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A SEMIOTICS OF HUMAN ACTIONS FOR WEARABLE AUGMENTED REALITY INTERFACES By Isabel Pedersen
2005
Published: Isabel Pedersen. “A Semiotics of Human Actions for Wearable Augmented Reality Interfaces.” Semiotica Vol. 2005 (155 -‐ 1/4) pp. 183 -‐ 201.
Abstract
Wearable Computers create a personal augmented reality for people who wear them. Unlike virtual reality, wearable augmented reality could potentially alter mobility, interactivity, and beingness (existence) in the actual world. As wearable computers emerge as a medium of communication, several designers like Steve Mann, discuss their physical and political goals. In other words, these computers are actively being designed by the discourse that discusses them. This paper suggests that wearables ought to be considered in terms of semiotics and rhetoric during the early phases of media design. Treating wearable actions semiotically helps us understand the meaning-‐making potential of the medium. Treating the interface itself as a rhetorical text helps us understand how interfaces can be both manipulative and transformative. This paper uses Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric as a design framework, and it draws on the work of Marcel Danesi, Glenn Stillar and many others. It also examines many actual wearable computer inventions to foreground the nature of the medium.
INTRODUCTION
Wearable computers, computers that you strap to the body and ‘wear,’ emerge as a new medium of communication. While their more distant mobile relatives like cell phones, gameboys, notebooks, and personal digital assistants run rampant in society, wearable computers (‘wearables’) sit just over the horizon waiting for adoption by the masses. Wearables are unique because they have the potential to create an augmented reality for users. Augmented Reality (AR) is similar to Virtual Reality because both attempt to alter the meaning-‐making that constitutes our reality. However, virtual reality users remain inside specially equipped rooms, ‘caves,’ which construct a reality, while augmented reality users move through the actual world with sense-‐enhancing equipment like head-‐mounted, visual displays. This paper explores wearable computing, in combination with augmented reality or ‘wearable AR’ in semiotic and rhetorical terms. Further, it posits a new design strategy for wearable interfaces with the goal of making wearable AR more human-‐centric in three areas: wearer movement, interactivity and existence (beingness).
In this paper, I ask that we treat ourselves as active agents of media design, even though I acknowledge that some media theorists contest the possibility of that stance (Virilio 2000; Kittler 1999). To achieve this goal, I construct a model of theoretical resources. I adapt a selection of Burke’s rhetoric for the central theoretical focus. Burke’s ‘Definition of Humans’ (1989: 263) reveals how humans are both a
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cause and an effect of the sign systems in which they signify. Burke’s definition treats humans as sign makers, users, and misusers. I show how this definition also reveals that humans are designers. In conjunction with the definition, I deal with Burke’s terms for ‘Order’ (1969 [1950]: 183-‐189), the ‘positive,’ ‘dialectical,’ and ‘ultimate’ as a triad and relate them to three key actions of wearable AR: moving, interacting, and participating with signs of being. I treat these actions as semiotic processes.
WHO WEARS COMPUTERS? Glorified in their extreme by Terminator movies and other sci-‐fi media, wearables are being worn by everyday people on a small scale for many purposes. People wear computers with head-‐mounted displays to get email and browse the web (Poma ™ 2003). Scuba divers wear them to measure plant life in waterscapes (WetPC 2003). People wear computers sewn into jackets to share music and collaborate with others on new musical scores (Nishimoto et al. 2001; Tada et al. 2001). Other people wear computers to augment the memory and match names with faces (Schiele et al. 2001). Soldiers wear them for urban warfare (O’Brien 2001). These current applications conform to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media as ‘extension[s] of ourselves’ because they deliberately extend the senses or the memory (1994 [1964]: 7). In a sense, the ‘augmented’ aspect of wearable AR audaciously aspires to better humanity in some fashion.
