RHETORIC and EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE Represents the Evolving Ideas of an Emerging Area of Study

Home , Experience architecture

“Rhetoric is a natural choice for UX work.” Potts —Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, RHETORIC and author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity and Salvo “I really like the definition of experience architecture. As Potts and Salvo write EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE in their introduction, ‘experience architecture requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single-task scenarios.’” —Donald Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE RHETORIC and author of The Design of Everyday Things EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE RHETORIC and

RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE represents the evolving ideas of an emerging area of study. Experience architecture focuses on the research and practice of creating technologies, products, policies, and services that serve the needs of various participants. Experience architecture addresses issues of usability, interaction design, service design, user experience, information architecture, and content management for websites, mobile apps, software applications, and technology services.

Experience architecture also represents an emerging context for the practice of a variety of research and practical skills. These proficiencies are incorporated into commercial design and development work as user experience design, which has become an effective workplace moniker for this assemblage of practices. The study of language, and especially of persuasion, grounds experience architecture. Rhetoric sustains the technology-rich discussion of language and design that characterizes the contemporary exploration of the emerging practice of user experience design, and experience architecture enriches discussion of relevant research and methods. Experience architecture is a professional practice merging the newest technologies with ancient knowledge, hence the need for a volume in which rhetoric and experience architecture are in dialogue. RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE includes chapters from twenty-five authors in three countries and eleven US states, representing eighteen universities, research institutions, and design firms.

EDITED BY 3015 Brackenberry Drive Anderson, South Carolina 29621 LIZA POTTS and MICHAEL J. SALVO http://www.parlorpress.com Parlor S A N: 2 5 4 – 8 8 7 9 Press ISBN: 978-1-60235-962-8 RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

Edited by Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo

Parlor Press Anderson, South Carolina www.parlorpress.com Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA © 2017 by Parlor Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Potts, Liza, editor. | Salvo, Michael J., editor. Title: Rhetoric and experience architecture / edited by Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo. Description: Anderson, South Carolina : Parlor Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017038154 (print) | LCCN 2017047258 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602359628 (pdf) | ISBN 9781602359635 (epub) | ISBN 9781602359826 ( ibook) | ISBN 9781602359833 (mobi) | ISBN 9781602359604 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781602359611 (hardcover : acid-free paper) Subjects: LCSH: Communication and technology. | Rhetoric--Technological innovations. | Content analysis (Communication) | Information resources management. | Research--Methodology. | Social change in literature. Classification: LCC P96.T42 (ebook) | LCC P96.T42 R53 2017 (print) | DDC 808.00285--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038154

978-1-60235-960-4 (paperback) 978-1-60235-961-1 (hardcover) 978-1-60235-962-8 (pdf) 978-1-60235-963-5 (epub) 978-1-60235-982-6 (ibook) 978-1-60235-983-3 (mobi)

2 3 4 5 Cover image: 2016. Photo by Michael Lechner on Unsplash. Used by permission. Book Design: David Blakesley Copyediting by Jared Jameson

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Bracken- berry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [email protected]. Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 3 Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo

2 Beckon, Encounter, Experience: The Danger of Control and the Promise of Encounters in the Study of User Experience 17 Patricia Sullivan

3 Experience Architecture: Drawing Principles from Life 41 Roger Grice

4 Analyzing Activity for Experience Design 57 Cheryl Geisler

5 Feminist Rhetorics and Interaction Design: Facilitating Socially Responsible Design 84 Jennifer Sano-Franchini

6 Personas as Rhetorically Rich and Complex Mechanisms for Design 111 Erin Friess

7 “Constructivist” Research Methods for Experience Architecture and Design 122 Heather Christiansen and Tharon Howard

8 Experience Architecture in Public Planning: A Material, Activist Practice 143 Kristen Moore

v 9 Methodologies: Design Studies and Techne 166 Ehren Pflugfelder

10 Ethnography as Research Aggregator 184 Andrew Mara and Miriam Mara

11 Audience Awareness: Resituating Experience Architecture as Execution 197 Cait Ryan

12 Kairos and Managing Experience Architecture Projects 209 Ben Lauren

13 Toward a Rhetoric of the Place: Creating Locative Experiences 225 Anders Fagerjord

14 Dialogic, Data-Driven Design: UX and League of Legends 241 Cody Reimer

15 Making as Learning: Mozilla and Curriculum Design 258 Rudy McDaniel and Cassie McDaniel

16 Memorial Interactivity: Scaffolding Nostalgic User Experiences 274 William C. Kurlinkus

17 Designing Digital Activism: Rhetorical Tool as Agent of Social Change 291 Douglas M. Walls, Delia M. Garcia, and Amy VanSchaik

18 Badges as Architectures of Experience: From Signaling to Communication 304 Stephanie Vie, Rudy McDaniel, and Joseph R. Fanfarelli

19 Relocations: (Re)visioning Rhetoric in a Modern Amusement Park 323 Jill Morris

Contributors 341 Index 347 Acknowledgments

We want to thank all the authors who contributed to this volume. Over a long and tumultuous path to publication, our contributors were patient, professional, and productive. Our goal from the outset was to create a fo- rum for academics and practitioners to share their experience and, along the way, convince as many as we could that experience architecture was a term that accurately described their work. Charles Sides was convinced early on, and offered valuable feedback and advice at an important moment. Ashita Nichanametla, Erin Brock-Carlson and Michelle McMullen offered us great insight and helped us construct another interface for readers to encounter the book. We would also like to thank Laura Gonzalez whose work on international user experience is helping us plan our next project. Mi- chael is grateful to Liza for pushing the project along when he just could not even, and Liza is thankful for Michael’s persistence. We presented early versions of this work at the Council for Programs in Technical and Scien- tific Communication (CPTSC), Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) and are thankful for our colleagues’ patient guidance and direction during early stages of the work, and are especially appreciative for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (ACM-SIGDOC) for helping us refine our approach and for providing excellent feedback in Silver Spring, Maryland and Limerick, Ireland. David Blakesley has a vision for the future of academic publishing; Jared Jameson has been sharp-eyed. Any value here is attribut- able to these collaborators and any missteps are of our own making. Our spouses have been patient as we discussed what we affectionate- ly refer to as “The RXA,” disrupting family time. And to our children, Liza’s Zöe, Katie, and Jayne and Michael’s Aila. Joy.

vii

RHETORIC AND EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

1 Introduction

Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo

xperience architecture (XA) represents an emerging context for the Epractice of a variety of research and practical skills. On one hand, these proficiencies are incorporated into commercial design and development work. User experience (UX for short) has become an effective workplace moniker for this assemblage of practices. The study of language, and especially of persuasion, grounds user experience architecture. Rhetoric sustains the technology-rich discussion of language and design that characterizes the contemporary exploration of emerging practice and enriches UX’s research and methods. Experience architecture is a professional site merging the newest technologies with ancient knowledge, hence the need for a volume in which rhetoric and experience architecture are brought into dialogue. With chapters contributed from twenty-five authors in three countries (and eleven US states), representing eighteen Universities and Re- search Institutions and design firms practicing experience architecture, this edited collection represents the evolving ideas of an emerging area of study. Experience architecture (XA) is focused on the research and practice of creating technologies, products, policies, and services that serve the needs of various participants. XA focuses on issues addressing usability; interaction design; service design; user experience; information architecture; and content management for websites, mobile apps, software applications, and technology services. Definitions of Experience Architecture We take experience architecture to be the architecture of mediated systems, resulting in a designed capability for those using those systems to commu- nicate. Experience Architecture takes a systems approach to the recipro- cal processes of analyzing and constructing social experiences in a variety of networked digital environments as well as a number of physical spaces. While social media represents the most immediate example, this collection demonstrates that a wide range of organizations deploy experience architecture in a broad application in virtual and physical space. These organizations value insights gained employing reflexive, iterative processes of designing interactive environments. While Experience Architecture is new in comparison to Rhetoric, Donald Norman insists it isn’t a wholly new concept, emerging alongside Apple’s first generations of personal computing devices in the late twenti-

