User:Eleanorg/1.2/RWR/Lecture notes 18 Jan

The Creators of Shopping Worlds

Documentary about analysing people's lines of sight in the design of shopping malls
Shows use of eye-tracking software to determine the best placing for adverts
Works from the basis of natural sight & movement patterns, but in turn influences where people will look & move

Eg - playing a game. The interface is the rules and conventions of the game - like a protocol; a formalized sort of social exchange. Etiquette would also fall into this category.
Isotypes are an 'interface' to statistics, which are harder to digest on their own; these images grow from a context of information saturation, where images must help info be digested easily.
Try to ask what interfaces do, rather than searching for a final definition of what they are.

Nowadays we are encouraged to 'personalise' our interfaces - custum Gmail themes, phone covers, etc. But the essential protocols - the things that make it an interface - usually remain beyond our control.
Paradox of engagement/disengagement: tech makes things accessible to us; eg geolocation engages us in our location - on the other hand, we are more alienated from direct experience

Stanley Milgram - Obedience to authority experiment, 1961 (electric shocks experiment). When a version was done where shocks had to be administered directly, without contact, percentage of ppl willing to do it went down drastically. See project by Rod Dickinson (Steve also worked on it) in response to this experiment. Re-staging of the experiment, done all by actors. Made from manuscripts of original experiment - original wasn't filmed. Milgram coined the termed 'agentic state' - where you become an agent to someone else's will. Milgram wrote a book with the same name as the experiment after doing it, using the Arandt's term "the banality of evil" (Milgram was himself Jewish). Arandt argued tha the beaurocratic context of modern socity facilitates atrocities like the Holocaust. The experiment could be seen as a dramatic enactment or story, rather than a piece of science.

Relates strongly to previous work where I have introduced interfaces into otherwise 'direct' encounters - latex, phones, etc.
Idea of 'interface' links to essay on talking to computers - eg, Milgram experiment relies on the erection of interfaces between people. These can be technological, or psychological. Projection of 'evil' etc as a justification for violence; Lacanian imaginary others.