Steve Mann, the most notorious computer wearer and inventor, uses them to promote social justice (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). With them, he interrogates commercial and political hegemonic orders to tip the balance ‘toward a little bit of fairness on the surveillance superhighway’ (Mann and Niedzviecki 2001: 168; Mann 1998). Acting very much as a medium-‐maker, Mann also describes what wearables should do and what they should avoid doing, creating a rich terminology of design goals to guide the emergence of this medium. In this paper, I deal with the belief that it would be better if we designed wearables to augment rather than detract from our humanity. Despite this belief inherent to so many texts like those of Mann’s, many wearable interfaces are not human-‐centric (or human-‐centric enough) nor are they likely to be so in the future. In this paper, I draw on Mann’s terminology and outline a new strategy for wearable AR to help it become more human-‐centric and emerge as a unique medium.
FIGURE 1 © STEVE MANN, MANN AND STUDENT WEARING HEAD-‐MOUNTED DISPLAYS.
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FIGURE 2 © STEVE MANN, POSTER FROM CYBERMAN FILM ABOUT STEVE MANN’S LIFE AND POLITICAL VIEWS.
HUMAN-‐CENTRICITY, MEDIA, AND INTERFACE To begin, let me offer some preliminary descriptions of key terms. By ‘human-‐centricity,’ I mean a value system that privileges humans over other entities, such as technology or potentially hegemonic orders like governments. Despite the common term human-‐computer interaction (HCI), much technology goes unexplored as to its impact on human signification. By placing wearable AR in the terms of human-‐centricity, we remind ourselves that humans are always at risk to the design decisions that we make. By ‘design strategy,’ I mean several things. Much of the decision-‐making involving human-‐centricity occurs at an early stage of design because we must decide what an interface will do for a human long before we write any software code. How will we use it? To what benefit or risk? In a sense, designers strategize from the moment that they hatch an idea for an invention. I argue that a set of assumptions, goals, avoidances, notions, and concepts, amongst other factors, contribute to constructing a ‘strategy’ which begins at an early stage of design. Traces of design strategy remain with an interface throughout its existence as a text. Consequently, strategies bear upon interface discourses and, ultimately, alter the lives of real humans through these discourses. I argue that three activities form a foundation for wearable AR as a medium; they are moving, interacting, and participating with the signs of being. ‘Strategizing’ means considering human-‐centricity in terms of each action. I acknowledge that the design strategies of media are dynamic. Even though I write about them (and even propose one) as if they are static, I acknowledge that they are not.
The terms ‘media’ and ‘interface’ need explanation. Marcel Danesi writes that ‘a medium can be defined as the physical means by which some system of ‘signs’ (pictographs, alphabetic characters, etc.) for
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recording ideas can be actualized’ (2002: 2). Wearable AR is a medium “actualized” or instantiated by certain texts. An ‘interface’ is one such type of text because it conducts communication between a person and a computer. More generally, a ‘text’ is a socially-‐recognized, meaningful unit. Glenn Stillar writes that ‘texts exhibit some kind of unity or texture that enables them to be (socially) recognizable as a whole’ (1998: 11). Books, pictures, songs, gestures, movie scenes, gardens, paragraphs, hikes, lectures, meals, and conversations are all examples of kinds of texts. Further, texts are not isolated entities; they always exhibit connectivity. They operate in terms of contexts. The word ‘context’ describes the condition of texts as coherent entities. To cohere means to hold together as a mass of parts. For example, one might judge a garden (text) in terms of a Japanese garden contest (context). A wearable computer game, a text, might portray characters from the context of popular movies, like The Matrix or The Terminator. Thus popular movies make the wearable game coherent with other texts like movie trailers, actions figures of characters, and fashions (e.g., Terminator 3 sunglasses).
