Abstract
This chapter explores deconstruction and reconstruction as a technique for understanding interactive experience and then applying it to the redesign and recreation of experience on new media. It begins by looking at literary analysis where it is normal to dissect texts to understand the techniques they use to achieve aesthetic technique. This is reinforced by considering an example of graphic design before approaching a more extensive deconstruction of the experience of real Christmas crackers and the reconstruction of that in a web version––virtual crackers. Understanding the facets of deep experience allows a recreation in a new medium.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact the two words “animosity” and “inanimate” come from a group of related Latin words derived from “anima”—breath, soul or life and “animus”—spirit or mind.
- 2.
Note I am not using “deconstruction” here in the recent traditions of post-modern criticism, but in a broader looser sense of just taking apart, teasing out the strands that make something what it is ... and, in this context, especially those that make something ‘work’ as an experience or as a designed artefact.
- 3.
The vocabulary of literary and other artistic criticism is large and rich. For example, the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Cudden 1998) contains over 4500 terms. Poets and artists are amongst those expanding and using this language. For example, Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term “sprung rhythm” to describe a metrical form of his own verse, which was also found in far earlier writing, and in so doing both reinforced his own style and influenced later poets (Hopkins 1918).
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Acknowledgements
Virtual crackers are an online product of vfridge limited and can be seen (and experienced!) at: http://www.vfridge.com/crackers/.
The first version of virtual crackers was produced by aQtive limited in conjunction with Birmingham University Telematics Centre. Thanks especially to Ben Stone who produced the first cracker implementation. Since then they have evolved through comments from numerous people.
An early version of the analysis in this chapter was presented at the 2001 Computers and Fun conference (Dix 2001), where I received many helpful comments.
This is part of a wider study of the nature of technological creativity and innovation (see http://www.hcibook.com/alan/topics/creativity/) and this has benefited from discussions and input from many people and especially recent support from the EPSRC funded EQUATOR and CASCO projects.
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Dix, A. (2018). Deconstructing Experience: Pulling Crackers Apart. In: Blythe, M., Monk, A. (eds) Funology 2. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68213-6_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68213-6_29
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