3 Potts and Salvo 4 eth century: “the original book says nothing of what has come to be called user experience (a term that I was among the first to use, when in the early 1990s, the group I headed at Apple called itself “the User Experience Ar- chitect’s Office”)” (Norman, 2013, p. xiii). Before the web became ubiquitous, long before the phenomenon of smartphone users started gathering likes and comments on their latest updates and photos, Norman named the infant disciplinary formation:

It requires a change to emphasize the human needs, to emphasize development for people. Such a change will not come effortlessly. It requires a new process for product development, one that involves the social side of development as much as the engineering and marketing sides. It requires bringing a new discipline—user experience—to the development table. And it requires that this new discipline live up to the challenges before it. (Norman, 1998, p. 229)

It is challenging indeed to emerge with a new disciplinary formation facing the always-ongoing crisis in the very Humanities and Social Sci- ences we are charged with making relevant to the public and engaging with our engineering and programming colleagues. We are, again in Norman’s words, “victims of our own success” (Invisible Computer, 229) because we have “let technology lead the way.” Experience architecture puts human experience first, ahead of technological change or “disruption.” Comprehension begins, through its Latin roots, with taking ahold of something, of grasping it. So we need to grasp how our artifacts emplace us within the world, revealing how we can use these devices to better enjoy our experiences and maximize our time with the people we want to include in our lives. This emerging discipline is part of the process of humanizing technology: it is a systematic approach to discovering with whom we want to share our time and attention. It is quite a different definition of technological development and of user-centered design—with fewer zombies in technology-addled comas and more time available to maximize our presence in our loved ones’ lives. It isn’t surprising to see so many resisting technology when it results in more distance between us, less time spent together while we update, upgrade, and reboot our devices searching for ever-better Wi-Fi signals. Perhaps we are designing the wrong kinds of immersive environments. We need to focus less on single activities that envelop us in technology, and more on creating experiences that are augmented by technology. Meaningful, rich, humane, and valuable technologically mediated experiences drive this field. Experience architecture requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single task scenarios. When we build an app, we need to take into consideration the situations in which peo- Introduction 5 ple will use that app. Are users rushed, racing between airplane terminals? Is the environment welcoming and comfortable, such as their home? Are they excited to use this app and engage with it? Or, is it a necessary evil in their day-to-day activities, worth wrestling with because of the utility it af- fords, such as a calendaring system? What other tools are at their disposal? What is around them, and what other media demand their attention? Will the app augment a physical experience, such as purchasing coffee as part of a personal or professional ritual at their local shop? What other apps might they use at the same time, either for cross-comparison or more information? Should these other attendant technologies be linked together, meld- ing spaces, applications, websites, and other digital interfaces into seamless environments? Gone is the moment in which we thought we could build for a simple singular task, if we ever could. Here we must understand the context in which our participants are engaging with these experiences. This volume is designed to help specialists design methods for gathering and analyzing data and understanding network phenomena, ultimately improving the experience for those immersed in these techno-social networks. To understand these ecosystems, we must move beyond isolated tasks of writing, designing, and programming. We need to gain a stronger understanding of strategy and be willing to lead initiatives in the name of the participants who will use these systems and the organizations that want to engage users as contributors. This requires questioning assumptions about technology, ethics, culture, economics, and politics. It requires preparing students to grasp bigger contexts about developing technological solutions that serve actual peoples’ needs, rather than simply driving us to technology for technology’s sake. Experience architecture is the most generalizable expression of creating an environment: it includes investigative research such as contextual inquiry and survey design, analysis techniques like usability testing and task analysis, and practical applications such as interaction and information design and taxonomy creation. It is, perhaps, the name for one of the Sciences of the Artificialthat Herbert Simon first wrote about in1 969. Simon was an early proponent of process-oriented design and recognized the emerging field of computer engineering as a form of design. Simon was interested in a wide definition of design, but his work has been most influential in computing. Predating Norman’s work by two decades, Simon’s concern was the realm of the uncertain, what is now recognized as rhetoric. His concerns were distinct from the natural sciences, and hence his title. Simon articulated a range of design-intensive disciplines, from engineering to “architecture, business, education, law, and medicine,(111)” that he distinguished from natural sciences. Sciences of the Artificialconcentrate Potts and Salvo 6 not on describing how things were but on arranging how things ought to be. Design also brings a shift from analysis to productive action, and Simon as- serted these concerns are re-emerging as the rightful focus of professional education. Victor Margolin ends his book Design Discourse with a landmark bib- liographic essay explicitly linking Simon’s work with rhetoric: “On the side of Theory, Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial . . . looked at the potential of a unified science of design, but he did so from a process view only, without examining the ideological and cultural dimensions of theory” (Margolin, 1989 p. 286). As important as Simon’s work was in articulating design, Margolin points out his work was just a start to recognizing the ideological and ethical implications of human-constructed artifacts, of the power of technologies, institutions, and environments to shape—to both limit and expand—human action. Margolin goes on to discuss Ehses and Luptin’s work in the illustrated Rhetorical Handbook that includes a dictionary of visu- al rhetorical tropes. Whatever limitations history may have revealed in Si- mon’s approach, his work remains inspirational in its breadth and clarity— defining design as action-oriented, rhetorically imbued, and ultimately a human enterprise. Experience architecture is an umbrella term, and many distinct subfields fit into it: information design, content strategy, usability, app development, user-centered design, project management, interaction design, information architecture, findability, and web development. This list is by no means exhaustive, nor is it simply a laundry list. These are places on a map we’ve learned to collectively gather under the moniker experience architecture. For experience architects, every new project is an opportunity to create interactions with and between places, artifacts, and technologies. The editors of this volume understand experience architecture through the process of building a variety of experiences for a wide range of users, and then accounting for strategic decisions with the stakeholders who determine whether these projects and programs are worth maintaining. We have ad- ministered information repositories like our academic program websites and Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), contributed to the architecture of commercial software, designed innovative curriculum like the Experience Architecture Program at Michigan State University, and created new scholarly outlets like Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy. We are also participating in the redesign of scholarly communities (notably SIGDOC) as well as academic conferences. But the most important and far-reaching experiences we participate in almost every day of our professional lives is architecting our students’ classroom experiences and the environments in which they learn to become professionals. We would not limit this to what Introduction 7 is called interaction design or instructional design, as these titles miss so much of the context and responsibility of the strategic moves we must make as architects, writers, and designers of learning places. It is also too narrow a conception of what is within the (techno-) rhetor’s purview. That said, we can see emerging, similar (yet different) work being done in educational technology under the banner of learning experience (LX). It is that continuous and rewarding pursuit of the emergent, the new—what our colleague Patricia Sullivan has recently called the constant of change1—that is what we are after. Based in the ancient knowledge of rhetoric, performed using emergent digital tools of the current internetworked age, experience architecture is timely. This pursuit of the always-emergent is informed by ancient knowledge and by ethical action, cautioned by what we know about the problems of systems-centered and modern design. That is, we simply cannot train professionals to be Experience Architects. Instead, we have prepared this text in order to support the education of Professional and Technical Communicators (PTCs) and other advanced students. Such education requires that students learn about the requirements and demands, as well as the rewards of and vision for a future where we recognize, value, and self-consciously reflect upon numerous professional practices, enter- ing realms that respond to these sciences of the artificial, these realms in need of rhetorical intervention and requiring innovative work that extends beyond our traditional notions of user-centered and participatory design. How we define our work, our research, and our practice holds great meaning. Terminologies are swift to shift from user-centered design, to human-centered design, to user experience, to whatever new title emerg- es while this volume is in production, due in no small part to the demands of commerce and the whims of the market. This volume on experience architecture delineates its territories, in contrast, by being inclusive and aim- ing to supply foundational understanding for a new generation of professionals who will both anticipate and navigate the constant change that is our fluid context. The Future of Experience Architecture Is Global It is important to note that experience architecture is an international pursuit, taking place around the world. While the majority of chapters are contributed from researchers and professionals working across the United States, we received proposals from France, UK, Norway, Canada, India, and Australia. In the UK, there are service design professionals, user-experience designers, and design ethnographers working to improve the design 1. In her 2014 keynote at the SIGDOC conference on the occasion of receiving the Rigo award, September 27, 2014, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Potts and Salvo 8 of technologies, and in France and Germany, researchers link data with design. In Belgium, design is part of national identity with much to teach the world. Scandinavian design is here represented by Norway. Our authors represent a wide variety of approaches and traditions, and the collection is broadly international. The future of experience architecture is strong both as a body of knowledge and as a professionalizing identity. Further, and perhaps more importantly, the future of user-centered work and what Pele Ehn named usability culture is stronger still: the commercial viability (and quiet failure!) of so many products has been demonstrated by marketing user-centered and user-participant design. Apple remains a touchstone for measuring the value added to its products through design, as corporate entities in such diverse competitive scenarios as Disney and Delta Airlines try to measure the impact of user-centered engagement. Each of the authors in this collection traces a potential arc of the future of experience architecture. Yet, the power of its future is not in ar- guing over and deciding upon a single trajectory all its academic and prac- titioner adherents can follow, but rather to articulate our diverse successes, to study and determine what commonalities they share, and then re-articulate the practice of experience architecture. Informed as further co-creative extensions of the practice of experience architecture, the future of the field becomes a historical accretion of its most successful expressions over time. This collection of approaches, methods, and projects represents the kind of identity-building narratives such luminaries in the field as Whitney Quesenbery advocate. In her work on storytelling and narrative, she emphasizes not finding the single right answer but a variety of possible working solutions, “Every project is different, so the specific activities need to be adjusted, within an overall approach, to answer the questions each project poses” (Interview, 2012). Quesenbery leads us to conclude that there is no single future of experience architecture, but rather the discipline will ma- ture and advance by providing numerous routes to a variety of solutions, in effect, articulating not a single answer but a diverse range of solutions that together show a rich collection of potential trajectories, all of which together are futures of experience architecture. Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric (Pittsburgh, 2013) imagines a more active rhetor “attuned” to the voices of culture. Articulating the cho- rus (chôra) as distributed, among the artifacts of the human-made world, or the anthroposphere, the rhetor need not wait as in Bitzer’s construction. Such active rhetorical arts require engagement with spaces and places as well as technologies that, with reference to Latourian thinking, act as allies in a network of people and things to strengthen one’s position. While the Introduction 9 rhetor never controls the situation, Rickert’s attunements allow rhetorically-trained experience architects to work with design and designers to en- courage some actions and discourage others—raising further complications, particularly ethical conduct and knowledge-making, of epistemology. Sullivan, Grice, and Geisler, from part one of this volume, are important because of their contributions to rhetorical methodology. Sullivan explicitly connects Walter Ong’s work in audience analysis to usability research and indelibly links rhetoric to design, as in Kaufer and Butler’s Rhet- oric and the Arts of Design (1996). Our focus honors these rhetorical foundations while moving forward. Experience architecture is grounded in the ancient arts of rhetoric applied to emerging contexts of experience architecture, defined as “the architecture of the systems both above and below the surface (i.e., architecture of interactions, visuals, content, structure, and policy)” (Potts, 2014). Ancient rhetorical concepts of kairos, techne, and metis join user experience concerns with interface, design, and usability to sketch a field of inquiry uniting the most ancient knowledge with emergent media, requiring constant revisiting and revising of research methods. Revision requires re- engagement and reconceptualization. The opening chapter by Sullivan articulates this process as a tripartite waltz—beckon, encounter, and experience—and argues for the need for supple, plastic methods that do not become blind in their rigidity. While the book presents foundations and theories in the opening, these four chapters are inspirational and contextualizing rather than prescriptive and limiting. Similarly, the second part presents six methodological essays that situate knowledge-making practices fluid enough to respond meaningfully to the ebbs and flows of designing to support meaningful human experience patterned with enough recognizable re- peating elements to inform future meaning making. Finally, the third part offers a wide variety of cases of experience architecture in action, presented to inspire practitioners and researchers to take on their own projects and articulate their own practices. Equipped with meaningful rhetorical prepa- ration, the additive logic present throughout this collection (and this, plus this, also . . . ) is meant to inspire experience architects to act with reassur- ance and articulate new sites of research. That so many professionals and classroom teachers recognize the need for their intervention, the exigence for this collection is clear. Perhaps at some far-off date, another collection concerned with the limits and boundaries of experience architecture will be necessary, but that time is not now. Potts and Salvo 10 Organization of Rhetoric and Experience Architecture Part 1 of Rhetoric and Experience Architecture presents longer field-defining essays of 6,000–8,000 words. It consists of four single-authored chapters and represents over a century of experience in rhetoric, technical communication, and user-centered design theory. The opening essays trace the development of user experience as a rhetorical concept by contrasting system-centered with user-centered design. Sullivan asserts the rhetorical dimension of user engagement as a central value of user experience architecture, while Grice articulates a bridge between workplace practice and rhetorical knowledge building. Geisler asserts key components of methodological inquiry in rhetorical experience design, while Sano-Franchini articulates a feminist ethics at the field’s core. Throughout, the first section articulates experience architecture as a rhetorical activity. Part 2 offers a variety of methodologies for doing research in experience architecture that are grounded in projects and cases. While these methods are deeply enmeshed with rhetorical practice, the focus shifts from the relationship of rhetoric to experience architecture to revealing what counts as knowledge in the field. Each of the chapters in the second section is committed to experience architecture as rhetorical inquiry, providing links to and development of the arguments presented in the opening section. While each presents examples and sites, the focus is on the doing of research, designed to allow readers to find answers to a variety of questions: Why insert further data collection here? Why insist on reflection? How do I get started? Is this the best site to conduct this research? What benefits will stakeholders accrue? Essays in the second section invite interrogation of research methods so that readers can begin building their own approaches. Friess develops a rhetorical introduction to building personas, while Howard and Christiansen push towards constructivism. Moore pos- tulates unique characteristics of service design where citizens are encour- aged to participate in decision-making. Pflugfelder returns to explicit discussion of rhetoric by contextualizing the utility of techne in the language of design studies. Mara and Mara employ ethnography to make knowledge, while Ryan returns discussion to the value of audience awareness, contextualizing thirty years of development in information design research. Final- ly, Ben Lauren’s articulation of Kairos as sensitive to both time and space bridges the knowledge-making methods of part two with the case studies of part three. Part 3 presents seven sites of experience architecture research, from virtual game worlds to churches, from crisis and health communication to memorials and amusement parks, in shorter descriptive chapters. Introduction 11 Together, these cases reveal a rich variety of sites that exemplify the practice of experience architecture. These seven exciting examples cannot begin to exhaust the reach and appeal of the methods and perspectives but only ges- ture towards the rich opportunities a rhetorical approach to experience architecture supports and nurtures. Fagerjord narrates the process of filling churches across Europe with music and how these places reveal characteristics that sound designers can enhance for richer, more immersive experiences of place. Reimer traces the online community surrounding League of Legends and how an organization uses data to provide a better gaming experience for its customers. Rudy and Cassie McDaniel reveal Mozilla’s Webmaker as a site for teaching new literacy. Nostalgia, defined as bringing the past into the present, ani- mates sites of memorialization in Kurlinkus’ chapter, while Walls and colleagues are engaged in production of activist tools, here articulating Fair & Square as an app designed to support the long search for social justice. Vie and her colleagues explore community communication built around badges earned in gaming spaces. Finally, Morris connects experience architects with Imagineers in amusement park design. Each case articulates a facet of experience architecture, describing a site or related group of sites that re- veals key components of the rhetorical practice of experience architecture, thus establishing a broad range of sites for both professional practice and analytical study. Conclusions Since we began using the phrase Experience Architecture, academics and professionals have told us of their “aha” moments: of putting work in usability together with an ecological approach to genre, information architecture, and document design to create a coherent approach to the complex work of the technical and professional communicator in emergent environments of work and play. They want to read, use, and assign this book. From these con- versations, we believe the book would challenge advanced undergraduates in the growing numbers of professional and technical communication degree programs, would be core reading for masters-level professionalization programs, and regularly assigned to PhD students in writing studies, rhetoric and composition, digital humanities, and communication programs to describe the current state-of-the-art for technical and professional communication specialists, writing generalists, and writing program administrators. It is becoming more common to see the Experience Architect as a job title. More importantly, the core competencies of experience architecture are wrapped into the job responsibilities of a growing number of next-generation content and interface design positions in a widening array Potts and Salvo 12 of industries. In our experience, even though the phrase experience architecture is making its way into employment materials, it is both broad enough and sufficiently theorized to support academic input from a broad range of participants. The field is a truly transdisciplinary pursuit: while interdis- ciplinary remixes invite participants to work together, they return to their disciplinary homes after collaboration. A trans-disciplinary pursuit prom- ises no safety of return, and indeed, these academic origins may no longer be viable destinations as traditional disciplinary structures disappear. As academic programs focused on experience architecture emerge, participants come from numerous academic backgrounds. Similarly, faculty will emerge with varying backgrounds, from technical communication and rhetoric to social scientists trained in Internet research methods, to cognitive psychologists, design anthropologists, arts and design, and computer science. More importantly, however, experience architecture testifies to the rich variety of approaches as well as the diversity of epistemologies that ground meaning-making in emergent disciplinary formations. Experience architecture represents the breadth of current practice as invitation and in- spiration for further discussion and development. While an emergent field needs to establish best practices, it also must learn from as wide a variety of practice and ways of knowing as possible, to inform the important discussion of boundaries, of reach, and of expansion. That is, as a community of interested participants, we first have to understand the wide variety of methods we use to make meaning and to establish credibility, which is why we insist that this emergent practice of experience architecture is necessar- ily wedded to the ancient study of rhetoric as we establish shared community practices. References Burdick, A. (2012). Digital humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ehses, H., & Luptin, E. (1988). Design papers 5: Rhetorical handbook. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selber, S. A. (2013). Solving problems in technical communication. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kaufer, D. S., and Butler, B. S. (1996). Rhetoric and the arts of design. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Margolin, V. (1989). Design discourse: History, theory, criticism. Chicago: Universi- ty of Chicago Press. Norman, D. A. (1998). The invisible computer: Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Introduction 13 Norman, D.(2013). The design of everyday things (Revised and expanded edi- tion). New York, New York: Basic Books. Potts, Liza. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. ATTW/Routledge Book Series in Technical and Professional Communication. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Fran- cis Group. Ridolfo, J., & Hart-Davidson, W. (2015). Rhetoric and the digital humanities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Scott, J. B., Bernadette, L., and Katherine V. W. (2006). Critical power tools: Technical communication and cultural studies. SUNY Series, Studies in Scien- tific and Technical Communication. Albany: State University of New York Press. Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Tomlin, C. (2012). An interview with Whitney Quesenbery. Useful Usability. Retrieved fromhttp://www.usefulusability.com/whitney-quesenbery- interview/.

