Point of View When Designing Around Behavior

What does it mean to be a creature in space, able to displace oneself? After decades of passive screens in every house and almost in every room, some video games, virtual reality, and other tracking based media have been developed with the dynamic ability to move through virtual spaces with agency. This paper will articulate the philosophical, aesthetic and design implications of this shift that are permeating though the transition to embodied technologies. First the philosophical implications of what a point of view is in terms of subjectivity will be illustrated with examples of daily individual and social experiences. Then the paper will go over the aesthetic implications of different media according to the direct or implied approaches the media may contain regarding subjectivity, and how these implications carry metaphorical assumptions we use to socialize with each other in today’s public discourse. Lastly, the paper will consider notions of virtuality (Noë), simulation (Barret), and participatory sense making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo) that question the notion of subjectivity as a scalable experience which expands from individual to social situations.

Shifting from personal to collective behavior in the designed point of view is not trivial. When Nagel described disembodiment (or experience without point of view) as “a view from nowhere” perhaps there was not yet a notion of the absurdity of holding nobody’s experience. To a great extent humankind already shares the common subjective experience of living on planet Earth looking out into space from the Earth’s point of view, and from the umwelt of the human body. We bring that experience to everything we interact with. So the question becomes, what really is subjectivity if not the notion of a point of view in a specific place in time and space? How does that notion alone project itself into the assumptions we make of the world, of each other and of our representations? Because these assumptions become languages and cultures, perhaps we are at a crucial time to traverse these levels of meaning, liberating others from fixed and static assumptions of being, and finally from the individual subjective impositions, disguised as objectivity, we make on others and on the environments we experience.