Daniel Pink – A Whole New Mind

Summary

Pink claims that there is a “seismic shift” in the types of aptitudes that make people successful in this day and age. Because of what he calls “Abundance, Asia, and Automation” (Chapter 2), left brain-driven skills such as linear thinking, analytic hard logic, and step-by-step methods of problem solving are no longer enough to make a person stand out in their field. Pink says that if you find yourself doing a job in which someone overseas could do it cheaper and/or a computer can do it faster, then you are in a precarious spot. In order to save your job and to be more satisfied with the work you do, as well as with the quality of your life overall, you should strive to develop or refine six fundamental right-brain aptitudes (51):[1]

• Design – A combination of utility and significance (70)
• Story – “The essence of persuasion, communication, and self-understanding has become the ability also to fashion a compelling narrative” (66)
• Symphony – “synthesis,” “crossing boundaries,” “combine disparate pieces into an arresting whole” (66), inventive juxtaposition (130)[2]
• Empathy – “allows us to see the other side of an argument” (160)
• Play – homo ludens
• Meaning – “Our fundamental drive, the motivational engine that powers human existence, is the pursuit of meaning” (217). The top tier of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (225).

Pink claims that we have moved out of the Information Age, and into the “Conceptual Age.”[3] In his words, “We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age” (1-2). Overall, Pink encourages an inclusive approach to living and working in the Conceptual Age. It’s not that we need to develop the right-brain aptitudes to the exclusion of the left-brain ones. The point is, we need both.

Key Differences between the Left and Right Brain

Left Brain	Right Brain
Text Brocca and Wernicke’s area	Pictures “The right hemisphere is the picture; the left hemisphere is the thousand words” (19)
Literal meaning / Manifest content (in psychoanalytic terms)	Metaphors, figurative language / Latent content
Details “’The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing’…The left side is the fox; the right side is a hedgehog” (22)	Big picture / Gestalt
Sequential	Simultaneous
Link obviously connected elements to establish something already known	Link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi says, ‘”creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains’” (135).
Homo seriosus (Lanham) Homo sapiens – man the knower (Pink)	Homo rhetoricus (Lanham) Homo ludens (Pink, Huizinga)

Quotes & Ideas Pertaining to Interface Design and UX

“It’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful, abiding by what author Virginia Postrel calls ‘the aesthetic imperative’” (33, emphasis mine).[4]

“In an age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical, and functional needs is woefully insignificant…Mastery of design, empathy, play, and other seemingly ‘soft’ aptitudes is now the main way for individuals and firms to stand out in a crowded marketplace” (34).[5]

One way in which these aptitudes manifest in an instructional setting is being developed by Robert Sternberg. The Rainbow Project (now called the Kaleidoscope Project) is “an alternative SAT” which was designed not only to address issues related to the gap in performance between races and socioeconomic classes, but also to be a more precise indicator than the SAT is of college success. Sternberg’s test, which “doesn’t aim to replace the SAT—only to augment it,” engages students’ narrative and emotional literacies by asking them, for example, to create captions for New Yorker cartoons, to write a short story around a given title (such as “The Octopus’ Sneakers”), and to figure out how to persuade others in real life situations (such as helping them move furniture) (59-59).

“’Learning isn’t about memorizing isolated facts. It’s about connecting and manipulating them’” as is the case in video game play (193).

“Many aspects of video gaming resemble the aptitude of Symphony—spotting trends, drawing connections, and discerning the big picture…Experiences with [RPGs] can deepen the aptitude of Empathy and offer rehearsals for the social interactions of our lives” (194). Games also have a Story structure (“’games are the literature of the twenty-first century’” (195), and are often beautifully Designed.

Utility + Significance = Design

- “Utility requires significance” (79, emphasis mine)

- Cases in point: toaster (80), hospital of the future (82, and my experience on the project in Jan’s class)

We “consume experiences, not things.” – Karim Rashid (92)

Symphony is the underling drive behind my entire project, since it calls (like Lanham does in “The ‘Q’ Question”) for a both/and grammar, a gestalt (136): We need to understand how to adapt technology to users AND how to adapt users to technology.

Interfaces are satisfying if they can imbue Meaning. If they are gratifying to interact with (226).

My Questions

1. In terms of creating persuasive interfaces, how does the aptitude of Design combine both usability and user experience? How can Design interpellate users, and persuade them to act in their best interests in virtual environments?

2. In what ways is Story an interpellative construct? How are stories persuasive?

3. If Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric is an interpellative construct, how does it keep from being destructively persuasive (i.e. coercive, manipulative), since it is defined by being rule-based, and since being rule-based is inherently non-empathetic?

