Karen Cham
Professor Karen Cham is a critical design practitioner who works with technology. With a background in experimental electronic arts, she is an expert in design methods for complex digital products, services, business models and strategies.
Her research concerns narrowing the 'semantic gap' in the user experience (UX) by developing emotional engagement methodologies. Current R&D is in nudge mechanics, neuro navigation and neuro transformation
Her research concerns narrowing the 'semantic gap' in the user experience (UX) by developing emotional engagement methodologies. Current R&D is in nudge mechanics, neuro navigation and neuro transformation
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Papers by Karen Cham
As recent advances in digital media computing technologies have moved into mobile, ubiquitous, social and tangible applications, such products, services and environments include, but are not limited to, web sites, mobile phone apps, digital television,
interactive artworks, computer games, software and intelligent environments.
User experience design for such products and services is complex and as yet is a new and evolving field. Some visual communication designers do not account for UX at all, many technical developers don’t have the skills to implement design concepts and
yet others build user interfaces based purely on business requirements. All of this poor design practice has a negative impact on communication; a bad interface may do its job but a bad UX will mean a product or service isn’t understood.
For an holistic consideration of the users’ experience, good UXD should aim to optimise the integration of functionality and aesthetics in digital interaction to reinforce and promote the communication goals. Digital interaction is specifically
used here to refer to ‘a machine system which reacts in the moment, by virtue of automated reasoning based on data from its sensory apparatus’3.
Visual communications that are digitally interactive in this way are participatory, navigable in a nonlinear manner and/or open to user generated content and require different design methodologies. The author has previously proposed that designing for digital media is best approached by an integration of post structuralism and complex systems theory 4. This paper argues that the designer must successfully integrate visual communication design, information architecture and usability by purposefully designing for semiotic autopoesis 5; a fundamental dialectic between structure and function must be designed into the system and its use. This proposal requires good UX designers to design diachronic grammatical structures that can adapt and evolve whilst consistently providing a coherent synchronic experience under multitudinous variables. Good user experience design for digital media visual communication systems requires designers to paint with language and leave it wet.
critical dialogues; as if their very accessibility precludes value. However, as the computational arts abound in our day to day lives, critical accounts of, for example, virtually reality, augmentation and embodiment are imperative if critical
appraisal of the computational arts is to be commensurate with practice.
What is unique about the computational arts is the capacity for interaction, either in production or in use, and there are numerous autonomous theories of interactivity across an entire spectrum. However, creating a work of computational art always involves the either the use or design of some sort of
rule based system that can be implemented beyond the conceptual. Artistic compositions of dynamic systems that can be tangibly implemented finds its roots in the participatory performances and installations of systems art, yet in
digitally interactive artifacts, there is also a virtually tangible, live mediated exchange of elements which constitutes both an entirely new medium and an entirely new form of systems art.
In the sciences this type of dynamism or capacity for unpredictable change in systems is a recognized characteristic of complexity; a new type of scientific thinking concerned with systems that display a capacity for self organization and
emergent behaviour. Thus the dynamic capacity of digitally interactive systems in use, places digital interactivity and the computational arts well within the realm of
complex systems science.
It is where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend the component parts of an artefact, that the attributes of complex systems such as self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of
possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by artists, designers and users alike. This paper will look at the convergence of complex systems science and art practice in the computational arts through examples in practice, demonstrating how they exemplify complex
behaviours and suggesting how established art methodologies might inform complex systems theory in turn.
method it has provided useful paradigms for addressing our conceptual interaction with, an interpretation of, diverse art, design & media visualisations. However, it is limited in effectively
accounting for the significant interaction between the abstractions that are media images and actual behaviours as practices ‘outstrips theoretical understanding of the relationship between the sign and the signified, the simulation and the social, the model and the real’.
In the sciences, it is ‘systems thinking’ that emphasizes a concern with relationships, systems and networks. Here, ‘emergent behaviour’ is accounted for as a recognizable characteristic of
‘complexity’; a new type of science concerning systems that are sufficiently complex as to display a capacity for ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self making’.
The author has previously proposed that a convergence of post structuralism and complexity may allow some greater understanding of the generative feedback loop between the conceptual, computational and very real ‘semantic behaviours’ of digital culture.
Here she elaborates that as the abstractions of synergetic brand architectures and designed identity systems are used more and more to underpin user experiences, this type of distributed,
networked, ‘cloud semantics’ can be recognised as the soft engineering of participatory semantic systems where the emergent actual behaviours are the intentional result of generating metaphoric ‘virtual’ avatars for us all to involuntarily inhabit as part of the natural ‘autopoetics’ of the digital age.
