Some thoughts on Frames and Interaction Design

Michael Angeles brings my attention to David Malouf's latest post on language and interaction design.
In "The language we use," David Malouf discusses how ideas about user interaction can become so ingrained in what we are familiar with, that our language begins to reflect that familiarity.
It strikes me that a useful thinking tool on this topic may be the concept of Frames. I became aware of Frames, when Cognitive Psychologist George Lakoff popularized the idea in his book, Don't Think of an Elephant. However, the idea predates his use of it by 20 years, going back to 1974 and Sociologist Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.

A simplistic description is that a frame is the subjective definition someone may assign to a situation and as such relies on the past experiences, culture and language that person uses for interpretation. Applying this to Dave's post, the "click" frame was being subconsciously applied by the student, based on his own past experiences with interactive technology, and this was limiting the range of imaginable solutions the student could devise to the problem.

Dave's suggestion for how to overcome this challenge is a good one:
...you need to deconstruct your language. Write it down. Write down your narrative of your interactions and look for affinities that develop around words and phrases and see if anything calls out to you the way the word “click” called out to me.
In addition to a little critical self-analysis, I'd add a technique I learned early in my training as a designer. Try to consciously re-frame the problem at hand. It's not a pencil, it's an instrument for writing. It's not a post-it, it's a portable reminding device. It's a simple technique but it can shake loose the subconscious frames that limit your thinking.

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Published:
8:30 PM
by John Payne