Part 1: Foundations and Theories

2 Beckon, Encounter, Experience: The Danger of Control and the Promise of Encounters in the Study of User Experience

Patricia Sullivan

his chapter confronts the paradox of control in research as it addresses Tuser experiences that reside at the center of the rhetorical work done as a component of experience architecture. While the chapter acknowledges the importance of control for all species of research, it interrogates ways that a lack of balance between openness and control can hamper researchers’ understanding users’ experiences. The chapter recounts how key control mechanisms operate to sort experience into domains; identify roles users play; establish and maintain boundaries; and mine themes, metaphors, and analogies in order to model how a user’s experiences move and unfold. The chapter also acknowledges that some control is valuable to user research, but argues a better balance between control and open discovery can be achieved by focusing on doing, watching, logging, and reflecting. It also offers reasons why more loosely controlled encounters are needed in user experience architecture: online environments yield expanding types of user experiences, offer broader access to otherness, leverage the Internet’s ability to make the global local, and foster unexpected insights that may accompany more openness to encounters. In the Odyssey, Sirens’ voices beckoned sailors to wreck their ships on a rocky shore. Beauty led to danger and death. What a heady encounter. Odysseus, who fancied himself so clever that he could experience encounters without enduring their potential downsides, had his men lash him to the mast and block their ears. That way he could hear and enjoy but none of his men would respond to those dangerous songs and crash the ship on the rocks. Did he encounter the Sirens and voyeur their songs or sidestep a real encounter through the measures of control he enacted? My initial response is that his tale scaffolded a faux encounter, one reminiscent of the sort of encounters qualitative researchers sometimes structure into their research designs. In this chapter, I argue that encounters important to understanding user experiences are increasingly being controlled by research “rules” (in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method studies) that seek to “control” research moves in ways that restrict “beckoning” behaviors and to “lock down” encounters in ways the researcher can imagine before having any encounter or experience. If users’ experiences are to drive design, encounters