Whilst differing characteristics such as ‘frequency, loudness, direction, power’ etc may induce physical responses and attendant emotions in the user, human perception of music, art, choreography etc is complex and anchored in the thorny
issue of aesthetics. Whilst this subject has been notoriously difficult to address as it is by its nature, anchored in subjectivity, all art, performance, and creative work are expressly designed to address subjectivities and all artists’ works go some way
towards ‘predicting spectators' reactions, influencing and affecting ‘peoples' views, mind, life, and the future’ by means of aesthetic engagement. In the most engaging work, art practice and creative processes are strategic, refined and focused even if not entirely tangible. Key concepts from art and design theory can help us
apprehend these practices and are some are integrated here. Indeed, in the commercial practices of marketing & advertising we can perceive a causal link between design, engagement in aesthetics and future behaviours. This proposal argues that ‘to positively and therapeutically influence users’ life style, health, and
spirit’ we must do it by design.
are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms 'complex' is used to describe those humanistic systems that are ‘intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories’ (M/C journal). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design & media practice since the late 1960s.
knowledge in a usable way is one of the key ways of understanding complex systems behaviours and developing a workable complex systems science.
It is by means of representation that science has always apprehended, represented, understood and anticipated parts and processes of the world around us.; indeed when scientific representations have failed, as was the case for atomic physics in the 1920s, science has struggled to proceed. The standard methodology in scientific research has always been mathematics; do the complex systems scientists of the future need to look
for different representational methods ?
It is in the arts that one finds expert knowledge and practices for innovation in representation; documentation, visualisation, simulation and embodiment are all artistic methods that can represent complex systems. Indeed there are some precedents that will be expounded here, that have thus far taken divergent perspectives; from Castis algorithmic complexity of art images to Galanters notion of complexity theory as a context for art theory. However, it is also important to point out, that modeling
knowledge of complex states via illustration, diagrams and maps may be helpful, but to the art world, those representations are not, in themselves ‘art’; they are the ‘result of a mental effort’ and are well accounted for as knowledge elicitation methods in many
disciplines, not least in systems science. So if we are to argue that art processes and practices are to be useful to complexity science, we are also going to have to provide a working definition of what makes a representation 'art' and of course, what is 'not art'.
Conventionally, it seems aesthetic knowledge and the use of metaphor has been undervalued, despite the key artistic process of drawing being well established as a means of problem solving in the most ‘scientific’ of the arts such as architecture and
engineering. It seems cognitive processes that involve intuitive use of aesthetic languages are generally undervalued; somehow less useful, or less real than logic and rationale. Is this because they cannot (yet?) be measured by mathematics ? Intuitive thinking and
aesthetic metaphor has long been established as a cogent part of rational processes; indeed Einsteins concept of intuition included modes of mental imagery and there is convincing evidence of the role of intuition in many scientific discoveries. This paper
will seek to establish that aesthetic exploration of scientific subjects reaps tangible rewards by citing key examples from contemporary medical research. Finally, it is argued here that it is unsurprisingly within art theory that paradigms on
aesthetic processes, practices and methodologies can be found to inform the development of pluralist ontologies and complex adaptive methodologies necessary to develop the art
of complex systems science. This paper aims to set out the proposal that a post structuralist approach can deliver ontological bases that will provide complex systems science not simply with diagrams and maps, nor even with the workable metaphors of
visualisation, simulation and embodiment but with visualisability; that most elusive and 'scientific' of representations that shares a generative semantic relation with that which it
represents.
interfaces of interactive art installations and participatory performances. In artistic compositions, the design of open structural relations rather than closed objects finds
its roots in the participatory performance and installations of systems art, yet the dynamic capacity of digitally interactive systems in use, places digital interactivity
well within the realm of complex systems science. A digital interface may, for example, allow multiple ‘authors’ and multiple ‘readers’ to participate in a simultaneous and instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of their divergent interpretations
of an artefact as part of a networked participatory process; such a process demonstrates self-organisation and emergent behaviours, which are key attributes of complex systems. This paper proposes a ‘reconstruction theory’ as a design methodology for the ‘space of possibility’ in such ‘complex media’ in order to underpin
critical practice in digital media arts. Such a proposal would also provide the foundations of a much sought after theoretical continuum from established art, design and media theory to the divergent manifestations of digital culture by establishing
the common relations between structuralism, systems theory and systems art, to post-structuralism, complex systems science and the digitally interactive arts.
