Dramaturgy
From CS260SP09
Readings
"Introduction: The Five Key Terms in Dramatism" Chapter 1 from "A Grammar of Motives" by Kenneth Burke, U. California Press, 1969. Burke was one of the leading figures in 20th century literary theory, but his work spanned philosophy and anthropology as well. His approach of "dramatism" was the basis of all his later work. This short chapter gives the basic structure he built on.
"Self Presentation" and "Social Life as Drama" from "The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life" by Erving Goffman, Blackwell Publishing, 1997.
"Using Dramaturgical Methods to Gain More Dynamic User Understanding in User-Centered Design" Vesa Kantola et al., from ACM conference on Creativity and Cognition, C&C 2007.
Discussions
Please post your critiques/commments on the required readings below. To do that, first login by using your user name and password, then click the "edit" tab on the top part of this page (between the "discussion" page and the "history" page), New to wikis? Read the Wiki editing guide. . Hint - Please put a whole line == ~~~~ == (literally) at the beginning of your submitted critique, so the wiki system will index, sign and date your submission automatically.
KetrinaYim 15:34, 3 April 2009 (PDT)
I must admit, I was initially skeptical of the use of dramaturgy in user interface design. But after reading the paper, it made much more sense. To design for users, one must understand them, and user profiles alone can only go so far in describing individuals. Going back to Actor Network Theory, there's just so much that contributes to a user's identity (needs, wishes, life, and mindset) that words alone can't fully capture it. But performances can convey the feeling behind the words, the desires and thoughts that shaped the profiles, giving context and bringing life to the user data collected.
Himanshu Sharma 18:52, 5 April 2009 (PDT)
One thing I really liked about the paper is that it has neatly summarized (in points) in the conclusion that how dramaturgical reading applied to the field of user-centered design can be useful (in comparison to some of the earlier readings in the course where, I somehow missed the connection between theory and its application). I would be further interested in finding out whether this has been used in real world projects during their design process and how did this approach make a difference, what sort of tacit aspects of the user's identity were captured that could not have been possible otherwise.
Junda Liu 00:21, 6 April 2009 (PDT)
Dramaturgical reading can encourage users to show themselves, and react in a personal way, which is difficult to describe using profile or just words. Capturing and correlating user behaviors may be not very easy, due to the dynamic and not-so-structure nature. I'm also curious about what kind of applications really leverages this method
Nicholas Kong 04:52, 6 April 2009 (PDT)
Like Ketrina, I was also sceptical about the applications of dramaturgy to HCI. I had never thought deeply about the "All the world's a stage" quote, but the readings led me to see its applicability as a useful framework to place human action. Particularly interesting was Goffman's delineation of how we must sculpt our performances to ensure both proper representation and to guard against possible misrepresentation: we must avoid potentially incrimination situations or we may be discredited by our audience, even if our actions were not cynical in the least. It seems that in public opinion people are often guilty before proven innocent.
I believe this point has been raised before in previous lectures, but if we are constantly "performing" for an "audience", either honestly or cynically, is there room for a "true" self? Or does personality manifest itself through our performative decisions and where we choose to place ourselves in the honest/cynical spectrum?
Unrelated, but Goffman's work does seem to reveal an unsavory bit of Goffman: his example of filling station attendants checking and rechecking the tire pressure for "anxious women drivers" and the statement "perhaps there are not many women who play the part of wife to one man and mistress to another" smack of sexism.
Brian Tran 09:38, 6 April 2009 (PDT)
Like Ketrina, I felt that the dramaturgy serves as a great extension to Activity Theory and Actor Network Theory. It's impossible to understand every scenario, activity, etc that influences an action. I like how dramaturgy explains there can be some general common motivational concepts that we can fall back on and group the more various situations to create a big picture. Like Nicholas mentioned, the readings discuss how everything we do can be misinterpreted in terms of motive. I feel that putting more thought into understanding user motives when doing the follow-me-home observations will greatly increase a product's success.