17 Patricia Sullivan

should be less safe than our methods plan them to be. I begin by asserting 18 that “encounter” is a routine user experience that runs counter to most researchers’ practices, even ethnographers, because it abandons both efforts to control a situation or event under scrutiny and also to shape researchers’ actions in ways that make them recognizable as research. Encountering users’ experiences without controlling them opens us to hearing/seeing beyond what we expect, beckons us to the new or unexpected, and in opening the events to others’ views and actions, we open new ways to experience. Exerting research control is not inherently problematic; sometimes it is needed. Why do efforts to control user research matter to user experience (UX)? One of the reasons it matters is that broadening our knowledge of user experiences enriches our abilities to understand users, use, and experience in ways that positively impact our capacities to design, develop, and refine the sorts of products, environments, and interactions that support users and their needs. When usability started in the 1980s (roughly at the time of the rise of personal computing—see Weiser, 1991; Dieli, 1989; and Ramey, 1989), it used the fact that independent labs’ “ease of use” scores and HCI’s interest in reducing interface errors to fuel its establishment. Its acceptance in personal computing was usually related to saving money. I was shown an internal proposal in 1987 that argued for increased testing on the basis that testing would take 10% of the resources that engineering enough new features would require to meet a product’s independent lab score for GAO (using Government Accounting Office purchasing standards). At this time feature creep was expected in software development, so when this company emphasized increasing its “ease of use” scores in order to meet the government’s minimum requirements for purchase, it chose frugality over features to grow its market share. In choosing frugality, it also invested in a dimension of usability that reduced errors for beginning users. In addition, decisions such as this one prescribed that improving “ease of use” is inte- gral to testing connected to users and use. Thus, it is little surprise that error reduction opened a door to including users and their experiences at the same time as it limited the study of experience to activities that would improve “ease of use” scores. Soon usability had become anxious in its efforts to advocate for users (particularly end users), to legitimate its findings by making them as scientific as possible. This move prompted them to emphasize research controls for studies of user behavior and human-machine interaction. At times they even retreated to referring to the work only as ergonomic testing, interface testing, interface-error reduction, or user testing. I am not saying that controlled research we connect with science is problematic; on the contrary, I find it needed. I am proud of the work these testers Beckon, Encounter, Experience have contributed to reducing errors in products, to modeling better interactions, and to forging sounder paths for navigating virtual spaces. 19 What troubles me is a lack of space for research that proceeds along a path that is more open to the voice of another. Such openness to otherness is also needed perhaps even more today than it was in the past. I have long contended (Sullivan, 1989) that to achieve a deeper, wider, and fuller understanding of users’ interactions with built environments/products (so that we can better design and build them) we must be willing to let the other speak to us, move us, be free to disagree with us, and perhaps even that we should chance such encounters that might toss us onto the rocks. But two kinds of related actions have limited the spread and influence of encounters thus far—a tendency to quickly cordon user experiences into rig- id domains and researchers’ investment in over-controlling user-experience encounters. Of course, encounters have not always been so underwhelming in their contributions. “Encounter” drew attention years ago (1987) in the opening of Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions. An ethnographer working at Xerox PARC, Suchman had studied the interface of an advanced copying machine by sit- ting in a break room and watching workers interact with the machine in order to copy and collate documents. Somehow, as ethnographers often do, Suchman riffed a cultural turn and presented the workers’ journeys as competing philosophies of oceanic navigation, pitting European navigators against the Trukese (a Pacific Islander group). In her metaphor-driven example, the Europeans relied upon setting a goal before they started their journey, then they planned a route to meet that goal, while the Trukese set sail and responded to whatever situation arose. These diametrically opposed approaches to navigation were meant to illustrate that interactivity had more than one direction (and set of moves) that it might profitably work. Yet, usability, user testing, technology-product design, and human factors workers of the time did not embrace the situation-driven navigation and interface work Suchman ascribed to the Trukese; instead they focused, in a goal- based way, on eliminating user and machine errors. From Suchman’s perspective, these sailors encountered navigation (and sailing) in dramatically different ways—so differently that their problems could not be mapped into the same space. She wanted usability to make space to encounter and learn from the Trukese. But perhaps the timing of her insight was not right. As I indicated earlier, goal-based or error-driven work was, and still is needed, but it also has been paint-by-numbers enough to open a door for the kinds of criticism that McCullough (2004) delivered as he avowed that interface designers have focused on mechanical usability and Patricia Sullivan

first-time use in the past, and that such activity must give way to interac- 20 tion design that is more situated: ”Today we can no longer assume that mechanical efficiency is the root of usability, that more features will mean better technology, or that separately engineered devices will aggregate into any- thing like optimal wholes . . . We need to advance the science of computer-human-interface into a culture of situated interaction design.” (p. 22) Positions such as those voiced by McCullough fuel the rise of interaction design because they attack the older views of user experiences embedded in HCI as a science (focused on typical work or home-use tasks, targeted users who would buy/use the program in the test, test a limited time frame—usually initial use, and focus on identifying interface errors and/or navigation problems). Today, with the rise of the Internet and social and mobile computing environments, emerging user experience urges us to revisit how encounters may shape us and our interactivity. How/Why UX Has Expanded Over the past two decades, the ways that users interface with products and processes have expanded to include devices and other things, and the expansion has called for a base of research that addresses the richness of experience as surely as it checks the correctness of user actions and interface responses. That expansion, which has been fueled by Internet use, social media, cloud computing, proximity mobile gaming, streaming video/au- dio/animation, ubiquitous environments, and mobile computing (to name some of the components of new and emerging user experiences), proffers richer and more natural experiences than were typical in most of the personal computing era. It beckons us to look more deeply into user experiences and to seek new ways to establish fuller portraits of how user experience is accumulated, understood, managed, and (when necessary) reshaped. It also inflects what it means to work as a technical communicator/UX designer. A recent blog post in UX Designer Magazine stated this rather pointedly:

Here’s the good news: designers are really far from being obsolete. Quite to the contrary, you can see that the demand for UX designers is still on the rise, and everyone seems to be redesigning their digital products these days. . . . It’s time for us to grow up, because we have been part of the problem: we have helped to give birth to self-righteous web pages that assume they deserve to be watched and awarded just for the time we invested in crafting them. Now more than ever, in a world flooded with cognitive noise, the world needs simple, intelligent, integrated Beckon, Encounter, Experience

ecosystems of information. The sooner designers embrace this need, the better prepared we’ll be for the future. (Nouvel, 2015) 21

