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| Minna
Tarkka has been active as critic, producer and educator in media art
and design. In 1996-2001 she was professor of interactive and multimedia
communication at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki,
Finland. As head of the lab’s MA in New Media programme, she initiated
study and research projects in digital museums, interactive television
as well as critical art and design practice. Currently she is finalizing
her doctoral thesis on media design discourses at the National Consumer
Research Centre. She has authored and edited works and published numerous articles on media and contemporary art. As cultural producer, she has managed digital art and design projects for museums and the web. In 1994, she was programme director of the Helsinki ISEA symposium and is currently chair of m-cult, the Finnish association for media culture. Contribution: Representing the user: strategies and tactics Designers can be said to represent the user in two ways. In their discourse and practice, designers construct the user through scripts, scenarios as well as visual and interactive representations. In a more political sense, designers represent the users by being their ‘advocates’ in the product development process, defending the user’s rights. Focusing on interaction design we witness a hybrid and contested field, where ‘the user’ is being represented through discourses and practices of engineering, art and marketing. The approaches are being constantly negotiated: lately, we have witnessed a shift of emphasis from functional usability considerations towards the notion of user experience, which foregrounds the affective and persuasive aspects of interaction. Besides these ‘mainstream’ orientations, interaction design also involves more experimental and artistic threads. My paper will follow some of these threads, which range from aesthetic speculation and basic research on the language of interaction to a more politically oriented ‘tactical’ approach towards the social contexts of media. The focus will be on the tactics and strategies of design - the designer’s position and accountability. |
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