This paper is largely about the beginning of a medium and its emergence within cultural contexts. In the famous Hot and Cool interview, McLuhan says that ‘when we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electronic technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people’ (1997 [1967]: 67). Following closely, Bolter and Grusin posit the idea that media ‘remediate.’ They write that ‘these new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media’ (1999: 15). Evidence of remediation lies in the notion of ‘media convergence.’ Danesi points out that media do not ‘compete,’ they ‘converge.’ He says that ‘if the “roads” on the digital highway continue to converge, we may well end up living in one global cyber-‐universe’ (2002: 15). I agree that we are the subject and object of media emergence; that we create and are created by media; and that media remediate and contribute to convergence of digital experiences on a global scale. However, I suggest that we need to take control of a medium and shape it toward a specific end as much as we possibility can. In terms of wearable AR, for example, we need to reject the desktop metaphor and not let it simply determine a new computing medium without challenging it first. In addition, we need to ask if our old style input methods like mice and keyboards have any purpose in a mobile computing world or are they just recycled media from another context thrust onto a new medium without consideration. This paper does not focus on misguided designs or the problems with current wearable AR media. Rather, it argues that we need to conceptualize the medium in terms of rhetoric and semiotics and then offer a new way to consider design.
BURKE’S RHETORIC AS A DESIGN FRAMEWORK Burke’s rhetoric provides a useful model for design because it emphasizes how sign systems, or “symbolic action” in Burke’s terms, act upon our real lives. Stillar comments on the value of a Burkean model:
Rhetorical analysis, in a Burkean perspective, focuses on our dual relation to symbolic action and symbolic systems. That is to say, symbol systems enable us to construct a world of experience and orientation. Through symbols, we actively shape and interpret worlds and orient ourselves to those represented worlds and the other agents in them.
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They constitute our ways of knowing and acting in the world. At the same time, the symbol systems and symbol-‐using patterns of our cultures define us as social agents. They constitute our ways of being in the world. (1998: 61)
Real people act through ‘symbolic action,’ and real people are acted upon by ‘symbol systems.’ We construct the terms of our existence and ‘actively shape’ the worlds of our experience through symbolic action. Simultaneously, symbol systems act upon us with commensurate agency. They enact boundaries and draw human action under their domain and control. This ‘dual relation’ of both acting and being acted upon constitutes our epistemology and our ontology.
Burke explores the dual relation of symbolic action in his “Definition of Humans.” Instead of using prose, Burke uses a poem in order to make each trait evocative instead of definite:
BEING BODIES THAT LEARN LANGUAGE THEREBY BECOMING WORDLINGS
HUMANS ARE THE SYMBOL-‐MAKING, SYMBOL-‐USING, SYMBOL-‐MISUSING ANIMAL
INVENTOR OF THE NEGATIVE SEPARATED FROM OUR NATURAL CONDITION BY INSTRUMENTS OF OUR OWN MAKING GOADED BY THE SPIRIT OF HIERARCHY
ACQUIRING FOREKNOWLEDGE OF DEATH AND ROTTEN WITH PERFECTION (1989: 263)
Language is action. The poem emphasizes both the way humans are symbolic actors and what that action constitutes. By using this poem as a framework, I can stress the fact that humans are agents of design as much as they are acted upon by designs. The word, ‘design’ comes from the medieval Latin designare, to mark out, and suggests the intention to mark, to signify, or to make symbols. It implies signing (which is symbol-‐making) and intent. One makes a deliberate sign. Further, the word relates to many verbs like ‘plan,’ ‘prepare,’ ‘fashion,’ ‘devise,’ ‘contrive,’ ‘execute,’ and ‘conceive’ etc. All of these meanings suggest a change in a symbol or sign-‐making system, a transformation. In the following three sections, I deal with how we can make wearable AR more human-‐centric as it emerges into a new medium.
MOVING AS A POSITIVE SIGN Many theorists study human action in semiotic terms. Danesi (1993) writes extensively about gesture and meaning-‐making in Peircean terms; he says that gesture ‘remains a functional subsystem of human language that can always be utilized as a more generic form of communication when an interaction occurs’ (1993: 99). Drawing on the context of music video, Radan Martinec (2000) adapts a systemic-‐functional approach to build a semiotics of human action. He deals with a Michael Jackson video, ‘Jam,’ and analyzes dance moves and basketball. In this paper, I am concerned with everyday movement because wearables do everything along with the wearer. The computer travels along with you, instead of you travelling to it. Like clothing, it ought to be able to go anywhere. Mann stipulates that wearables should run constantly. They must exhibit the potential to take a secondary role so that wearers can do other things simultaneously (Mann with Niedzviecki 2001: 33). Also, wearables can enable people to
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move in extreme physical locations like waterscapes, outer space, the battlefield, or inside an airplane. Of course, ‘extreme’ is relative. One person’s extreme is another person’s everyday. The point I want to make is that wearables augment experience rather than replicate it. They offer the chance to go places that one would not normally go with a regular computer. In order to design an interface to meet this challenge, we need to understand moving as a symbolic act.
