Paradigms

Learning to notice what you are assuming about your process. Paradigms are heuristic lists of choices that are always being made when designing an interaction.

  • Navigational Paradigms: walk/fly, grab the world, space warp
  • Identifying Paradigms: actor, avatar, puppeting, point of contact, third
  • Relationship Paradigms: competition, scores, karaoke, play, metagaming
  • Reflection Paradigms: behaviorism, neuroscience measurement, microphenomenology, authentic movement,
  • Framing Paradigms: where does the game/experiment end? who isn’t in it?

Joe has been struck by the importance of navigational paradigms since he first encountered the KeckCAVES and VRUI’s navigational ability to “grab the world” with one’s hands and shrink or enlarge it. This shifted the sense of virtual reality in which one was “in the world” to one in which “the data world was in my world”. Not only did this reframing affect me physically – i no longer felt disoriented – but it made it intuitively obvious how to get to any place in the data: shrink it down, put my hands where i wanted to go, and expand from there. I was now inside the data in the place i wanted to be!

Paradigms thus offers a way to ask what you are assuming/naturalizing/taking for granted about interactions.

On 4/12/19 we discussed how to approach the frame reflection on experiences. Isa and Rosemary each drew on authentic movement practice to notice how important it is to stage how to offer commentary, questions, and feedback to another. Making sure that we stay open to different forms of eliciting experience. One technique is microphenomenology and its variants of “elicitation interviews” that are being practiced a lot in Europe and combine first-person perspectives with second and third person ones.