clox-CriticalInterface
I thought tenet 13 was interesting: "In the design of the interface, not only skills but also emotions and affections are deployed. How are emotions produced and circulated in interfaces?" Here are a couple of the tenet's propositions/assignments:
- Never, never smile when photographed. Stop the happy flow. Even better: pretend to take pictures but instead take videos, and don't tell the person. You'll see how smiles fade away.
- Draw your own emoticons
- Kiss the screen
- From time to time, choose some messages you want to comunicate, and avoid sending an email, post, sms, message and try to do it in real life to see how it feels.
- Share your fears in the social networks. Then share your neckline (sorry feminists :S , I don't find a male correlate).
I think the propositions for this tenet are, more than trying to trace how emotions flow, become mediated by, are imbued by, embedded in (etc.) by interfaces, they provide a set of counter-choreographies to the way we "normally" interact with interfaces (or the idea of interfaces). By "normally" I mean that these propositions already carry a preconceived view of our affective relationship with (digital/not-digital) interfaces (the cold screen (inauthentic) VS. the warm cheek (authentic), the text message V. a face-to-face conversation), and seek to repair those affective relationship (see the call to: "Kiss the screen"). Some of the propositions also recognize the agency we have in determining some aspect of how we circulate emotions through interfaces--like drawing your own emoticons. Generally, this tenet is showing how both the materiality and temporality of the person and the interface is implicated in the way emotions are circulated. I also want to say that proposition 5 (above) is lazy and there is no need to replicate sexist language to make a point (we ALL already know what "showing your neckline" does, we see it all the time, and for longer than social networks have ever existed). While I can see that these could be fun experiments to do, I think that some of these propositions are just amateur sociological experiments (riddled with biases).