Burke’s first term of rhetoric, the ‘positive,’ involves acting through naming:
First, we take it, there are the positive terms. They name par excellence the things of experience, the hic et nunc, and they are defined per genus et differentium, as with the vocabulary of biological classification. . . .In Kant’s alignment, the thing named by a positive term would be a manifold of sensations unified by a concept. . . .
The imagery of poetry is positive to the extent that it names things having visible, tangible existence. (1969 [1950]: 183)
Positive terms describe the ‘here and now’ (‘hic et nunc’) and those distinguished by ‘generic category and distinguishing feature’ (‘per genus et differentium’). They relate to things that do not inspire ambiguity. Positive terminology defines things that have a sensory existence like trees, houses, colours, and sounds. However, poetry can evoke sensory things even if they do not actually have a positive existence in the world (1969 [1950]: 183). Humans, ‘symbol-‐using’ animals, name a tree a tree and thus estrange themselves from nature; they act upon nature with a system of symbols.
Human physical acts are also positive signs, not only bodies moving. When we walk around trees instead of bumping into them, we act, but we also signify in terms of the positive order. A dodge around the tree, an action, reveals recognition of the tree’s ‘visible and tangible’ existence. If we did not recognize the tree’s presence as meaning (a positive sign), we would bump into it. Wearable AR suggests a sophisticated exchange of positive terminology because of augmented human action. For example, when the wearer walks, a wearable might track her location on a global positioning satellite system translating her physical movement to positive signs in language. With this feature, she communicates with her own mobility by signifying according to a positive terminology. By augmenting her physicality, she will move in new ways because she will sense the world in new ways. Wearable AR designers need to address physical action as communication.
Further, humans move according to a positive system subject to relative contexts. WearSAT is a wearable computer, early in its design stages, for astronauts performing tasks in a space suit during extravehicular activities in space (Carr, Schwartz and Rosenberg 2002). When the wearer is a crewmember at a space station in outer space, his tangible world is different. Wearing a computer in microgravity presents a different here and now to the here and now on earth. The crewman’s indication of his physical existence, for example, comes through language generated by wearable instruments (e.g., temperature, heart rate readings, or distance from earth) rather than the experiential world. He and his computer exchange signs of the positive order so that he will survive. When he floats through space like a balloon, his new outer space movement, a sign, operates according to a different positive terminology than that of his everyday context. Instead of plodding along the streets on gravity-‐ridden
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earth, he floats. His floating marks the new context as a sign understood by him, by his computer interface, and by anyone who reads signs within that extreme context (e.g., another astronaut). Every wearer experiences at least one shift in context because wearable AR demands a real/virtual duality. The virtual aspect of augmented reality has the potential to structure an alternative physical reality. It could posit a here and now that is not here and now. In other words, the wearer’s body is always moving in the real world, but she might also be flying, jogging, or sitting in a virtual context. A lab in Singapore has already developed a wearable version of Pacman for outdoor use (Cheok, Goh, Farbiz, Liu, Li, Fong, Yang, Teo 2004). In a wearable game scenario, one might be walking down a busy street in real reality, but also eating virtual characters superimposed upon the same street.
Wearers need to be autonomous movers. When designing for wearable AR, we need to treat movement as symbolic action within multiple physical contexts. The desktop interface, like that of Microsoft Windows XP, falls short in this regard because it does not provide a human-‐centric interface for wearable computers. It offers a context-‐centric interface that does not adapt to people; rather people must adapt to it. In this section, I demonstrated that signs of movement draw upon, but also contribute to context enabling multiple potential experiences for a wearer. Further, movement is also a catalyst to interactivity, which is the topic of the next section.
