Poetic function of design, communication and interactivity Gustavo Victor Casillas Lavin

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN RESEARCH CENTER, CIDI NATIONAL AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF MEXICO, UNAM gvcl@servidor.unam.mx

Mara Luisa Prez Guerrero

TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF CATALONIA, UPC mlpg20@gmail.com

Jos Mara Monguet Fierro

TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF CATALONIA, UPC jm.monguet@upc.edu

FIGURE: Interactivity and Communication (Composition: M. Perez) Can things communicate with us? Some people talk to their computers, cars, cellphones, even to their microwave ovens. They frequently demand some specific behavior from these objects or in some way express their emotions to them. The mainstream judgment in science and technology describes this attitude as animism, the belief system that attributes souls to animals, plants and other entities like everyday objects and manufactured articles. With a different perspective, Fernando Martin Juez (1) suggest that this process of communication and the flowing state that sometimes engage people in the use of everyday objects are expressions of a participating consciousness, described by Berman as a kind of consciousness that: "... involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness..." (2). Beyond the idea of a participating consciousness, there remain questions about what happens through the use of things created by designers. Is an interactive procedure performed with the object itself or with the designer? Does this interaction actually involve a communication process? Is the user communicating to the designer through the object? How are interaction, communication and design related to each other?

In this paper we will try to explore the links between design, communication and interactivity, in regard that interaction process implies the change of the entities involved, and this is not necessarily an issue frecuently associated with communication or design. Is there poetic in design? Jordi Llovet proposes one interesting approach to analyzing the relationship between design and communication (3). Llovet recognizes in the first place that objects, even if voiceless, bring some 'sign value' beyond their proposed functionality and that this is a semiotic phenomenon. Secondly, he brings Jakobson's theory of communicative functions to the analysis of design and asserts that the poetic function is the essence of design. Roman Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions, each related with an aspect of the communication process. One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a message and usually is related to the nature of the message. The aspects or dimensions of the communication process in Jakobson's schema are: 1. context 2. message 3. sender 4. receiver 5. channel 6. code And the functions to which they relate are: 1. referential (linked to contextual information) 2. poetic (linked to the message, autotelic) 3. emotive (linked to the sender, self-expression) 4. conative (linked to the receiver, vocative or imperative addressing of receiver) 5. phatic (linked to the channel) 6. metalingual (linked to the code) In poetry, the dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the message itself. According to Jakobson the main characteristic of poetry is "the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination" (4). In plain words, it implies that poetry successfully integrates form and function. In a language, some words are equivalent to other words or combinations of other words; consequently most meanings can be expressed in several different ways. The 'axis of selection' concept is applied to the process of choice of one of the possible words to express something. On the other side, individual signs can be collected together to form compound signs, for instance: groups of sounds (and the letters to represent them) form words, groups of words form sentences, sentences form narratives, etc. The constructed signs are called syntagms and each element collected may be a paradigm. The 'axis of combination' concept refers to this process of construction of syntagms. The distinctive feature of the poetic function is the concept of 'equivalence' or coherency between the selection process and the combination of the elements chosen in a set. There is no poetry if one of the items doesn't match with others. Llovet suggest that in the course of the design process the designer must integrate the different elements contained in the object following the rules of the poetic function.

Llovet recognizes that the designed object carries a sign-value, with an approach similar to Baudrillard's. Baudrillard claims that commodities are bought and displayed as much for their sign-value as their use-value, and that the fact of sign-value has become a critical component of the commodity and its consumption in the contemporary society. In this act of communication the designer a sends a message through the object. However, our original question still remains: what happens when people in fact use the things created by designers? Interactivity and communication: begging the question During the use of the object the user performs one or several actions on the object and the object executes one or more actions corresponding to the user's procedures. This is an interactive process apparently performed with the object itself and is normally compared to a dialogue. In fact, Sheizaf Rafaeli defines the concept of interactivity with regard to the activity of communication exchanges: "An expression of the extent that, in a given series of communication exchanges, any third (or later) transmission (or message) is related to the degree to which previous exchanges referred to even earlier transmissions" (5). Actually we are in the presence of a circular argument: when inquiring about communication in using objects, we defined the use itself as a communication process. In contrast, Terry Winograd points out how the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) communities have often been characterized as having opposing views of how humans and computers should interact, bringing two related questions: "Should we expect to communicate with the computer in the same way we would to another human...? Or are there practical and even philosophical objections to encouraging people to attribute human attributes and abilities to their computers?" (6). Winograd seems reluctant to characterize human-computer interaction as a communication process in regard of Austin and Searls 'speech act theory'. Austin argues that when we speak, we do not simply make descriptions of a non-linguistic world. Everyday conversations consists of 'speech acts' of different kinds such as metaphors, questions, promises, rumors, etc. (7) and some of these acts involve purpose, intention or will. We will try to explore the concept of interactivity with a scheme not related to communication from the beginning, and then try to find the link between them. The geometry of knowledge Interaction is about the coordinated actions of two or more entities. More specifically, interaction involves change, when the action of one of the entities promotes a change or state alteration in the other or the others, and vice versa. Is a two-way effect, contrasting a one-way causal effect. In systems theory the combination of simple interactions can lead to emergent phenomena. Following the 'geometry of knowledge' model (8), we propose different stages for interaction: phase shift, successive selection of phase and random selection of phase, with some complementary functions. We will succinctly describe this model. The more basic form of interaction is when an entity can achieve only two states or phases. If the entity has only one state then it cannot change and there is no possible interaction. In this stage the interaction consist in the change from one phase to the other. For example: the light switch, one of the simplest interactive artifacts.