3A. How does (or can) procedural rhetoric as an interpellative construct demonstrate emotional literacy?

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1.  From what I understand at this point, there’s overlap here between these aptitudes, and what defines a sticky idea in Made to Stick. Those elements are Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories.

2.  Symphony might have more resonance when I get to Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences because Pink writes that the best way to understand symphony is to understand drawing. Both are about relationships. Both are a way of seeing (131).

3.  Richard Lanham makes a similar claim in The Economics of Attention. Substitute ‘conceptual’ with ‘attention,’ and you’ve basically got Lanham’s thesis.

4.  Pink quotes from Postrel’s The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Values is Remaking Culture, Commerce, and Consciousness. This sentiment is more or less echoed in Norman’s Emotional Design. I’d have to see exactly how Postrel defines ‘the aesthetic imperative,’ but it might also link up with Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital.’ It also has obvious syntactic similarity to Kant’s ‘categorical imperative.’

5.  This might be an extension of Pine and Gilmore’s thesis in The Experience Economy. They claim that creating a memorable user experience is the way to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. But how is that experience generated? Through utilization of some combination Pink’s right-brain aptitudes.

Jean Baudrillard – “On Seduction”

Summary

Seduction and Psychoanalysis

Baudrillard explains seduction in part through the use of language and analogies from Freudian psychoanalysis. He therefore begins the chapter by saying that unlike psychoanalysis, whose whole project is to uncover latent meaning by interpreting manifest content—for, psychoanalysis teaches that the locus of meaning is underneath, in between, or outside of manifest discourse—in the case of seduction, meaning is located wholly within the manifest. In other words, the domain of seduction “is the scared horizon of appearances” (153).

Understanding seduction is difficult in part because psychoanalysis privileges the latent: “Interpretation overlooks and obliterates…appearances in its search for hidden meaning” (152). Furthermore, the manifest denotes superficiality (that which is apparent within appearance), and “all appearances conspire to combat meaning, to uproot meaning, whether intentional or not, and to convert it into a game” (153). Thus, manifest discourse’s alignment with ‘play’ puts it at odds with psychoanalysis’s ‘serious’ (i.e. scientific) practice of producing meaning through the act of interpreting signs and matching them with signifiers (to bring in Saussurian terms, as Baudrillard does). Moreover, Beaudrillard writes that Freud “abolished seduction [from the list of primary human drives] in order to replace it with an eminently operational mechanics of interpretation” (155). Thus, in addition to being aligned with frivolous activities such as play, seduction also refuses to allow itself to be operationally defined, which therefore makes it anathema to science and scientific inquiry.

As a consequence of its epistemology, the psychoanalytic paradigm created a number of binary oppositions. For example:

• Latent / Manifest         -Or-         Hidden meaning / Surface appearance
• Science (formal logic, rules, law) / Play (no formal logic, no spoken rules, no law)
• Passive acceptance of weakness in order to survive / Active use of weakness in order to thrive

The Trompe-l’oeil, Trick of the Eye

Baudrillard’s articulation of seduction deconstructs these binaries. He addresses the primacy of appearances by bringing in the notion of “enchanted simulation: the trompe-l’oeil [or, trick of the eye], more false than false, and the secret of appearances” (157). Beaudrillard explains the trompe-l’oeil through negation: “these objects are not objects. They do not describe a familiar reality, like a still life. They describe…void and absence…These are…reappearances that haunt the emptiness of a scene. This seduction is not an aesthetic one…but an acute and metaphysical seduction, one derived from the nullification of the real” (157). As he continues to explore the ways in which the trompe-l’oeil manifests itself, the binaries reverse: in the non-space and surreality of trompe-l’oeil, play will always trump science—for truth does not exist once it is stripped of appearance (157), and appearance is the realm of play and game (153). Additionally, nothing is hidden—for pure appearance is ironically the “excess of reality” (158). The trompe-l’oeil is a key organizing principle (even though Badrillard would not call it such, insomuch as it resists form) for his theory of seduction, and it is therefore instructive to break out some characteristics of it which Baudrilard discusses.

Some Characteristics of the Trompe-l’oeil

• The effect of the trompe-l’oeil is “seduction and exhilaration” (159), as well as pleasure (160).
• The revelation of the trompe-l’oeil is that “’reality’ is nothing but a staged world, objectified according to rules…a simulacrum which the experimental hypersimulation of the trompe-l’oeil undermines” (159).
• The mechanisms of the trompe-l’oeil are play, artifice, mimicry, and questioning.