and the real. For example, the international crisis provoked by the publication of a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed as an unexpected result of networked global media; or
the pre-mediated violence of the ‘trenchcoat mafia’, where signification was an intentional precursor to real effects; or the trajectory of ‘celebrity’, where the ‘virtually
real’ is designed, acted out, consumed and fed back in a co-evolving eco-system of signification. The proliferation of digital media means it is increasingly important to understand interaction per se, especially the interaction between systems of signification and the real. This paper argues that all representational systems have a performative capacity for transformation of the real and that signification is a dynamic intermediate realm between the real and the conceptual which can be best understood as a realm of invocation.
objects and ideas, and finding new ways of thinking about things. We discuss art in the context of the conflicting modes of thought: discovering truths about systems from the outside or creating narratives and telling stories about systems from the inside. We report on experiments generating artworks to explore the interaction between complex systems science and art. In this context we make a series of predictions to investigate the inside-outside dichotomy. Our conclusion is that art can contribute to science and it can play a powerful part in the science of complex systems.
have always underpinned fine art production (rules of perspective, proportion and the golden section for example) photography, film, television and video are still marginalised in art-historical dialogues. The mechanically-reproduced artefact is easily dismissed in a discourse where value is still equated with dubious concepts of authenticity and originality anchored in production techniques.
For example, whilst video art has been part of the art world since the 1960s when artists such as Nam June Paik brought the TV set into the gallery, the aesthetics of video is still
neglected in art theory. Not only can video artefacts be mechanically reproduced, but the potential for mass access or worse still, mass appeal, is assumed to negate the exclusivity
essential to establishing an aesthetic value.
Digital artefacts manifest these two problems of reproduction and access to an even greater extent. A digital artefact, by conventional standards, is even less authentic and
original than a mechanically-reproduced one; a true simulation, a mathematical model of the real. Furthermore, not only is the digital artefact accessible by the masses, it is very often interactive, i.e. shaped by audience input; a product of ‘the mass’ itself.
These material factors should not inhibit an academic discussion of the aesthetics of interactivity. An aesthetic value is always established by the consensus of an elite. In
media studies for example, textual analysis of televisual artefacts clearly demonstrates that whilst television might appear generally accessible and understood by everyone there is quite clearly a relative, yet elaborate, aesthetic code operating within a wider, still elite, cultural context.
As recent advances in digital media computing technologies have moved into mobile, ubiquitous, social and tangible applications, such products, services and environments include, but are not limited to, web sites, mobile phone apps, digital television,
interactive artworks, computer games, software and intelligent environments.
User experience design for such products and services is complex and as yet is a new and evolving field. Some visual communication designers do not account for UX at all, many technical developers don’t have the skills to implement design concepts and
yet others build user interfaces based purely on business requirements. All of this poor design practice has a negative impact on communication; a bad interface may do its job but a bad UX will mean a product or service isn’t understood.
For an holistic consideration of the users’ experience, good UXD should aim to optimise the integration of functionality and aesthetics in digital interaction to reinforce and promote the communication goals. Digital interaction is specifically
used here to refer to ‘a machine system which reacts in the moment, by virtue of automated reasoning based on data from its sensory apparatus’3.
Visual communications that are digitally interactive in this way are participatory, navigable in a nonlinear manner and/or open to user generated content and require different design methodologies. The author has previously proposed that designing for digital media is best approached by an integration of post structuralism and complex systems theory 4. This paper argues that the designer must successfully integrate visual communication design, information architecture and usability by purposefully designing for semiotic autopoesis 5; a fundamental dialectic between structure and function must be designed into the system and its use. This proposal requires good UX designers to design diachronic grammatical structures that can adapt and evolve whilst consistently providing a coherent synchronic experience under multitudinous variables. Good user experience design for digital media visual communication systems requires designers to paint with language and leave it wet.
critical dialogues; as if their very accessibility precludes value. However, as the computational arts abound in our day to day lives, critical accounts of, for example, virtually reality, augmentation and embodiment are imperative if critical
appraisal of the computational arts is to be commensurate with practice.
