VII. Specific Contexts

So let’s look closely at how does our digital world affects our world view. Let’s see how those specific contexts closer, really inspect how the digital world has affected our world views, individual ideals, and core concepts of self.

This relates to Enlightenment thinking about knowledge and sublime. In the 18th century, Enlightenment thinkers like Emmanual Kant began to try and understand how the scientific, intuitive mind coexists with the dogmatic elements of the Church and its unquestioned “truth” ^[55]. They began to see the act of ritual in art as important to the humanist idea of self. ^[56]

Now looking at the methodologies of UI/UX design and game design, like Donald Norman’s idea on design thinking, and Agile, in that light, we can see that psychologists, designers, and engineers use the basic ideas of being human as a way to direct our attention through devices that we use, and through those interfaces ^[57]. This guides how we interact with a computer, that has a very different set of learning, understanding, and knowing functions a computer is linear, we are divergent. ^[58]

This is where we look at Semiotics and symbolism. We do this through an understood commonality of symbolism, some spoken ^[59], like “Hey Siri …”, but this is not ideal, how we say things much more than what we say plays an important role in how we communicate, so most we communicate through text and visual symbols. The symbolism that is so understood and important to the artist of the 20s century as they moved away from representational art to “meaning” in work ^[60]. I propose that we are at that moment for work in video games and design software, looking for the meaning behind things instead of the replication of them. We need to see which would carry more symbolic meaning. Building a new visual language is a key concept to UX design. Perhaps we can use methods to unlock a postmodernist narrative element by subverting app design.

A. Can installation art help us reflect on this perspective?

One of the first ways that we interact with our world is through play. This mantra has guided famed game designer and contemporary artist, Iwai Toshio ^[61], in which he builds works to use play as a way to engage his viewers, and open them up to new ways of discovery. His work first started as installation work present in galleries, but really interested me is when he started his partnership with Nintendo and released the soundscape piece on the top-selling portable system at the time, the Nintendo DS. Elektroplankton used graphic cues, touch interface and dynamic music and sound as a contemplation on interrelations between sound and touch. Toshio successful released a piece of art to the general public in a videogame landscape, where goal completion and action is prominent, even though his ‘game’ had none of that, instead it focused on the element of ‘play’ inherent to videogames.

Similarly, I propose to use UX/UI methodologies to develop apps that don’t technically follow the guidelines of efficiency, ‘stickiness’ or engagement, or goal completion [cite Norman, or other apps]. But instead focus on another core tenet of app design, and that is self-evaluation. An example is how Instagram becomes a reflection to the user of their own self-worth as much as it does to the outside world as a social tool. I want to build on this journey of the self through UX, priming the user for the 3D environments by focusing their archetypes and building a reliance on unique symbolism, similar to language characters, as a cryptologist would use to unearth a long lost language [image of Mayan language] through the deconstruction of ciphers.

A. Can digital manipulation simulate natural randomness?

Now let’s look at the contrast digital artifacts that we encounter daily. Does digitization of these images affect the way that we see the world around us, and does machine learning where avenues of digital manipulation for aesthetics be replicated with randomness to build upon natural occurrences that mathematically derived from game theory, chaos theory, and fractal analysis, specific to the study and model prediction of random, i.e. natural, occurrences that go from migration, topography, to weather prediction ^[62]. Let’s use those models to build and explore new forms of art.

          1. Machine Learning representations of cinema

Looking at the 1982 Sci-fi classic, Blade Runner, using neural networks to program a way to visualize the movie through machine learning.  ^[63]

B. Does UI/UX share a similar space with ritual and myth

           1. Implications of Symbols and how does this guide us in our own narratives. 

Narratives build identity through myth. One of the key aspects of Joseph Campbell’s work about mythology, after studying myths from all over the world in vast cultures is the key elements of archetypes. Identifiers that characters that are in these stories fall into, and how many people construct their own narratives to their lives ^[64]. We are all the centers of our own universes, we are all heroes in our own real-time myth.

          2. Design Thinking vs Ritual: Comfortable vs Uncomfortable

Design thinking uses the psychology of design to help humans interface with complex systems that digital devices force us into. This is even more persistent with devices that we have on us 24/7. Design thinking works to eliminate user error, feature creep, and amplify efficiency and usability. But imagine using this doctrine to instead look inside. Instead of finding the best restaurant for lunch, or the quickest route to Toledo, we instead use it as we would use ritual, to amplify self-discovery. Ritual uses repetition, sound, visuals, and increased stimuli to force us into uncomfortable and unique situations. Instead of trying to minimize our daily lives, ritual looks to open our perceptions to a greater life. ^[65]

VIII. Literature Review

Reference writings on digital conveyance like The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich, Kant and the Enlightenment about ritual and art, and Joseph Campbell and mythology. These many different principles and educational studies at first seem incompatible, but I propose that the underpinnings of my thesis are about blending these together.