Some of our user experiences are routine and cumulative, while others shape our emerging thinking and/or actions, and still others slow us down and force us to reflect (often because they contradict other areas of our experience and surface what Festinger called a “felt difficulty” that serves as an indicator of cognitive dissonance). The literature describing and investigat- ing user experience provides a glimpse of how widely user experience is/has expanding/expanded. As July 2015 began, a search for articles in First Monday addressing “user experience” yielded 216 relatively recent ones that featured user experiences (remember, users are people and things) as such agents as: blind transit riders, tweeters, stadiums as studios, urban churches, cyber- cafes, smart phones, grindrs, four squarers, facebookers, wikipedia mak- ers and users, piracy victims, digital objects, cyber volunteers, 3D printers, Chinese gold farmers, health information, devotees of Reddit, e-commerce initiators, napsterers, bloggers, etc. The variety of encounters they inferred far outstripped the possibilities for users’ domains and actions that were available in the early days of usability, which suggests even greater need for more emphasis on encounters in our study of user experience. The variety of users, their actions, and their addressed experiences in First Monday (a popular but still serious publication) alert us that studying user experience welcomes us once again to James West and Artemus Gor- don’s Wild, Wild West. A 1960s steampunk television classic, Wild, Wild West followed the exploits of secret service agents charged with protecting President Grant, and the series’ creator, Michael Garrison, thought of the series as a kind of James Bond on horseback. Its plots usually included trains, hors- es, bad guys, damsels in distress, gunfire, cleverness, spying, gadgetry, and happy endings (or at least would allow West to win the day). But what the show really did was supply a kind of liminal western that contradicted Gun- smoke (had you been forced to compare them) at the same time as it quietly provided a different experience of the US West in the nineteenth century. It expanded and deepened viewers’ experiences of the period. The same sort of thing is happening in user experience today. Not only are our direct experiences expanding through our interactions with new environments, social configurations, products, people, and things, they also are expanding through indirect experiences, voyeurisms, dreams, and encounters. As it turns out, there is much more for user experience researchers to study than there has been in the past. So it comes as little surprise that growth in scope and richness for user experience encourages researchers to seek more pro- cedural control over how that experience is revealed through their studies. Patricia Sullivan The Control Paradox in the Qualitative 22 Study of User Experience Researchers use control (or at least restraint) in their studies so that they can argue, if needed, that their work has been done in systematic ways that could be replicated with a chance of achieving similar results. Haswell (2006) stated this clearly in his widely cited discussion of writing research; he argued that studies, even qualitative ones, should be RAD (replicable, aggregable, and data-driven) in design, deployment, and make up. Each of his three common characteristics for studies imbricate control, and as he describes qualitative studies that meet his RAD classification, Haswell emphasizes these studies’ “systematic” qualities of gathering, sorting, and disci- plining information (his examples cover genre, process, and discourse use), which also emphasizes that these studies embrace measures that control the research enough that it can be “replicated” (or repeated). Though his main argument focuses on how CCCC and NCTE have attacked and denigrated empirical research, more important for our purposes is that Haswell rec- ognizes that qualitative research exercises control when it is at work. This emphasis on control functions paradoxically for many because they see the function of qualitative research primarily as finding and naming new issues (Lauer & Asher, 1988) or as narrating stories (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2008). Recently my husband reminded me of an experience he had with a track-and-field season highlight video program. They wanted him to include some footage of one of their athletes winning a heat at the Penn Relays in their banquet highlight tape. Technically it messed up their highlights in several ways—it was shaky footage, taken from hundreds of yards away, and lacking visually clear markers of where they were or what was happening— and it sat counter to his clips that sported a professional quality. But because they were adamant, he included the footage, and the track team cheered when it came up on the reel because they knew what it was, and they filled in the missing information that the poor video quality removed. He real- ized that their experiences and values led them to see beyond the project- ed images and to their memories of the event. Their experiences let them see differently than he did. If he had structured the video according to his professional values, it would have been more understandable to outsiders and been a more appropriate tape to archive their athletic achievements for posterity. He and other video professionals presumed that omitting the “flawed” footage would make a more successful communication design, but paradoxically, the experiences that the team valued made the “professional- ly flawed” tape perfect for them and their experience. In the above video example we notice that the video maker’s values so differed from those of his audience’s that controlling the video’s quality Beckon, Encounter, Experience from his professional perspective would have precluded or erased an essen- tial component of the target audience’s experience, and so if the video mak- 23 er was also studying those users’ experience, he/she often would find that this video called forth a different experience for the track team members than it did for the maker-now-researcher because their “valuing eye” was calibrated differently (in this case with more emotion) than he expected it to be. What counted as representative or good did not align between maker (or researcher or designer) and audience (or user). And since the researcher normally controls all of the components and procedures of a study, even the airing of values, a study of making and using this video would have threat- ened to impoverish how fully the research understood the user’s experience. Mechanisms That Maintain Control While the tracing of and the voicing of contrasting values is one way to expand our understandings of how control can be used in user experience research, a number of other control mechanisms are often deployed to: 1) sort experience into domains, 2) identify and interrogate roles users play, 3) establish and maintain boundaries, and 4) mine themes, metaphors, and analogies that assist in modeling how an experience moves and unfolds. In the designs we build for research we also use data collection methods, analytic tools, and methodological checks that systematize our work and help us maintain control of the findings.

(1) Sort User Experience into Neat Domains Events that produce, support, cache, or clarify user experience can seem workaday or even innocuous (and surely not fodder for most First Monday articles). Take an experience had by Hannah, a design engineer working remotely for a week while on a business trip. Her trouble starts when the WIFI connection drops. She has been using local WIFI to connect to the company network in order to access and download data from tests she has previously run on her office machine. She does this frequently at night and has never had trouble at her home near the plant. But now in another city, she suddenly has her portal shut down. A call to IT informs her that there is a patch, but it will not work on her machine as her security protocols are too constricting. The IT guy is intrigued because the company is invested in protecting her production, and so he works with her, but without total success. A day of frustration and diminished work is anticipated by Hannah, and achieved. We can quickly label Hannah’s user experience a work experience, and if we were studying work we may examine it further. But if we are seeking experiences that help us understand social media, we are unlikely to Patricia Sullivan

glance its way again. We won’t tap into her frustration or track her attempts 24 to name and solve different problems or query her about how this incident maps onto other work experiences. Further, work stories give little value to an ordinary but unique experience; it is likely that a story such as this one would not be glanced at again. Once placed in the domain of work and also classified as work-a- day but unique, Hannah’s account will not likely be referenced again because it will be deemed too isolated from typical work problems. While there is a branch of Organizational Studies that investigates sensemaking in organizations (following the work of Weick, 2010, which studies thorny workplace problems starting with the Bhopal disaster in the 1980s and using storytelling as a way to fuel sensemaking), most usability research has been un- dertaken to enlighten scholars how user experience operates by focusing on debugging oft-used process for workers at work. The literature therefore focuses on routine “on site” experiences rather than embracing an isolated user experience (high tech, high security remotely) that may—or may not— soon be the norm. Like the Internet itself, our user experiences are sometimes like a time machine in a stagecoach. If the domain of work is used to sort user experience, Table 1 re- lates some of the consequences. Of particular interest historically, the work domain has sustained the most scrutiny during the usability era, in part because it can be linked to actual tasks that workers need to perform daily. So, from early years of user studies, we have recognized users sometimes seem zany, and that realization has pushed us to seek means for controlling users’ actions in studies. We usually strive to strip out complexity and uncertainties attending actions and change. Computing cultures, with their focus on systems, have often seen users as problems, as error machines, as weak links, or as ergonomic challenges and have asked: how do we design to take into account human limitations? Regardless of motive, when an investigation of user experience is tied to work, the study focuses on reducing work-related error (Can X be done faster, or with fewer people, or with fewer mis- takes?) or on learning to be more efficient (Can this revised process make typical tasks faster or easier for those who typically perform it?) (see Ehn, 1988; Bødker, 1991; Suchman, 1991; the journals Computer Support for Cooper- ative Work; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics; Journal for Computer Hu- man Interaction; and the conference proceedings for Computer-Human In- teraction (CHI) Conference). Work studies have not entertained the study of encounters. Much of this work has presumed that workers act in highly predictable ways when actually “People (especially when they are learning) act in the darnedest ways.” Consider the classic tale of IBM’s first user manual for Beckon, Encounter, Experience their personal computer, hand-written for the purposes of testing in 1980. That machine came with a 5 1⁄4 inch floppy disk that encased a gooey storage 25 medium in a black plastic cover, with further data safety provided by storing the disk in a Mylar sleeve. Early in the manual, users were told to remove the disk from its sleeve and insert it into the computer. I bet you can guess what happened, and how it horrified the team. Almost every user pried apart the plastic and inserted the gooey center into the computer. Wow, that was so wrong-headed. Yet, from a certain perspective it made sense. Users acted in ways that both followed instructions and made sense to them, and their actions sometimes yielded unfortunate consequences. In the case of that early manual, placing the gooey medium into the drive broke the machine. This truth about users’ words and actions encourages us when we study to seek control—to minimize uncertainties when work cultures call for new kinds of technologies that better support the changes that are de- sired. This is a main reason that a focus on work helps to perfect interfaces or learn processes but does not tell us much about the emerging user experiences that UX wants to study. Table 1: User Experience Sorted by Domain

Domain of Type of Name Used Techniques Culture Experience Experience Work routine Usability user testing western; (workaday) goal-driven; knowledge making edutainment/ Creative design; product aesthetic socialty interactive design; info design; ubi comp architecture public culture thorny probs expert problem Heuristics built solving life events, out of box situational or tune emotions event driven; family, & experiential colonial/tribal consumption