When the entity has more than two states the interaction can take the stage of successive selection of phase: the consecutive shift from one state to the next, until the end of the selection possibilities. This kind of interaction is frequently used in text reading, image visualization or slide shows. If the entity can acquire multiple states and the user wants to get one in particular that is far away in the succession string, then interaction can be achieved by the random selection of phase, where the user can select the desired state without going through the intermediate stages. The geometry of knowledge scheme recognizes the combination of the suggested stages within different structural configurations. For example, it is possible to generate a three dimensional interactive walk applying the random selection of phase with four states: forward, backward, turn right and turn left, which are repeated successively for each new position. From this perspective, we can confirm that the coordinated sequence of acts that people performs with objects, no matter its complexity, is an interactive phenomenon. The user interacts with the object itself and not with the designer. In this interactive process the object state changes, but also the user's state shifts, contrary to the idea of one-way causal effect in objects by people actions. In addition this model distinguish different kinds of interactivity: user-machine interaction, useruser interaction, or user-message interaction and the possible mediations between them, for example: usermachine-message-machine-user interaction. Information by itself does not create knowledge; it must be organized, transformed, and presented in a way that gives its significance. In other words: knowledge requires, in addition to the information, of a structure to provide meaning. This structure is what we call geometry of knowledge. The geometry of knowledge model recognizes the function of user states and perceptions. As Reeves and Nass suggest, in general, perceptions are more influential than reality in terms of individuals interactions with computers (9). Acknowledge of people shifts is the foundation for affective interaction studies and emotional design. This changes involves psycho-physiological effects, reflecting physical, emotional and cognitive shift in the user as a result of the interaction with objects (10). Sometimes the change in people state becomes more evident with interrupted interactions or flow breakdowns (11). Through the use of the object the individual and the object change congruently, adapting to each other in a way that can be defined by the term 'structural coupling' as proposed by Maturana and Varela. To them, structural coupling takes place when the history of interactions between two or more systems becomes a history of recursive coherent structural changes in which the participant systems change together congruently (12). Conclusion Despite being sympathetic with the notion of participating consciousness in the relation with objects, as designers we don't need to attribute purpose, intention or will to everyday objects during the process of design, neither in their conceptual analysis. Designers send messages through the objects; this is a communication act. But, unless participating in a test procedure, users cannot send corresponding messages to designers. Generally the designer-user relation is not interactive in regard that there is no two-way effect. We identify the use of designed objects as an interactive procedure between the user and the object itself. Through performing this procedure the object changes and the user changes accordingly.

Additionally, we recognize that interactive procedures can be components of several communication processes, for example between different users or between the user and the object. The object itself plays diverse roles in different communication acts. Every communication process has particular characteristics: some of them are one-way acts that cannot be properly defined as interactive procedures.

NOTES (1) Fernando Martn Juez, Contribuciones para una antropologa del diseo, Gedisa, Barcelona, 2002, pp. 76-96 (2) Morris Berman, The reenchantment of the world. Bantam Books, New York, 1981, p. 16 (3) Jordi Llovet, Ideologa y metodologa del diseo, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 1981, pp. 89-133 (4) Idem, p. 99 (5) Sheizaf Rafaeli, Interactivity: From New Media to Communication, in H. Hawkins, J. Wiemann and S. Pingree (eds) Advancing Communication Science: Merging Mass and Interpersonal Processes, Sage, London, 1988, pp. 11034 (6) Terry Winograd, Shifting viewpoints: Artificial intelligence and humancomputer interaction, in Artificial Intelligence 170, Elsevier, 2006, pp. 12561258 (7) Terry Winograd, A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work, HumanComputer Interaction 3-1, 1987-88, pp. 3-30. (8) Gustavo Casillas, De la interfaz a la interfase. La relacin hombre-mquina ms all del paradigma de representacin. UNAM, Mxico, 2004, pp. 53-64 (9) Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996 (10) Timo Partalaa and Veikko Surakka, The effects of affective interventions in humancomputer interaction, Interacting with Computers 16, Elsevier, 2004, pp. 295309 (11) Jocelyn Scheirer, Raul Fernandez, Jonathan Klein and Rosalind W. Picard, Frustrating the user on purpose: a step toward building an affective computer, Interacting with Computers 14, Elsevier, 2002, pp. 93-118 (12) Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, El rbol del conocimiento, Lumen-Editorial Universitaria, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 50