What is unique about the computational arts is the capacity for interaction, either in production or in use, and there are numerous autonomous theories of interactivity across an entire spectrum. However, creating a work of computational art always involves the either the use or design of some sort of
rule based system that can be implemented beyond the conceptual. Artistic compositions of dynamic systems that can be tangibly implemented finds its roots in the participatory performances and installations of systems art, yet in
digitally interactive artifacts, there is also a virtually tangible, live mediated exchange of elements which constitutes both an entirely new medium and an entirely new form of systems art.
In the sciences this type of dynamism or capacity for unpredictable change in systems is a recognized characteristic of complexity; a new type of scientific thinking concerned with systems that display a capacity for self organization and
emergent behaviour. Thus the dynamic capacity of digitally interactive systems in use, places digital interactivity and the computational arts well within the realm of
complex systems science.
It is where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend the component parts of an artefact, that the attributes of complex systems such as self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of
possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by artists, designers and users alike. This paper will look at the convergence of complex systems science and art practice in the computational arts through examples in practice, demonstrating how they exemplify complex
behaviours and suggesting how established art methodologies might inform complex systems theory in turn.
method it has provided useful paradigms for addressing our conceptual interaction with, an interpretation of, diverse art, design & media visualisations. However, it is limited in effectively
accounting for the significant interaction between the abstractions that are media images and actual behaviours as practices ‘outstrips theoretical understanding of the relationship between the sign and the signified, the simulation and the social, the model and the real’.
In the sciences, it is ‘systems thinking’ that emphasizes a concern with relationships, systems and networks. Here, ‘emergent behaviour’ is accounted for as a recognizable characteristic of
‘complexity’; a new type of science concerning systems that are sufficiently complex as to display a capacity for ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self making’.
The author has previously proposed that a convergence of post structuralism and complexity may allow some greater understanding of the generative feedback loop between the conceptual, computational and very real ‘semantic behaviours’ of digital culture.
Here she elaborates that as the abstractions of synergetic brand architectures and designed identity systems are used more and more to underpin user experiences, this type of distributed,
networked, ‘cloud semantics’ can be recognised as the soft engineering of participatory semantic systems where the emergent actual behaviours are the intentional result of generating metaphoric ‘virtual’ avatars for us all to involuntarily inhabit as part of the natural ‘autopoetics’ of the digital age.
Whilst differing characteristics such as ‘frequency, loudness, direction, power’ etc may induce physical responses and attendant emotions in the user, human perception of music, art, choreography etc is complex and anchored in the thorny
issue of aesthetics. Whilst this subject has been notoriously difficult to address as it is by its nature, anchored in subjectivity, all art, performance, and creative work are expressly designed to address subjectivities and all artists’ works go some way
towards ‘predicting spectators' reactions, influencing and affecting ‘peoples' views, mind, life, and the future’ by means of aesthetic engagement. In the most engaging work, art practice and creative processes are strategic, refined and focused even if not entirely tangible. Key concepts from art and design theory can help us
apprehend these practices and are some are integrated here. Indeed, in the commercial practices of marketing & advertising we can perceive a causal link between design, engagement in aesthetics and future behaviours. This proposal argues that ‘to positively and therapeutically influence users’ life style, health, and
spirit’ we must do it by design.
are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms 'complex' is used to describe those humanistic systems that are ‘intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories’ (M/C journal). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design & media practice since the late 1960s.
knowledge in a usable way is one of the key ways of understanding complex systems behaviours and developing a workable complex systems science.
It is by means of representation that science has always apprehended, represented, understood and anticipated parts and processes of the world around us.; indeed when scientific representations have failed, as was the case for atomic physics in the 1920s, science has struggled to proceed. The standard methodology in scientific research has always been mathematics; do the complex systems scientists of the future need to look
for different representational methods ?
It is in the arts that one finds expert knowledge and practices for innovation in representation; documentation, visualisation, simulation and embodiment are all artistic methods that can represent complex systems. Indeed there are some precedents that will be expounded here, that have thus far taken divergent perspectives; from Castis algorithmic complexity of art images to Galanters notion of complexity theory as a context for art theory. However, it is also important to point out, that modeling
knowledge of complex states via illustration, diagrams and maps may be helpful, but to the art world, those representations are not, in themselves ‘art’; they are the ‘result of a mental effort’ and are well accounted for as knowledge elicitation methods in many
disciplines, not least in systems science. So if we are to argue that art processes and practices are to be useful to complexity science, we are also going to have to provide a working definition of what makes a representation 'art' and of course, what is 'not art'.