“The trompe-l’oeil does not attempt to confuse itself with the real. Fully aware of play and artifice, it produces a simulacrum by mimicking the third dimension, questioning the reality of the third dimension, and by mimicking and surpassing the effect of the real, radically questioning the principle of reality” (159).

• The aims of the trompe-l’oeil are to “reverse and to revert,” to undermine certainty.

“Surrealism, like the trompe-l’oeil, is not really a part of art of art history. Surrealism and the trompe-l’oeil have a metaphysical dimension. Aspects of style are not their concern. They disrupt the very point of impact with reality or functionality, and therefore with consciousness. They aim to reverse and to revert. They undermine the world’s certainty. This is why their pleasure and seduction is radical, even if minor, for they derive from an extreme surprise within appearances, from a like prior to the mode of production of the real world” (160).

• The locations of the trompe-l’oeil are (Renaissance) painting and architecture (specifically political edifices such as palaces) (160-61). Seduction happens in the former through perspective, or, more accurately the loss thereof—the feeling of “vertigo”, and in the latter through space, or rather the “holes” therein.

How Baudrillard’s Seduction is Different from Shedroff’s

After discussing the trompe-l’oeil, Baudrillard moves into a section called “The secret and the challenge.” Here, we learn that this theory of seduction goes well beyond the impoverished understanding of seduction in terms of sex. Baudrillard writes, “It is not through some libidinal investment, through some energy of desire that [seduction] acquires intensity, but through the pure form of gaming and bluffing” (164). Baudrillard goes on to sharply criticize the popular understanding of seduction (i.e. the way Nathan Shedroff invokes it) when he says that seduction, “in its actual [popular] form, has lost all risk, suspense, and magic to take the form of a faint and undifferentiated obscenity” (166). This is a damning invective indeed, because the way seduction has been appropriated, by Shedroff and others who attempt to ‘sell’ it, is as a commodity, and Baudrillard explicitly claims that seduction is beyond production, beyond commodification (“seduction takes hold of…all production and finally annihilates it” (166)). Seduction does not participate in the regular flow of things for “seduction is merely an immoral, frivolous, superficial, and superfluous process: one within the realm of signs and appearances; one that is devoted to pleasure” (165).

How Seduction is Related to Play

So, if sex is not seductive, what is? The answer (in addition to language itself): a challenge.

The rules of engagement which govern challenges and seduction are similar, and actually hinge on the strange logic of play: “The challenge terminates all contracts, all exchanges regulated by law (the law of nature or the law of value) and substitutes it for a highly conventional and ritualized pact. An unremitting obligation to respond and to outdo, governed by a fundamental rule of the game, and proceeding according to its own rhythm. Contrary to the law which is always written in stone…this fundamental rule never needs to be stated; it must never be stated. It is immediate, immanent, and inevitable (whereas the law is transcendental and explicit)…The enchantment of seduction…is never an investment but a risk; never a contract but a pact; never individual but dual; never psychological but ritual; never natural but artificial” (164-65).

The logic of play explains how challenges might be characterized as seductive. But what makes challenge distinct from seduction? Baudrillard both asks and answers this question. In response to his own question he writes, “The challenge consists in drawing the other within your area of strength, which is also his or her strength, given that there can be an unlimited escalation. Whereas the strategy (?) (Sic) of seduction consists in drawing the other within your area of weakness, which will also be his or hers…We seduce with weakness, never with strong powers and strong signs. In seduction we enact this weakness, and through it seduction derives its power…Seduction makes use of weakness, makes a game of it, with its own rules” (165). Here, then, is the reversal of the last binary I listed above, and the final way in which seduction thwarts the psychoanalytic paradigm “of resignation and acceptance” of weakness (165).

My Questions

1. What is the relationship between Baudrillard’s notion of the trompe-l’oeil and Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric?
2. If seduction is an effect of interpellation, and flow is also an effect of interpellation, how are they similar in this regard? How different?
3. Baudrillard gives as an architectural example of the trompe-l’oeil the studiolos of the Duke of Urbino, and Frederigo da Montefeltre, in the ducal palace of Urbino and Gubbio. He says that the studiolo is “a reverse microcosm: cut off from the rest of the structure, without windows, literally without space, since here space is actualized in simulation.” He goes on to note, “Since Machiavelli politicians have perhaps always known that the mastery of a simulated space is the source of power, that the political is not a real activity or space, but a simulation model, whose manifestations are simply achieved effects. The very secret of appearances [i.e. its seductive quality] can be found in this blind spot in the palace” (161). What do trompes-l’oeil look like in digital environments? In cyberspace? Is their effect the same as in Renaissance art and architecture?