Nokia News HUB: Articles about digital media environments and new media 2008

Articles on creativity, behaviorial patterns, virtuality and existence in the networked digital environments

Virtual spectacle illuminated (Published in the Nokia News Hub / 01 February 2008)

An excerpt from the article:

Professor Timo Airaksinen reminds us about an important yet overlooked plain fact considering virtual environments in his book The Future Of The Human-Machine. It’s very important to realize, that virtual doesn’t exist without physical existence. Virtual environments are connected to the physical world in many ways. Virtual sphere is an emergent phenomenon that’s tied to several physical systems, servers, computers, power plants, human beings and the infrastructure of society. Real life actions give basis for the networked virtual world. It’s interesting and somewhat puzzling that we have instances of ourselves stored in the servers that are located in the different parts of the globe.

Creative Misuse Exposed (Published in the Nokia News Hub / 31 October 2007)

An excerpt from the article:

In her book “Play between worlds; exploring online game culture”, T. L. Taylor describes different possibilities of the creative misuse in the online game environments. Users of the multiplayer online role-playing games (MORPG) expand existing feature set of the game environment by finding new combinations and well-hidden bugs. In a rich, interactive multi-user environment, even their designers and creators can’t map every possible action before the system is actually used by the real people. As Taylor suggests, new conventions and habits are born around unexpected user behaviour. Bugs, as it seems are important too. It’s almost self-evident that unnoticed bugs can be extremely harmful and annoying but at the same time, they might provide an unexpected, even valuable feature of the system. For Taylor, the ingenious player is adjusting the game for her own needs and creative misuse acts an important part in this process. User community and individual users decide what’s appropriate and acceptable considering the creative misuse of the particular system.

The creative misuse has existed since the dawn of the digital, networked environments. Existing web technologies and presentations methods (i.e. html, css) have been developed by creative “misusers”. It can be said that today’s community platforms such as Myspace, Facebook, Flickr or even Second Life enable creative misuse. User can use the system in a “wrong way” but the system is still working. Of course, this might not have been the actual aim or purpose of their designers. Some times misuses make the “cross over”; they affect to the design of the service or become the actual feature of the system.

tags: design journalism, interaction design, r&d, research, service design