Conventionally, it seems aesthetic knowledge and the use of metaphor has been undervalued, despite the key artistic process of drawing being well established as a means of problem solving in the most ‘scientific’ of the arts such as architecture and
engineering. It seems cognitive processes that involve intuitive use of aesthetic languages are generally undervalued; somehow less useful, or less real than logic and rationale. Is this because they cannot (yet?) be measured by mathematics ? Intuitive thinking and
aesthetic metaphor has long been established as a cogent part of rational processes; indeed Einsteins concept of intuition included modes of mental imagery and there is convincing evidence of the role of intuition in many scientific discoveries. This paper
will seek to establish that aesthetic exploration of scientific subjects reaps tangible rewards by citing key examples from contemporary medical research. Finally, it is argued here that it is unsurprisingly within art theory that paradigms on
aesthetic processes, practices and methodologies can be found to inform the development of pluralist ontologies and complex adaptive methodologies necessary to develop the art
of complex systems science. This paper aims to set out the proposal that a post structuralist approach can deliver ontological bases that will provide complex systems science not simply with diagrams and maps, nor even with the workable metaphors of
visualisation, simulation and embodiment but with visualisability; that most elusive and 'scientific' of representations that shares a generative semantic relation with that which it
represents.
interfaces of interactive art installations and participatory performances. In artistic compositions, the design of open structural relations rather than closed objects finds
its roots in the participatory performance and installations of systems art, yet the dynamic capacity of digitally interactive systems in use, places digital interactivity
well within the realm of complex systems science. A digital interface may, for example, allow multiple ‘authors’ and multiple ‘readers’ to participate in a simultaneous and instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of their divergent interpretations
of an artefact as part of a networked participatory process; such a process demonstrates self-organisation and emergent behaviours, which are key attributes of complex systems. This paper proposes a ‘reconstruction theory’ as a design methodology for the ‘space of possibility’ in such ‘complex media’ in order to underpin
critical practice in digital media arts. Such a proposal would also provide the foundations of a much sought after theoretical continuum from established art, design and media theory to the divergent manifestations of digital culture by establishing
the common relations between structuralism, systems theory and systems art, to post-structuralism, complex systems science and the digitally interactive arts.
and the real. For example, the international crisis provoked by the publication of a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed as an unexpected result of networked global media; or
the pre-mediated violence of the ‘trenchcoat mafia’, where signification was an intentional precursor to real effects; or the trajectory of ‘celebrity’, where the ‘virtually
real’ is designed, acted out, consumed and fed back in a co-evolving eco-system of signification. The proliferation of digital media means it is increasingly important to understand interaction per se, especially the interaction between systems of signification and the real. This paper argues that all representational systems have a performative capacity for transformation of the real and that signification is a dynamic intermediate realm between the real and the conceptual which can be best understood as a realm of invocation.
objects and ideas, and finding new ways of thinking about things. We discuss art in the context of the conflicting modes of thought: discovering truths about systems from the outside or creating narratives and telling stories about systems from the inside. We report on experiments generating artworks to explore the interaction between complex systems science and art. In this context we make a series of predictions to investigate the inside-outside dichotomy. Our conclusion is that art can contribute to science and it can play a powerful part in the science of complex systems.
have always underpinned fine art production (rules of perspective, proportion and the golden section for example) photography, film, television and video are still marginalised in art-historical dialogues. The mechanically-reproduced artefact is easily dismissed in a discourse where value is still equated with dubious concepts of authenticity and originality anchored in production techniques.
For example, whilst video art has been part of the art world since the 1960s when artists such as Nam June Paik brought the TV set into the gallery, the aesthetics of video is still
neglected in art theory. Not only can video artefacts be mechanically reproduced, but the potential for mass access or worse still, mass appeal, is assumed to negate the exclusivity
essential to establishing an aesthetic value.
Digital artefacts manifest these two problems of reproduction and access to an even greater extent. A digital artefact, by conventional standards, is even less authentic and
original than a mechanically-reproduced one; a true simulation, a mathematical model of the real. Furthermore, not only is the digital artefact accessible by the masses, it is very often interactive, i.e. shaped by audience input; a product of ‘the mass’ itself.
These material factors should not inhibit an academic discussion of the aesthetics of interactivity. An aesthetic value is always established by the consensus of an elite. In
media studies for example, textual analysis of televisual artefacts clearly demonstrates that whilst television might appear generally accessible and understood by everyone there is quite clearly a relative, yet elaborate, aesthetic code operating within a wider, still elite, cultural context.