(2) Identify Roles Played Roles adhere both to researchers and the researched in qualitative work, as the researchers in participant studies negotiate their roles vis-a-vis their participants (Pitman & Maxwell, 1992), and participants’ actions and iden- tifications map onto dramatic roles they assume and enact. Identification of and analysis of the roles users play in the dramas that their experience provides (or suggests is possible) have functioned as mainstays for quali- Patricia Sullivan

tative studies. You find Goffman discussing role-playing frequently in his 26 methodological treatises (in part because his take on sociology stresses interaction and dramaturgy). In Frame Analysis (1986), Goffman explains both the operation of roles and their connection to drama in this way:

The theatre seems to provide—at least in Western society—an ideal version of a basic conceptual distinction, that between a performer or individual actor who appears on stage and the part or character he assumes whilst employed thereon. . . . In thinking about unstaged, actual social life, theatrical imagery seems to guide us toward a distinction between an individual or person and a capacity, namely, a specialized function which the person may perform during a given series of occasions. A simple matter. We say that John Smith is a good plumber, bad father, loyal friend, and so forth. If we sense a difference between what a Gielgud does on stage and what a Smith does in his shop (or with his family or at a political rally), we can express it by saying that Hamlet’s jabbing away is not real, is make-believe, but that a repaired pipe (or a vote cast) is. We use the same word, “role,” to cover both onstage and offstage activity and apparently find no difficulty in understanding whether a real role is in question or the mere stage presentation of one. (p. 128)

By linking the dramatic uses of roles with the everyday (and multiple) uses of them, Goffman helps to surface their flexibility as central analytic moves in research. Years later, Laurel, a luminary in interface design and a software/interaction designer, has emphasized the importance of drama in interaction. Her Computers as Theatre (1991/2013) broadened the notion of roles past people and constructed characters played in a drama (though they were still included) to include the roles of time, change, and continu- ing encounter in interactivity. As she applies this idea to users and their experience, Laurel defines users as acting

like audience members who are able to have a greater influence on the unfolding action than simply the fine-tuning provided by con- ventional audience response. [Take] . . . interactive fantasy . . . The user of such a system . . . is like an audience member who can march up onto the stage and become a character, shoving the action around by what he says and does in that role. (p. 26)

Laurel is viewing the user not as a participant in a metaphor she la- bels “theatre” but as an actant in scenarios that conceptualize human-computer interaction itself. (p. 28) Laurel goes on to argue that users have the Beckon, Encounter, Experience option to move along a continuum of participation and possible personas in relation to their roles. In making such a point, her words could be inter- 27 preted as ceding control to the researchers by allowing their analysis to assign one or more roles to their users.

(3) Establish, Bridge, and/or Defend the Boundaries of User Experience Another pivot point for researcher control is the place or environment that bounds users’ experiences. In addition to describing and interrogating a culture’s milieu, several tools are available to control how place fits into (or is dismissed as a contributor to) a user experience event or interaction. A prime tool for environmental work is boundary work. While many work boundaries, not all researchers approach the boundary work in the same way. Star, for example, whose study of the founding history of California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Star & Greisemer, 1989) introduced (and named) boundary objects as liminal objects or concepts that had enough shared meaning that these boundary objects can be acted upon even in in- stances that include considerable disagreement among collaborators. One boundary object Star and Greisemer made focal to their analysis was the field dressing procedures for specimens gathered for the museum’s collection. Because scientists, students, amateur naturalists, natives, farmers, and even trappers assembled these specimens and because these specimens also had to be field dressed in widely diversified climatic conditions, the -in structions needed to include both common elements and room for process variation. The boundary objects needed to accommodate similarity and difference at the same time, a characteristic fundamental to boundary objects. In another, more politicized construction of boundaries, Sibley (1995) focuses attention on the mapping of boundaries that can work in institutions and physical sites to develop “zones of ambiguity” that also act in liminal ways to identify sites that overlap, as well as drawing boundaries once they are stable and policing the boundaries that are subject to multiple ownership claims. Depicting the overlapping (and often contested) zones via Venn diagrams, Sibley is able to portray situations in which multiple groups claim the same territory, and then, when one successfully controls the space, they must figure out how to police the space they claimed. At times, Sibley’s work is reminiscent of military strategic planning even though his motives seem descriptive more surely than they seem invasive. Another practice, “boundary spanning,” was coined by Schensul et al (1981) and made popular among educational ethnographers by Goetz and LeCompte (1984). It approaches boundaries not from seeking to find and describe or define them but by assuming they come along with environments, places, events, objects, and cultures and then working to bridge Patricia Sullivan

or dismantle them. “Boundary spanning,” write Goetz and LeCompte, “in 28 some sense is similar to cultural brokering, insofar as ethnographers often act as intermediaries or go-betweens for several groups, each of whose actions and motivations need to be explained to the other” (p. 99). Boundary spanning is enacted through friendship moves made by the researcher who shares, listens, makes friends, and builds understanding. Such boundary spanning actions have long been embedded in ethnographic anthropology, and ethical interactions understood as the responsibility of the researcher. Ethical and logistical challenges of blurring boundaries are often undertak- en to yield richer data. Further, initiating and sustaining richer discussion of cultural boundaries yields rich results, and rewards researchers who ac- cept additional responsibility—with complexity enters the specters of control that figure prominently into how a group is portrayed in the final -re porting of the research. Boundary work has successfully interrogated the edges of places and things, alert to disagreements among participants that disclose disharmony or disagreement among their views, activities, allegiances, or practices. By exposing such edges, boundary work has become more certain about the differences it sketches, more assertive about the environments it describes, and more in control of the boundaries it spans. Such surety helps in the catego- rization and management of novel user experience because boundary work seeks similarity and difference. Thus, when unusual activities accompany new user experience, the boundary researchers pose key categorical questions: Have I ever experienced something even remotely like this? Could I say this is an X? Or acts like a Y? And so on.

(4) Analyze Themes and Metaphors that can Explain Interviews and Events Themes and metaphors offer even more tools for use by qualitative researchers with their open coding of data (usually interviews or observation), and while many researchers see the identification of, systematic defense of, and even the reliability checks for coding as instruments of control, the creative use of themes and metaphors can help build new understandings of data, particularly UX data. Such coding of themes and metaphors includes semiotic analytic coding of the sort cultural studies does. Take Starosielski’s (2015) recent book Undersea Network (it investigates undersea cables that carry transoceanic data and missives) as an example. Though she claims to have assembled the book through travel and interviews, most of her analysis uses semiotic pars- ing of text, photos, and movies to build the themes of connection, transmission, disruption, and nodal narratives that she argues have been put in place over the years (and this is standard for cultural studies research). The Beckon, Encounter, Experience arc she thematizes places narratives of connection (they often employ hero- ic vision or monetary support as keys to success where the politics might be 29 linked to establishing global communication that follows along in the foot- steps of the telegraph) at the center of early stories. In the second political era (roughly corresponding to the Cold War), narratives of disruption accompany cable problems and often are examined both for technical and political motives, prompting questions like: Can we link this cable’s being cut to fishing nets or was it targeted? Today’s political era has transitioned from nation states involving themselves in global communication to terror- ists targeting global data, the data has morphed into internet data (undersea cables transmit 99% of transoceanic data), and narratives of transmission tend to lead to hiddenness rather than transparency because of the potential to disrupt the communication network. Starosielski ultimately argues that nodal discourse needs to be developed in order to gather the public participation needed to make this network less hidden and more transparent, and her argument is controlled through her use of themes and narrative analysis even though it does not disclose its procedures (humanities-based research normally hides its methods unless it is newer feminist work; see, for example, Hemmings, 2011).