INTERACTING AS A DIALECTICAL SIGN Others have written about computer semiotics (Andersen 1997; Wenz 2003). In this paper, I concentrate on symbolic interaction with, specifically, wearables. Interactivity is a key benefit of a wearable in four unique ways. (1) Wearables promote social interaction. Mann writes that wearables ought to be ‘communicative to others’ and ‘expressive’ (Mann with Niedzviecki 2001: 34). They ought to perform these functions constantly. And they should provide a seamless ability to interact with other people at all times. (2) Wearables facilitate interaction with environments. Mann requires wearables to be ‘attentive to the environment’ with multi-‐modal and multi-‐sensory capabilities (Ibid. 34). Already discussed previously, a wearable facilitates interaction with different environments like outerspace or under water. Some applications let the wearer tag the physical world with information for the next wearer who comes along. (3) Wearables offer unique ways to interact with the software (with machines). Software interface, itself, also acts like an interactive agent. The Remembrance Agent software for example helps people remember by remembering for them (Schiele, Starner, Rhodes, Clarkson, Pentland 2001). (4) Wearables promote unknown interactivity. Unlike conventional desktop interfaces or even virtual reality experiences, wearables promote interaction with the unknown. At least, a human-‐centric wearable interface ought to consider the unknown because augmented reality takes place alongside the life of a human, which is so unpredictable. Designing for interactivity means positioning a wearer who can negotiate dialectics of choice with other humans, interfaces, environments and unknown events through ongoing rhetorical transformation.
Interactivity instantiates dialectical orders. In his definition, Burke says that humans are the ‘inventor of the negative.’ The negative is peculiar to symbol-‐systems because nots do not exist in nature (e.g., no one will find a not flower growing). However, one can exchange certain negative words about a flower within symbol systems (e.g., a flower is not a chair) and this points to the utter symbolicity of the negative. Not flower makes no sense, but not modern is possible because one can be modern as well as
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not modern and debate the condition of modernity. Terms where a not is possible instantiate a dialectical order. Burke writes of the dialectical:
Here are words that belong, not in the order of motion and perception, but rather in the order of action and idea. Here are words for principles and essence. . . .
Here are titular words. Titles like “Elizabethanism” or “capitalism” can have no positive referent, for instance. . . .You define them by asking how they behave; and part of an expression’s behavior . . . will be revealed by the discovery of the secret modifiers implicit in the expression itself. (1969 [1950]: 184-‐5)
One cannot pick up and hold ‘capitalism,’ for there is no positive embodiment of it in the world. It is an idea. Dialectical signs point to the realm of thought and idea. The dialectical also involves choice because there is an either/or. For example, paired opposites structure morality in a theology. One embraces faith in order to avoid its negative, doubt. When the possibility for a yes or no arises, a binary opposition ensues. The dialectical, then, involves interaction between opposing terms pushing and pulling for a resolution in texts.
Choice leads to the potential for design because humans instrumentalize. Burke’s third premise of humans is that ‘[we are] separated from our natural conditions by instruments of our own making.’ Burke points to the instrumentality of language; he writes that ‘language is a species of action — symbolic action — and its nature is such that it can be used as a tool’ (1966: 15). In this sense, language is an instrument that empowers humanity to transcend the natural condition. This alienation or separation from nature enables humanity to organize signs into designs, by making choices, so that language can be instrumental.
