to identify: Not all attention is visual or selective like a spotlight. Not all debates on attention concern multitasking. Overload has always existed, but overload isn’t so much the problem as overconsumption. Superabundance is welcome, but it makes better attention practices more vital. Surroundings play a part in those practices. Not all attention is fragmented or paid; sometimes it just flows. Embodiment and orientation can be important components of attention. Not all attention involves thought. Not all interaction needs procedures and names. You don’t have to be a yoga teacher to say all of this. For, as interaction designers know, affordances shape knowing. You can sense that a surface might work as a step or a table without it having been designed or declared as such.

Artifice as Environment

Next, beyond recalling those presumably familiar themes, what is it like to consider the workings of attention from the perspective of a larger environment? What is it like to go beyond the comfortable scope of the situated task into the messy inhabited world? What happens when form, resolution, location, touch, or environmental sensor data become components of making sense? As the world fills with new technologies in ever more contexts and formats, the terms of engagement vary more widely. It is worth reciting that wherever interactions become something to inhabit and not just to sit at, you can no longer be so sure who is a user.

Today’s landscape of design
possibilities is not just in your
handheld; there are situated
technologies, too. Computation
increasingly becomes part of
things not thought of as comput-
ers—for instance, parking meters,
or even pavement [ 11]. Not every
interaction is a portal to some-
place else; many act in the here
and now. Design sometimes cre-
ates persistent circumstances that
people must live with, especially
those that arrange people in space,
and enable and so represent the
institutions that occupy them.
One word for that is architecture.

November + December 2012