Laurel and Tufte 1: 3 points and a question

I'm going to take a stab at Gayle and Kevin's questions and elaborate on those as the same thoughts crossed my mind. Kevin asks how chartjunk is very much the same idea as Laurel's idea that the needs of the audience are the main concern of a computer or theatrical design. At the same time, Gayle asks if the decorations intrude on the "seriousness" of the work. I differentiate decorations in the theatrical world from the chartjunk Tufte discusses.

Chartjunk to me is the unnecessary information that clouds a viewer’s field of vision. Instead of making the information easy and readily available to read and understand, the chartjunk instead makes it complicated and convoluted with moiré effects, excess information, or just bad design. When I think of charts, I see them as serious artifacts in the scientific world. In this sense, additional "junk" takes away from what is most important, the information that is supposed to be represented. On the flip side, the theatrical world is open to representation but is suspicious of decoration.

I think what Laurel intends for us to understand is that when she refers to decoration as being suspicious (22, Laurel) it is directed at those in the science-oriented fields. To them, design is seen as decoration because it diverts from the ultimate goal: a properly working, productive tool used to enhance real world capabilities; whereas theatrics is a mere representation of reality ornamented through props, costumes, make-up, and the like. However, we already know how un-user friendly computers can be, so if human imagination, as Kevin says, were never thrown into the mix, computer programmers would still be using binary to code and computers would not be a household staple.

But this leads to the next issue of human-computer activity as seen as productive and experiential. I think in regards to user interface design, Laurel’s explanation of productive vs. experiential is really an issue seen today. I think often times that line is non-existent, especially with the development of wiki’s, most notably Wikipedia, or even the educational children’s games like Leap Frog. How do you not blur experiential and productive activity in such an instance? Are they not viewed and played simply for the experience and at the same time “have outcomes in the real world that are somehow beyond the experience of the activity itself” (22, Laurel). Would “serious games” have come into existence if the possibility of combining the two were not possible? It shows foresight on Laurel’s part to recognize that such stringent boundaries could not exist (considering this article was written in 1993).

My question is where do we go from here? In what direction is serious gaming going? (I know, out of context of the article in that you’re not going to find the answer there, but I think an interesting one to probe).