Seth Horrigan 10:46, 6 April 2009 (PDT)
Using a doctor giving a placebo as an example of a "cynical performer" brings up an interesting point. The article was mainly concerned with contrasting cynical and sincere performers, implying that cynical actors were doing wrong. However, in the example of a placebo, this may be an essential activity. If the placebo is given just to "get the patient off their case," it is a problem. If the placebo is given as a part of clinical trials, it is essential to the actual test of the treatment. If it is impossible to separate the psychological effects of the trials from the actual effects of the treatment, the trials may give false positives, false negatives or falsely identify side-effects that in the future could lead to mis-identification of diseases and symptoms in the future. In this case, it is important that the doctors or nurses be skilled actors, or the study be carefully constructed as a double-blind. In cases where a double-blind is impossible, should medical professionals (or law enforcement officers or retirement home workers or espionage agents etc) be given dramatic instruction to be able to enact a cynical role more effectively when it is important to the sincere role as well.
David (Tavi) Nathanson 12:13, 7 April 2009 (PDT)
I found Burke's discussion of reducing the 5 terms of the grammar back to 1 to be fascinating. Specifically, taking the example of a hero being imprisoned by a villain and trying to escape, his motive might be that he is imprisoned (scene). But upon further analysis, he was imprisoned by the villain (counter-agent), so that might be his motive. Thus, we move from scene as motive to counter-agent as motive, and Burke's point is that we will continually bounce around from term to term if we try to reduce the motive to one of them.
As I mentioned in my presentation, I did not like Goffman's use of the term "gentlemanly" to describe individuals who act in accordance with their feelings (thus allowing others to get valid impressions of them), as this might often be a horribly rude thing to do! On another note, I found his discussion of the dramatization of work to be very applicable to software design, when a programmer has the option to either work on a simple frontend tweak or a complex backend change. Often, despite the complex backend work being necessary, the programmer might opt to work on the simple frontend tweak in order to demonstrate that he is working hard, as such a tweak is much more easily apparent to others than a backend change that might go unnoticed.
In an attempt to solve the issue of personas being static in nature, dramaturgical reading introduces bias into user-centered design. And while Kantola et. al. stress that this is a good thing (as the bias allows the characters to come to life via the actor's interpretation), this also seems to introduce the needs of the *designer* back into user-centered design, which gets at the entire reason we use personas in the first place! After all, if we just designed based on the needs of the designers, we wouldn't need personas at all. Thus, dramaturgical reading seems to solve one problem by introducing another, and I would argue that the problem it introduces (moving the design away from the user and more towards the designer) is actually more fundamental than the problem it attempts to solve!
Kenrick Kin 17:39, 7 April 2009 (PDT)
Like Ketrina and Himanshu, I thought it was nice to see one of the readings apply some of the theory we've read to user interface design, a connection that is not always easy to see. Dramaturgical readings or anything that helps you put yourself into the mindset of your target user is a helpful exercise. Sometimes as programmers we forget how the average user might approach the tool we're designing and we make things needless complicated for them, all the while thinking we're making things efficient. What is efficient and easy to use for us and other programmers is likely not what is easy to use for the target user.
Priyanka Reddy 22:58, 7 April 2009 (PDT)
Comparing acting in real life and acting in drama brings up some interesting points. When acting in drama, each person is given a particular role and are expected to play out that character. Then, these characters are judged based on how well they portrayed their character, whether they be good or bad. However, in real life, where most people are actors in some parts of their lives, they are only judged by how well they play the part of a good person, whether it's genuine or not.
This also brings up a point about honesty. Generally, everyone says honesty is a positive characteristic and everyone should have it. The idea of "being gentlemanly", which means that one lets everyone know his true feelings, is the most honest a person can get. However, most people would agree that they would not like a person like that, which creates an interesting discrepancy.
Simon Tan 01:09, 22 April 2009 (PDT)
The concept of dramaturgy as an avenue into understanding user's motives is an interesting one, but the skepticism usually comes when you realize that half of the time, actors do well when they overly exaggerate some particular aspect of the characters they play. I only say half of the time because I do appreciate a realistic actor, but I do know that acting that expresses a character's motives in a blatant way also has a purpose in the field.
If actors interpret a user in their own way (that might not be exactly truth) and then exaggerate some aspect, it might lead to design decisions that are more than a little off.
