CRITICAL ENGINEERING MANIFESTO – TENET 3

Tennet 3
“rich user experiences”
I think I know what this means, but perhaps it should be unpacked just a lil bit. Varying levels of immersion, persuasion, and the ability to distract/aid dissimulation define the esteemed ‘richness’ of user experiences and whose legitimacy is brought into question by this manifesto. To dismantle this paradigm for creating user experiences is to dismantle the pervasive norms of design itself, to critique the monetary structures that underlie these design tropes, to tread lightly or offend sensibilities relating to the sociological disparities that stem from the manic-yet-steady history of narrowing involved in designing user experiences. You should be suspicious, people aren’t subjects responding reliably to the attentional demands of different media nodes. Experiences aren’t reaction times and accuracy rates, psychometrics, or any other amalgamation or ‘assemblage’ of quantified sense data. [and I’m gonna just ignore how this sort of tenet might run into some compatibility problems with tenet 9 in the “real world”].

Anyway this CAVE joystick-controlled installation-video by earlyish VR artist Maurice Benayoun,”Is the devil curved?,” and actually a lot of [awesome] early VR art confronts some of the issues in qualifying user experiences [at least partly unintentionally, but in a way which I think is highly relevant to the youth’s apathetic/kawaii/infantilizing/qt zeitgeist rn]. Also, it’s [badly-chosen] sound component “raises issues” about sexist defaults in tech work.

More info at ARS ELECTRONICA’S ARCHIVE