in vino similitudas

Last week while in Mountain View, James presented a luncheon talk about wine. Before Friday, all I knew about wine was that it tasted like bitter grapes and had a lot of rules. Listening to James talk about his passion didn’t make me run out to Big Red for a bottle when I returned to Indiana, but I was struck by the similarities with recent design theories and practice.

Wine can be described in terms of body, alcohol, sweetness, acidity and tannin.

With different words, James provided a good description of what goes into the design of an application. Designers can find metrics like the ones James described for wine (body, alcohol, sweetness, acidity and tannin) to explain what a widget may be. We can get a sample of users or ask experts their opinions. We can count things and compare numbers over time to show growth. But none of that really explains what the application is. That is because the thing is the result of the activity surrounding it. The thing changes with the situation.

When critiquing wine, the key term to know is Terroir, a French word to describe the region of the vineyard. The style of the winemaker and quality of the grapes are important, but what gets put into the bottle depends largely on geography. The land itself becomes an ingredient in the making of wine. All of the environmental properties surrounding a vine—the soil, slope of the hillside, climate, wind, amount of sunshine, and temperature—help determine what kind of wine the grapes growing there will become. The circumstances of that environment differ at any given point in time as well. One year to the next may be similar, but not identical.

The experience in drinking the wine is also very contextual. Beyond the terroir, the situation when the liquid is consumed determines the taste. Pop open a bottle of Montrachet 1978 with a significant other on the occasion of a 50th wedding anniversary, and the experience would probably taste better than if you raided your boss’s expensive liquor cabinet after he ran off with your wife. Your health, your state of mind, even your understanding about what it is you are drinking will all play a significant role in what you experience as the taste of the wine. As a result, taste can vary from glass to glass, from sip to sip.

Suchman describes action as something that results from interactions between various situational factors. Following the metaphor, the wine doesn’t cause the sensation of taste; the ability to taste facilitates the interaction between the drinker and the drink, in effect bringing the wine into existence.

When we look at the things we design, we too often see the object instead of its relationship to the world. Human-Computer interaction designers are trained to deeply examine the people who might use a product in advance of the product being built, shaping the tool to fit a need instead of manufacturing uses after the fact for some engineered tool. However, that isn’t enough. Once the thing exists, it has impact on those who use it—or choose not to do so. Those effects cannot be contained within a particular use session. They permeate the life away from the tool.