Relationships in Interactive Media

Relationships in Interactive Media

If you have been around computers for some time, you remember the learning programs that responded to your incorrect answers with "tough luck, turkey!" Since then, designers and educators and communicators have reconsidered the relationship of the computer program to the user, and for the most part, the next century may give us kinder and gentler computer responses. Not the least reason for this has been a matter of the pocketbook. Ordinary people with their fragile egos did not buy as many software programs if they risked being called stupid. "User-friendly" was for some time an afterthought, in program design, and an onerous one for those programmers who just wanted the machines to "work." They should have gone back to study their teachers.

The relationship of students in dialog with their instructors has been pivotal throughout history. And this does not mean that the tone has always been always nurturing. Some fine medical and legal instructors have goaded their charges to better performance, and this method of learning dialog has also been quite effective. What is least appreciated is the impassive teacher, the teacher who seems marginal and uninvolved with the student. Even if the relationship is harsh and the personality is bitter, it seems better to have some sense of a person creating the material and some consistent relationship established.

The reason all of this relationship thinking is important to interactive media design is that just like writing or playing music or making a movie, the creator/designer is communicating with the user through an interposed medium. It means that we can communicate with others across the world, and we can communicate with people long after we die. However, we are not hiding behind this interposed media, like the "little man behind the curtain" who terrified Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Rather, we are using it to magnify both our outreach and our human persona.

So the design of the relationship in interactive media is not only a matter of tone, but of the transparency -- the directness -- of input and feedback. Obviously, Graphical User Interfaces have put even a different level of relationship into this mix. Technical items such as speed become just another level of computer courtesy.

Today, training with live human interaction is often possible through the Internet. Obviously, "chat" guidance from technical support is already happening, and we can see those folks have been attending Customer Service charm school. Distance learning is now being offered three choices: (1) the live "chat" or audio instructor on a scheduled basis, (2) the delayed-live instructor through postings and e-mails and various Q & A devices, and (3) the convenience of having transactional interactions with a program anytime. Leveraged by greater technical advances, the question will again become: When is it best to have a live instructor?

The last wrinkle in all this may go back to the Turing Test. One of the brilliant English pioneers of computing, Alan Turing (who -- working under bombardment -- broke the Nazi invasion codes) also set up this test for an ideal computer program: When a person talks to a computer that is behind a curtain, and the computer talks back, the person will not know whether he is talking to a computer or another human. Perhaps, with excellent design, interactive training will accomplish that classic Turing prophesy, in which the student does not know whether he or she is talking to a live teacher, or to a computer. This kind of design will require not only the mental horsepower of a programmer, but also that of the stand-up comedian, instantly branching through material based on how this night's audience responds, and the attentive mother, who teaches more in more ways through her sheer instinct than we can possibly ever replicate.