A Spoonful of Sugar

Now that we've talked about what flow is and what happens to people deprived of it, lets look at it the other way - things people love to do.

Donald Norman writes in Emotional Design that

"emotions have a crucial role in the human ability to understand the world, and how they learn new things...aesthetically pleasing objects appear to the user to be more effective, by virtue of their sensual appeal. This is due to the affinity the user feels for an object that appeals to them, due to the formation of an emotional connection [with the object]."

Flip that around. What if the affinity doesn't just make us like things more and gives us the motivation to learn to enjoy it...what if it distracts us while we do learn it?

Video games, like I said last post, are notoriously addictive and full of flow, bringing enjoyment to those who can get through the learning curve. The Wii has much less of a learning curve than most systems. Let's try analyzing the run-away success of the Wii in several different ways.

What does the Wii do different? It has motion control and a pretty direct mapping of action from analog to digital. When you learn to use the Wii, it usually follows a predictable set of experiences. Before you play the game, the Wii is giving out pleasure in the novelty of the interface, in the vibration on "mouseover", in creating a Mii character. Do not discount the little details, their effect is compounded as we shall see.

The Wii gives you pleasure immediately (In psychology terms, it reduces your anxiety) and continues on until you are capable of experiencing enjoyment - which is pretty quick. Anybody who's played Wii Sports knows that it's easy or at least low-pressure at the beginning. The interface details, the motion control, the vibration on mouseover, these are all causes of pleasure. The simple acts of creating a Mii, throwing a punch, swinging a bat or golf club or tennis racket, or rolling a ball are all acts of flow and provide enjoyment. Winning at a sports game is even more so. Nintendo has designed a console that oozes pleasure while you become capable of enjoyment. This is the path to success in product design.

Lets look at another case study.


I would say that OS X does the same thing.

What if all the eye candy on OSX with the bubbly dock and the big lush icons and the windows that fly around is a critical part of why people grow to love it so much, but has nothing to do with why they keep loving it so much? Because the pleasure allows the mind to open up to the point where enjoyment is keeping the mind engaged. Or as Kathy Sierra puts it, helping the users kick ass.

Of course, there's no argument that pure eye candy is as bad for the brain as it is for the teeth - non-nutritional at best, decaying at worst - but that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about things that give enjoyment through flow by letting you get done what you need to get done and make it look pretty even when you're not flowing. We've all heard disaster stories of pure eye candy (The Motorola RZR phone seems to be one of those) and we all know that substance over style is the way to go, but what Norman suggest up above and what Csikszentmihalyi's theory seems to agrees with is that pleasure and enjoyment can back each other up and make something that will endear the product to the user for a long time.

"To live life as a work of art..."

Flow is the experience of enjoyment and it is probably the closest thing to a meaning of life we've found so far. Google it if you don't know about it already but maybe read through this first, it might be easy enough. I might be reinventing the wheel here, but I think we could all use a refresher.

In this lecture, Mihaly Csikeszentmihalyi says there is a difference between enjoyment and pleasure. Pleasure is a massage or a back rub (or ice cream). Enjoyment has a sense of achievement and active contribution, while pleasure doesn't. A google search for "Mihaly Csikeszentmihalyi" and "pleasure" brings an exact quote:

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the people who are most happy in life have a much higher percentage of enjoyment than pleasure. In fact, I think knowing this difference is the key ingredient to a happy life.

Whoah, big statement there, I know, but think about it. If you don't know the difference then there's no reason to get out of the warm bed in front of the Scrubs marathon on tv to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You're feeling good from pleasurable things right now, why go through the pain of travelling through the cold city to see another pleasureable thing? All the arguements about high-brow vs. low-brow aren't gonna work. And so you'll sit home, and have pleasure...but no enjoyment while all the busy bees ask you "when are you going to do something with your life?"

Lets do a couple of thought experiments together, after all what are blogs for if not for thinking aloud?

Enjoyment is the light at the end of the tunnel.
This article states that when we should praise children for working hard, not for being smart. When we praise them for being smart it sets up the following spiral in the child:

If I'm not good at this new task then that means I'm not smart, therefore I won't do it unless I'm good at it already and that will save me from realizing/having others realize that I'm not that smart.
You really should read the article, I'm paraphrasing from memory.

