, scary topic, especially when what we're really talking 
about is turning the soulless computer into a propaganda machine.

We are at the beginning of this curve in lots of ways -- designers don't yet 
know enough to use persuasive concepts mindfully, and consumers aren't 
yet wired enough to make them widely useful. But the newbies who are just 
freshly connected to the online world, especially our parents, grandparents 
and kids, are much more vulnerable than we are.

How could they not be? Technology companies spend billions of dollars to 
sell us a fundamental belief that computers and the Internet are repositories 
of the world's knowledge, largely infallible and absolutely indispensable.

Because interactive technology is by definition more engaging than other 
types of media -- that's why they call it interactive -- it has the potential to be 
the most persuasive. Designers absolutely must come together and figure this 
out, just like the Web community is doing around the issue of consumer 
privacy. I have faith -- well placed, I hope -- that this will happen sooner 
rather than later.

And I also have a strong intuition that these concepts and methods, 
mindfully used, can put interaction design on a fresher, more interesting and 
much steadier course. Certainly, designers can take some of the mystery out of 
the evolutionary process. And that means they may be able to avoid the fate 
of the dinosaurs and at last redirect their energies toward creating interactive 
media that really work.