Bert Bongers - Understanding Interaction: The Relationships Between People, Technology, Culture, and the Environment, Volume 1: Evolution, Technology, Language and Culture

DOI: 10.1201/9781315373386-1

So, Understanding Interaction has many facets and draws on many disciplines.

To illustrate the multifaceted nature of Understanding Interaction, in this chapter I am describing my own path along a range of disciplines, fields, degrees, projects, jobs, explorations, accidents, experiences, and influences I have been lucky enough to have had in the last thirty-plus years. It is nothing more than that: an illustration. The core of this chapter is a reflective overview of the various fields and disciplines that have been explicitly concerned with design and research into the interaction between people and (particularly digital) technology in the last fifty years. The storyline of my own experiences is by no means a suggestion of the perfect path, as most of it happened without any particularly grand ambitions other than a drive to explore, learn, experience, and understand, in a number of situations that I have been lucky enough to be in. There never was a plan.

These personal experiences and other reflections may not be relevant for everyone, the reader is free to skip or skim in fact, this is true for most of this book. This meandering is deliberate, to avoid a one-dimensional linear narrative. As mentioned in the Preface, it is for this reason the use of footnotes and endnotes was avoided, as they bifurcate the narrative resulting in multiple streams, instead I have tried to keep many facets close together. It is my expectation that in this structure, the reader can pick up multiple streams of narrative simultaneously. Reading is only on the surface a seemingly linear activity; just like everything else the human mind is involved in, it is in fact a parallel multifaceted game of establishing meaning, (re-)constructing knowledge and insight. This is backed up and discussed at several points in the book, taking inspiration and insights from a large range of disciplines. Examples are: traditional storytelling and memory spaces that support oral culture, as for instance Lynne Kelly describes her recent books The Memory Code [2016] and Memory Craft [2019]; the all-at-once representation which Marshall McLuhan aimed for when he studied the transition from oral to literal culture in Understanding Media and other publications in the 1960s illustrated with his own probes or aphorisms; and the recent insights from psychology and neurology in unconscious thinking as a massively parallel processing mind, as Daniel Goleman discusses in Focus [2013], Malcolm Gladwell presents in Blink [2005], and the work of Daniel Kahneman (with Amos Tversky) in Thinking, Fast and Slow [2011], to name a few (discussed in depth in Chapter 10, Thinking).

Understanding Interaction is a dynamic, evolving landscape which in this chapter I will describe through my own journey, from which I have seen the landscape starting to be formed. Everyone has their own path of mixed professional and personal developments, but because this is my book, I am taking the liberty of sharing my life journey (or garden path) of explorations and experiences in fast-forward in this chapter, including mentioning many of the people I worked with or for it is important to acknowledge all the help and inspiration I received and all the opportunities I had to learn from experienced people, pioneers and leaders, and many participants from new disciplines I was lucky enough to collaborate with. And while there are personal elements throughout this book, I have put a lot of effort in being objective in all areas that need a neutral, unbiased, and scientific approach. I have attempted to back all this up as much as possible with precise referencing, while avoiding reference dropping or showing off (pretending to be erudite) the aim was to support all that is presented with the proper references, acknowledging sources from a range of disciplines, and to offer the reader the opportunity to use these as starting points for further explorations. Thats why they are in endnotes, as they facilitate a way out. Due to the breadth of the scope of this book, it is inevitable that some sources are still missed, either minor or crucial. I will keep (re-)searching!

My personal path started on the technology side, already in a mix: my first degree was a combined engineering course (BSc in Technical Computer Science, which brought together software and hardware, and digital and analogue electronics), supplemented with a fair bit of hands-on mechanical tinkering through working in bicycles and motorcycle maintenance. During the BSc degree from late 1986 I worked for six months as a student intern on the design and development of electronic musical instruments at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam, and later my final graduation project in 1989 at the Sonology Department of the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. This led to a permanent position as musical engineer based at Sonology and collaborating with STEIM: a highly specialised (and rare) profession, working with top musicians, composers, and artists on very individual interfaces as shown in the images in

Figure 1.1 Electronic musical instruments (from left to right): The Ladys Glove (Laetitia Sonami, 1994), The Conductor (Michel Waisvisz, 1989), The Hands (Waisvisz 1988), The Web (Waisvisz 1992), The Meta-Trumpet (Jonathan Impett, 1993), Cello++ (Frances-Marie Uitti, 1999)

Being immersed in musical culture was essential for understanding electronic musical instrument design, experiencing musical performances and rehearsals of such a high level of musicianship and instrument techniques, from early music and baroque, to classical, jazz, improvised, and contemporary composed music.

In this role I worked primarily as a craftsperson, an artisan, which is rare in digital technologies, certainly at that time.

I became increasingly interested in the theoretical aspects of the interaction with technology and computer systems particularly, in addition to the craft and design aspects, an interest which I was able to develop in the mid-1990s through a position as research scientist at the Institute for Perception Research (known by its initialism in the Dutch Language IPO Instituut voor Perceptie Onderzoek) in Eindhoven (NL), working for the consumer electronics company Philips on interfaces and multimodal interaction styles for networked home entertainment systems.

All this work was mostly within the field of HumanComputer Interaction (HCI), as the entertainment systems but also the musical instruments I worked on earlier were effectively computer based. I read the first text book on HCI from cover to cover, which was written (as is often the case) by a multidisciplinary team with backgrounds in computer science and psychology [Dix et al. 1993]. But I felt the need for more knowledge about the physical aspects of the interaction, the importance of which I had learned through the work with electronic musical instruments, including explorations of active haptic feedback. In part this was what led me to Philips/IPO, as they at the time had a research track on tactual perception, and had developed a highly sophisticated force-feedback device

Around the same time (mid-1990s) I started working on spatial and physical interfaces for interactive and dynamic buildings with the architects Lars Spuybroek and Kas Oosterhuis..