Archives for October 2009

Virtual World Affordances, updated

8 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

VWAffordances Corrie Bergeron (@skydadddy) pointed out that I hadn’t really accounted for the ability to create a persona, a representation of yourself via avatar that reflects how you’d like to be perceived. Chuck Hamilton did have it in his list, and I thought it was implicit in the alternative to anonymity, but on reflection, I think it does deserve it’s own affordance, and implications for reputation.

Of course, you’ll have a persona regardless, if you’re present in the world, but the ability to customize one is the unique opportunity.

The question then becomes, how do you use this representation? Caroline Avey (@aveyca) presented a wide variety of uses of virtual worlds that ACS is exploring, and some are really not things that require long term personas, but are instead ways for folks to come together independent of geography for introductions of new products or other events. Similarly, other uses of virtual worlds may be better configured with other combinations of affordances. Different environments have different implementation of the affordances, or the ability to limit the capability of some (ie not have customizable avatars or not support agency) to meet particular event needs.

Understanding your virtual world goals can help determine what affordances are critical, and support your design criteria (and tool choice). That’s my intention, at any rate. I really appreciate feedback that helps me refine the models I develop, advocate, and use. Thoughts and comments always welcome.

Extending Virtual World Affordances

6 October 2009 by Clark 3 Comments

I recently attended the 3DTLC conference, as I reported before. Chuck Hamilton presented on his (IBM’s) take on affordances on virtual worlds. Given that I’ve opined before, I asked for more detail on their take, and he was kind enough to forward to me their definitions. I like what they’ve done, but it led me to try to refine what I see as some confounding (they actually separate several of their 10 into two separate ones), and try to capture what I think are core, what can be enabled, and what then arise from those capabilities.

I start with what I think are the core affordances of virtual worlds, that there’s a 3D world, that you can visit, and that’s digital. From there, I see that you can enable others to be there (social), you can enable action (agency), the world can be kept around (persistent), and it can be made accessible broadly (e.g. through the internet).

If you choose to enable those (and you should, in most cases), you get some emergent properties. Chuck talked about a universal visual language, and you certainly can both tap into, and establish, visual cues. The scale does not have to be real, but can indeed scale down to and up to any size you want, in part or all.

You can choose to be anonymous, but if you don’t and choose to have a representation that is active over time, you can establish a reputation.

By being active, you can also enable practice opportunities such as simulations, scenarios, and games. If agency includes not just interaction, but creation, and you have social, you can have co-creation (one of the most exciting opportunities for informal learning). The persistence of your activity creates the opportunity to capture traces for reflection, e.g. ‘after-action review’.

The fact that it’s digital means it can be augmented with external capability: media, applications, and more. Also, you can be at least geography-independent, if not chronologically-independent.

This is a preliminary stab at trying to trace the initial, potential, and consequently emergent affordances, by no means do I think it’s the definitive answer. Feedback solicited!

The worst of best practices and benchmarking

5 October 2009 by Clark 4 Comments

In a recent post, Jane Bozarth goes to task on ‘best practices’, which I want to elaborate on. In the post, she talks about how best practices are contextualized, so that they may work well here, but not there. She’s got a cute and apt metaphor with marriage, and she’s absolutely right.

However, I want to go further. Let me set the stage: years ago as a grad student, our lab was approached with the task of developing an expert system for a particular task. It certainly was something we could have done. Eventually, we asked what the description was for the ideal performance, and were told that the best source was the person who’d been doing it the longest. Now, people are fabulous pattern matchers, and performing something for a long time with some reflection on improvement likely could get you some really good performance. However, there are some barriers: experts no longer have access to their own performance; without an external frame of reference, they can get trapped into local maxima; and other phenomena of our cognitive architecture interfere with optimal performance (e.g. set effects, functional fixedness). I’ve riffed on this often; it’s compiled and they tell stories about what they do that have little correlation to what they actually do. We didn’t end up taking up the opportunity. So it may be the best out there, but is it the best that can be?

And that’s the problem. Why are we only looking at what the best is that anyone’s doing? Why not abstract across that and other performances, looking for emergent principles, and trying to infer what would on principle be the best? That is, if it hasn’t already been documented in theory and is available (academics do that sort of thing as a career, and in between the obfuscation there are often good thoughts and answers). The same with benchmarking: it’s relatively the best, not absolutely the best.

I’ve largely made a career out of trying to find the principled best approaches, interpreting cognitive science research and looking broadly across relevant fields (including HCI/UI, software engineering, entertainment, and others) to find emergent principles that can guide design of solutions. And, reliably, I find that there are idea, concepts, models, etc that can guide efforts as broadly dispersed as virtual worlds, mobile, adaptive systems, content models, organizational implementation, and more. Models emerge that serve as checklists, principles, frameworks for design that allow us to examine tradeoffs and make the principled best solution. I regularly capture these models and share them (e.g. my models page, and more recent ones regularly appear in this blog).

I’m not saying it’s easy, but you look across our field and recognize there are those who are doing good work in either translating research into practice or finding emergent patterns that resonate with theoretical principles. It’s time to stop looking at what other organizations are doing in their context as a guide, and start drawing upon what’s known and customizing it to your context, and then having a cycle of continual tuning. With the increasing pressures to be competitive, I’d suggest that just being good enough isn’t. Being the best you can be is the only sustainable advantage.

Let’s see: copy your best competitor, and keep equal; or shoot for the principled best that can be in the category, and have an unassailable position of leadership? The answer seems obvious to me. How about you?

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