To be interactive, an augmented reality interface must offer wearers the capability to change the interface; wearers must be able to make meaningful choices (Azuma 1997: 356). Many early wearables sprang from very personal desires for interaction with different systems. The shoe-‐computer gamblers were famous for beating casinos in the sixties and seventies (Thorp 1999; Bass 1998). They claim that they did not strategize to win the money, they were driven to beat the roulette wheel and turn something unpredictable into the predictable. The ‘Lizzy,’ another early wearable, is a set of specifications, a parts list, and a set of instructions for how to build a wearable, all published on the Internet. The designers, originally Thad Starner and other students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explain the Lizzy:
Why “Lizzy?”: Comes from a talk David Ross (Atlanta Veteran’s Administration R&D) gave at the Boeing workshop about how the Model T Ford was nicknamed the “Tin Lizzy.” Everyone adapted it to whatever task needed to be done: winching wagons, pumping water, taking the family to church, etc. It is my hope that these instructions will enable folks to make wearables that do tasks we never imagined. (Starner 1999)
The Lizzy represents an early design objective for wearables. Wearables should adapt to the task. They ought not to operate as single-‐function devices, like the original telephones or television sets. They
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should be multifunctional devices offering a great breadth for interactivity. The Lizzy is a computer, but it is also an idea for someone else’s computer in the future. The unknown is an essential consideration.
In this section, I discussed interacting as signing. I pointed out that mobility is a catalyst to interactivity with other people, environments and other interfaces. When we interact in life, we meet others who present different ideas, thoughts, beliefs, etc. When humans interact in an interface, they also engage in the acts of clash and compromise instantiating the dialectical order. When we design new wearable interfaces, we need to consider interactivity on a much broader scale than ever before. In the next section, I discuss how moving and interacting affect beingness.
PARTICIPATING WITH THE SIGNS OF BEING Computer interfaces affect our beingness. I use the term ‘beingness’ to refer to a quality of being. If ‘being’ means to have an existence, reality, actuality, or occurrence, ‘beingness’ is the quality of having that existence. We participate with the signs of being. Design strategies can manipulate the signs of being, or the rhetorical aspect of an interface that deals with being. For example, many Microsoft interfaces begin with expected greetings that welcome users to begin interaction. Microsoft is there before you. The MSN web portal offers you the chance to store ‘all the content you care about’ as if Microsoft knows what you care about (My MSN Sign-‐in at www.msn.com). You become of Microsoft rather than a person in control of her computer. The result is that Microsoft appears to manipulate aspects of beingness. Conversely, Steve Mann aspires to a very different experience for computer wearers. He stipulates that wearables should be ‘observable’ by people. The computer should linger on autopilot waiting to assist a human. It does not interrupt the flow of living. With this criterion, the computer aspires to an organ of the body whereby bodily functions like breathing, swallowing, or perspiring simply occur when necessary. He also says that wearables should be ‘controllable’ by wearers only. Control is a governing ideal for Mann. In an attempt to displace the notion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with his model, ‘Humanistic Intelligence (HI),’ Mann cites control as a key notion (Mann with Niedzviecki 2001: 30). Rather than humans assisting machinery to soar to greater heights of intelligence, Humanistic Intelligence stresses humans as controlling agents and machines as assistants (Ibid. 30-‐32).
Hierarchy in symbol-‐systems governs our beingness. ‘Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy,’ Burke’s fourth trait, involves structuring hierarchies and validating order. For example, we use social ladders to shape people into social categories to justify behaviour or the behaviour of others toward them (Burke 1961: 41) (e.g., They let Joan backstage at the concert because she is rich). Burke says that ‘mystery’ functions to goad us because ‘once a believer is brought to accept mysteries, he will be better minded to take orders without question from those persons whom he considers authoritative. In brief, mysteries are a good grounding for obedience’ (Ibid. 307). Mysteries of social relations prop social structures whereby ‘King and peasant are mysteries to each other. Those ‘Up’ are guilty of not being ‘Down’, those ‘Down’ are certainly guilty of not being ‘Up’’ (1966: 15). The spirit of hierarchy spurs people to work within terms of order.