But, what if by praising a child for being smart, we are emphasizing the pleasurable aspects of things and maybe even devalueing - or worse, short-circuting - the enjoyment? Since enjoyment can be a rare thing (15% say they've never experienced it) and pleasure is only as far away as the fridge or the bath, isn't it possible we're reducing children's experiences with enjoyment to the point that they don't know it's even out there?

Think about children who are robbed of (i) the best feeling the brain can produce and (ii) the awareness that the brain can produce that feeling at all. Why bother going to school or work or doing chores or doing anything when the pinnacle of human experience can be found in watching a movie? What would they seek? Anything that would give them enjoyment. And what do we picture the sterotypical slacker doing most with his time that's notorious for being vehicles of flow?

Video games.

"It's a pillar! "It's a rope!" "It's a branch!"
What I become aware of at times like these is that these answers have been found before...but like the parable of the blind men in the room with the elephant, its we're realizing that they're all the same thing.

A large part of cognitive behavioral psychology teaches ways to deal with the anxiety that develops when we forsake pleasure for potential enjoyment, but people report being happier and more fullfilled when they do this. Religion teaches us to not seek pleasures in the flesh but do good works - and many people would testify that that has brought them bliss.

Look around. Some people seem to know about the pleasure vs. enjoyment dichotomy subconsciously and you can pick them out easily. They're the ones who write fan fiction or debate canon on forums for their favorite tv show. The pleasure they got from watching it wasn't enough, they wanted enjoyment. They're the ones who have blogs about what they've read, because the pleasure of reading it wasn't enough, they're the ones who go home and toss a ball around after a baseball game, who started hacking scripts together which then turned into full fledged applications, who created startups in their garage because they knew there was more out there.

Maybe the pleasure of the idea of recognition got them started, but the one thing about pleasure is that it's pretty common, and when the pleasure runs out (when the going gets tough), the ones who hadn't achieved enjoyment would lose interest, the ones that remained, the ones that we talk about, the tough that get going, they created whatever they created for it's own sake, for nothing but the joy of creating. Everything else was gravy.

Corners of our Eyes

The Science of It

The rods & cones in our eyes are not distributed evenly. They are much denser at the center and therefore our vision is clear only at this center. Everywhere else, it's foggy and undefined. Why don't we notice this? Because whenever we shift our eyes to look at a spot that was previously foggy...that spot becomes the center and we can see it clearly. Try focusing on one word in this paragraph and without moving your eyes see how many other words you can read. Not very many.

What does this mean? Well, it means we don't see 90% of what we think we see. We are constantly evaluating everything that's not right in the center of our eyeballs. We are especially sensitive to movement in our peripheral. (With good reason - how often do stalking predators walk right into our gaze?)

It also means that we could consider peripheral vision almost a sixth sense. Try this: Stare straight ahead. Raise your hand up so it's level with the side of your head. Wiggle your finger. Slowly move your hand around to your face. Do you notice how you can tell when it's within your line of vision...but you can't say anything else about it other than: it's there?

Close one eye, then the other The eye closest to your wiggling finger does see it, while the other eye doesn't at all and since your vision is a composite of both eyes, you (vaguely) see it and (vaguely) don't see it at the same time. Schrodinger's finger, if you will.

Practical Applications?
The first and most obvious use (to me, anyway) is to use whitespace to calm the eye. Most applicable to graphic design but useful elsewhere as well. If you want somebody to concentrate on something...empty all the space around it. The empty space will attract their vision anyway. (Perhaps this is why "trapped white space" is so bad...enough white space to surround something but not enough to clear our peripheral.)

Seeing movies on large screens is also an exercise in peripheral vision. Your eyes move around the screen like they would around a landscape, settling on details here and there. This allows us to "actively watch" a movie.

Peripheral vision also allows directors to fool us. Take a look at this shot from Jaws with some simple Photoshopping to approximate what it looks like to a first time viewer, focusing on Brody's eye or mouth.
Notice how the top row of shark teeth intersects Brody's eye and the bottom intersects his mouth? If our ancestors weren't hardwired to freak out atthat image, we wouldn't be here.

Horror movies are filled with this sort of stuff. I can think of several others off the top of my head. (The shark crashing into Hooper in the cage in Jaws, the Alien swooping down behind Brett in Alien, the alien grabbing Dietrich and so on, and so on)

Yeah, it can startle us, but lets think less about the techniques that have been used for it and what we can do in the future with it.