Reading Nicholas Nova and Fabien Girardin’s pamphlet, Sliding Friction, I was reminded of Pareidolia, the phenomenon of perceiving something random or immaterial as familiar or significant. As Nova has noted before, a common form of pareidolia is seeing human faces on inanimate objects. Just take a look at the multiple flickr pools dedicated to spotting these abstract faces.
[photos by raumoberbayern, Red Larry Yellow Larry and Alecu2]
But Cory Arcangel’s “Permanent Vacation”, an installation of two computers endlessly responding to each others’ out-of-office email replies, reminded me how much more human computers become when they adopt human behaviors, as supposed to human appearances.
[Permanent Vacation, 2007, Max Wigram Gallery, Ridley Road]
In this case, a seeming rejection of idleness suggests interests beyond those of its owners. “Psst, they’re gone. You up for some Outlook tennis?” Maybe that’s why some find screensavers so fascinating. Do the same expectations that lead us to characterize people without their own interests as boring lead us to desire our computers have hobbies and activities of their own?
Almost every interaction designer has at some point toyed with the idea of giving a system’s voice an extreme amount of emotion or personality. What if an application hurls insults every time it directly addresses its user?
[via fffound!]
But without direct messaging and avatars, how might we behaviorally humanize interfaces? Have you ever startled a computer? Caught it playing a game of solitare? How might an interface exhibit impatience with nothing more than its existing UI elements? And without the use of language, what would an operating system need to do to communicate discontent with a cluttered desktop? Some behaviors are already widely understood. Most users know to start closing applications when a computer shows a shortage of breath (running low on memory, resources). Is it useful to design new behaviors to bring attention to other needs or information? Is it possible to do so without the explicit use of interface? Does this cross the line of artificial intelligence?
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i want my computer to understand and adapt to my personal habits – supporting the good ones and correcting the bad so that it actually makes me a better human being. Imagine instead of just nagging me with messages (which are easy to click away from) it actually behaves differently if I start ignoring it, as if the machine itself is frustrated with me. Performance seems like one obvious way to communicate that frustration. The better I perform, the better the machine responds to my needs.