Further, terms of the ‘ultimate,’ the third order, construct the impression that hierarchies are inalienable:
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Now, the difference between a merely “dialectical” confronting of parliamentary conflict and an “ultimate” treatment of it would reside in this: The “dialectical” order would leave the competing voice in a jangling relation with one another. . . but the “ultimate” order would place these competing voices themselves in a hierarchy, or a sequence, or evaluative series, so that in some way, we went by a fixed and reasoned progression from one of these to another, the members of the entire group being arranged developmentally with relation to one another. The “ultimate” order of terms would thus differ essentially from the “dialectical” . . . in that there would be a “guiding idea” or “unitary principle” behind the diversity of voices. (Burke 1969 [1950]: 187)
The ultimate offers the seeming authority of a higher order to quell the divergence. Ultimate vocabularies propose more than a compromise. They generate a seeming unity in contexts through functions like sequences, series, relations, arrangement, reason, and design. They operate as if there is no challenge to them, like a principle, which is a fundamental law or primary doctrine. An obvious example of an ultimate vocabulary is a code of law, like the Criminal Code; we live by and according to laws. More subtle examples of the ultimate exist. Interfaces are pure convention, for example, adopted because machines and humans do not read the same languages. Interfaces produce ultimate vocabularies so that there will be meaning for participants. They quell the divergence, but there is no real authority inherent to them.
‘Acquiring foreknowledge of death,’ the fifth trait, also functions with ultimate orders. Richard Coe (1990) writes that ‘the ability to imagine our own deaths follows from the same propositional negative that allows us to abstract and to articulate the future tense’. A notion of death is utterly symbolic. Indeed, foreknowledge of anything is symbolic. But acquiring foreknowledge of death emphasizes the ultimate conclusion of the text of life. Signifying in the terms of knowing about death reveals an ultimate vocabulary because we do, say, and act according to an event, death, which we only know through language.
Ultimate vocabularies are products of being ‘rotten with perfection,’ the sixth trait. Burke intentionally leaves humans in a state of irony with this last clause. He refers to the idea of being ‘rotten with perfection’ as a ‘wry codicil’ (1966: 16). One strives to give one’s life form, and shape oneself toward a certain end that one believes to be perfect. Ultimate vocabularies are perfect because they are artificial; they are an alibi of perfection. The ‘Ten Commandments’ of the Old Testament (Exodus 20:1-‐21), for example, is a seemingly perfect text, and it suggests that you can be perfect too (or good) if you follow this perfect code of goodness. This tendency to perfection is harmful because humans do not contain their own ends within themselves. They make and are made by the social context in which they exist.
Interface metaphor is one means through which ultimate vocabularies negotiate order. Designers use interface metaphors to shape foreign experiences in familiar terms; the desktop metaphor, for example, shapes computer processes in terms of files, folders, and trashcans creating an office context. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson posit the idea that metaphors partake in a system of ‘conceptual metaphors’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987). For example, one conceptual metaphor, IDEAS ARE PLANTS, appears in metaphoric patterns in language like, She breeds interesting thoughts among the group and
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That was a radical branch of the argument. The source domain, plants and the target domain, ideas comprise a mapping. In order to bring conceptual metaphor theory under the umbrella of Burke’s rhetoric and specifically, discuss it in terms of the ultimate order, we need to remind ourselves that metaphors are always subject to context; they do not function autonomously. They exist in the terms of other terms and they are subject to ultimate orders as guiding principles. Elaborating on this idea, Danesi points out that conceptual metaphors as signs, occur as a ‘cultural groupthink . . . largely based on linkages that are established over time among conceptual metaphors’ in everyday language (2002: 50). I present an example of a wearable application to discuss metaphor and the ultimate order.
LifeLog is a proposed wearable application that will record life (Gage 2003). It will attempt to amass all the texts of a person’s life and store them in a life diary. LifeLog is one of the current brainchildren of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the central research and development organization for the United States Department of Defense. DARPA is famous for inventing the Internet in the late 1960s. LifeLog will collect several specific categories of information, including sense texts, geographical locations, health information, computer-‐based communication, real world communication, and the voice content of one person. It might even ‘feel’ what that person feels. As a metaphor, lifelogging might partake in the conceptual metaphor, MEMORY IS A CATALOGUE. The image implies that we can go through our lives and collect snippets of information and actions and log them all to structure a memory catalogue. However, many are asking, who will use this log? (Regan and Bencivenga 2003; Kesterton 2003) Will governments watch their citizens for terrorist activities or oncoming plagues? Will companies watch consumers to exploit unknown markets hidden in life’s texts? Will the military stitch together the thoughts of each individual fighter creating an army where no intelligence is ever lost after soldiers and generals die? Or will LifeLog help everyday people remember their past? In the end, terms of an ultimate order will orient the interface to prop one of these seeming authorities. Will it be My LifeLog giving me an augmented ability to remember myself? Or will a government log me and store me by storing all the texts which constitute my humanity? In a sense, we are already subjectified by LifeLog. The ‘LifeLog’ title alone persuades us to see our lives as potentially loggeable which structures us (humans) as captureable by computers. Ultimately, when we wear computers, we alter beingness. Construction of beingness is also the site of struggle between being empowered or being dehumanized by wearables.