(5) Control Other Moves that May Creep into User Experience Studies Control moves in quantitative research are assumed to be standardized and enforced by statistical analysis, but control moves also enforce more hidden standards in qualitative work, and in these studies they can block insights that are presumed to be the strength of case, ethnographic, and field studies. Take sampling as an example. There are data tables to guide sampling logic and procedures in survey work, but case studies build and deploy a logic for the number and type of informants they interview and sometimes also tighten control measures by randomly sampling a section of an interview transcript, coding that section, and then having the coding checked for reliability by another researcher. Such moves cinch up the control exerted by the researcher over the data that has been gathered by interviewing (or observing) the participants. In this way, discussing the qualitative work as listening (interview) or watching (observation) makes the data sound open, and treating it as selected through random sampling and checked for reliability makes it sound scientifically controlled. As qualitative research increases in status and use it systematically cedes more and more decisions about how to proceed to its research community, perhaps not fully realizing that along with the decisions come a control over the process that renders it more tight, predictable, and recep- tive to control by researchers and their methods of action. Such systema- Patricia Sullivan

ticity, often linked to a study’s demonstration of rigor or even its credibil- 30 ity (which is qualitative research’s version of arguments for validity), places more and more responsibility on the qualitative researcher to demon- strate control over the design and procedures of a study. Such control creep undermines some of the classic justifications given in response to why we should conduct qualitative research, namely to gather stories that we oth- erwise would miss or to discover themes, variables, and research questions in areas that are mysterious, new, or under-investigated. With regard to the study of user experience this work is seductive and troubling, if not down- right dangerous, because it threatens to crowd the more open versions of qualitative study—ones that “take in” or “celebrate” new experiences—out of the realm of serious study, claiming such work is scattered or uncontrolla- ble, or even not needed. In response to such potential danger, I suggest that when we are studying user experience that we be(come) more open to study of encounters.

Opening up to Encounter(s) Viewing user experience as an insider is difficult for researchers, as researchers have always struggled to convey “the other” in an accurate, rich, and empathetic way. Geertz, one of the most esteemed anthropological the- orists of the other, discusses this problem as he is pondering empathy. In the third chapter of Local Knowledge, Geertz (1983) interrogates why it is important for an anthropologist to seek and represent a native’s point of view. He uses Malinowski’s Diary (which was published posthumously) to point out that Malinowski did not seek or honor native perspectives. Of course, there was a squabble when Malinowski’s Diary was published, and Geertz weighs in by saying, “The issue the Diary presents . . . is not moral . . . The issue is epistemological. If we are going to cling—as in my opinion, we must—to the injunction to see things from the native’s point of view, where are we when we can no longer claim some unique form of psychological closeness, a sort of transcultural identification, with our subjects? What happens to verstehen when Einfühlung disappears?” (p. 56). What indeed happens to our understanding when our ability to empathize disappears (or is material- ly reduced)? Geertz goes on to use his extended cultural encounters with three native groups from Morocco, Bali, and Java, taking care to point out their differing points of view and senses of themselves, their cultures, their experiences, and what gives them sustenance (with loose threads of unre- solved differences between researcher and natives dangling still). Important to his accounting is an acceptance of the cracks and spaces that could not be fit into neat categories, differences that made the researcher and native values differ. Beckon, Encounter, Experience

While Geertz and most other ethnographers attribute cultural difference to point of view and values, there also are differences in experience 31 that come into play when we add contemporary user experience to the mix of potential differences across generations and global cultures. Yes, “encounter” has not remained static in its meaning(s) (see Willis et al, 2002), particularly when we think of it in the ecology of user experience: emerging technologies make possible virtual encounters, virtual interactions enable encounters without physical presence, and virtual experiences nudge those once F2F encounters into new spaces. More recently, Butler (2001) reminds us that the unified subjects that Geertz and other anthropologists tended to presume to be revealed through F2F encounters are actually fractured, partial, and multiple. Us- ing the work of feminists, particularly those who are feminists of color, she sketches and interrogates the ways that encounters no longer always indicate that there are unified groups that form a “we” or even a subject that makes a unified “me” or “I.” Instead, they offer evidence that “feminists as well must ask whether the ‘representation’ of the poor, the indigenous, and the radically disenfranchised within academia is a patronizing and colonizing effort, or whether it seeks to avow the conditions of translation that make representation possible: to avow the power and privilege of the intellectu- al along with the links in history and culture which make an encounter between poverty, for instance, and academic writing possible” (p. 87). Butler emphasizes this point by adding Cavarero’s (2000) more poetic phrasing, “No matter how much you are similar and consonant . . . your story is never my story. . . . . I still do not recognize myself in you and, even less in the collective we” (p. 92). And adding the new range of encounters made possible by emerging technologies to the partial possibilities of persons’ identities, it is not surprising that the possibilities for encounters are no longer straightforward.

Encounters in Today’s Users’ Experience When researchers are open to encounters, they expose user experiences more often than they control them. Techniques such as thick description, open representation without data reduction, exchange of and honoring of stories, and exchanges/gifting have been traditionally used by ethnographers to gather and present encounters with others who are unlike the researchers—and presumably the rest of us. New and emerging technologies have expanded our interest in encounters past the ecologies of other societ- ies, social, personal, and political identities. Earlier in this chapter, I listed examples of user experiences that were supported by emerging technologies and studied in First Monday. These technologies have expanded into digital/ Patricia Sullivan

virtual spaces that support encounters, interactions, interfaces, infrastruc- 32 tures, and so on. Figure 1 identifies techniques used with encounters and sorts them based on how much control they exercise in the collection of or analysis of the data related to the encounters. A story, for example, evidences less researcher control than an open interview (which can go either way, as liminal categories do) and both are more open (and less under the researcher’s controlling eye) than a credibility audit. Why is it important to open UX to research encounters, regardless of the danger posed to the research’s credibility? For the respect of others. For the creative possibilities it offers. For the new questions it harvests. No- tice that when mapped in Figure 2, many of the studies try to exercise control over the users, their experiences, and any encounters that are studied. More work is needed in the general area where we see Ito’s work on anime videos. I’m not certain that achieving analogous work is easy, or always appropriate, but it can draw on indigenous research tools and on new technological data recording tools as well, to update some anthropological ones already in place. In a recent discussion of how to do research in a native way, Chili- sea (2012) emphasizes how colonial assumptions and politics show up in inclusive ways in the research methods that researchers from indigenous cultures use. Storytelling and place-based techniques, which are oft used by indigenous researchers, both of which help these researchers give respect to others, urge her to be careful to recognize that “The story teaches against discrimination . . . [and that] the person is inevitably placed in relationship, through mutual friends or through knowledge, with certain landmarks and events. The researcher becomes part of circles of relations that are connected to one another and to which the researcher is also accountable.” (p. 113) Chilisea goes on to detail some of the relationship circles she examines, and in addition to relationships with people, these circles include relations with the environment/land, the cosmos, spirituality, and knowledge making. Important to the contrast is the point Chilisea quietly makes that relationships can encircle the edges we have constructed between researcher control and encounters with the researched. Circles and their relationships lead to deep and unanticipated insights that tight control misses (or ob- scures). These insights are important to research that emphasizes encounters with others (people, places, and things). Let me detail this point using examples of encounters (real or potential) with emerging technologies.