TRANSFORMATION ACROSS ORDERS The utility of the triad is not to label words as ‘positive,’ ‘dialectical,’ and ‘ultimate,’ but to realize the developmental relationship that goes on among these terms. One term leads into the other and in effect completes it:
In an ultimate dialectic, the terms so lead into one another that the completion of each order leads to the next. Thus, a body of positive terms must be brought to a head in a titular term which represents the principle or idea behind the positive terminology as a whole. This summarizing term is in a different order of vocabulary. And if such titles, having been brought into dialectical commerce with one another, are given an order among themselves, there must be a principle of principles involved in such a design –
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and the step from the principles to a principle of principles is likewise both the fulfillment of the previous order and the transcending of it. (Burke 1969 [1950]: 189)
Burke uses the terms ‘fulfillment’ and ‘transcending’ to describe the ‘step’ from one order to the next. Each order must be seen in terms of the other orders (see Figure 3). I understand this process as a transformation.
FIGURE 3 RELATION BETWEEN BURKE’S TRIAD OF TERMS AND THE ACTS OF WEARABLE AR
Burke’s triad exposes the transformative nature of rhetoric. It offers three orders, or hierarchies, namely, a positive order instantiated by terms of a material nature, a dialectical order instantiated by terms referring to the realm of ideas (clash and compromise between signifying entities), and an ultimate order instantiated by terms which act as a seemingly sovereign, organizing, and authorizing principle over the whole set of terms. Transformation occurs as each order conveys the social, consequential functions of texts within contexts from one order to another. Moving, interacting, and existing through a wearable interface, as symbolic acts, relate to the positive, dialectical, and ultimate orders respectively. Moving is a positive sign, interacting a dialectical sign, and existing according to is an ultimate sign. When we move through the world (enabled with a computer that moves easily), we meet others and this interactive relationship causes a dialectic of ideas. Our movement and interaction causes us to act according to a seemingly supreme system of signs that governs our behaviour (for better or worse).
For example, wearable computers might enable an augmented version of chess whereby players see the game on a head mount display. Two teams of real and virtual people (avatars) physically move around an actual chessboard in a local park (positive order). Interactivity occurs when players step into new positions (positive order) and create new decisions for others to make (dialectical order). However, governing this entire activity, this rhetoric, are the rules (ultimate order). The rules are the given; they act insidiously or overtly, but the players agree to participate in terms of the rules as the game progresses. Not acting according to the rules negates the game. At the end of the game, one player is the winner (ultimate order). That player becomes superior to the others; his actions reconfigure the roles and identities of the other players who are now losers (ultimate order). When the interface presents one with the means to claim, I exist in/through/of this interface in a different way, transformation has occurred in some form.
Interactivity as construed by Dialectical Terms
Beingness as construed by
Ultimate Terms
Mobility as construed by Positive Terms
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In conclusion, wearable AR interfaces offer wearers the chance to move autonomously, to interact constantly, and (if strategized correctly) to exist in new and empowered ways. Recognizing actions associated with wearable AR in terms of rhetoric and semiotics gives us a design framework for these goals. To design is to act on a symbol system, but also to relinquish activity and be acted upon by the same system. This paper attempts to leverage our design choices (the choices that we do have control over), with a theory to bring about interfaces that are human-‐centric.
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