Clementina Gentile

Designing (with) language@clementina_g

http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

What colour do you see?

And now have I put in here, as thou seest, with ship and crew, while

sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech, on my way

to Temese for copper

Homer. The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, PH.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919

Language influences our perception

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The limits of language (of that language which alone

I understand) mean the limits of my world”

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf

Language influences our behaviour

Language will be the new UI

Language is the UI

What does it mean for designers?

Syntax is the study of sentences and their structure, and the constructions within sentences. Syntax tells us what goes where in a sentence and how we should say things correctly.

Syntax

1

Skeumorphism before

Skeumorphism now

“Amazon Echo is magical. It’s also turning my kid into an asshole”Hunter Walk

Argument = war

The importance of metaphors

Your claims are indefensibleHe attacked every weak point in my argumentHis criticisms were right on targetI demolished his argumentI’ver never won an argument with himYou disagree? Okay, shoot!

Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Picture: Marina Abramovic

On what extent the language we speak with

machines will mirror or influence

the language we speak with our peers?

Semantics is primarily the linguistic, and also philosophical study of meaning. It focuses on the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for, their denotation.

Semantics

2

Yahoo developed a BOT that is able to catch online abuse

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601949/yahoo-has-a-tool-that-can-catch-online-abuse-surprisingly-well/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/20/flickr-complaints-offensive-auto-tagging-photos

Flickr tags

What about biases?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/08/24/language-necessarily-contains-human-biases-and-so-will-machines-trained-on-language-corpora/

How will we design the machine language to go

beyond syntax and grasp also semantics?

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society

Sociolinguistics

3

https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2016/sep/09/robot-boss-best-manager-artificial-intelligence

Language of organisationsTechnical expertiseIntegrityStrategic self awareness

http://www.pangaro.com/littlegreybook-dom.pdf

“Narrowing language increases efficiency

Narrowing language also increases ignorance”

Paul Pangaro

Paul Pangaro

http://www.pangaro.com/littlegreybook-dom.pdf

“Expanding language increases opportunity

To regenerate, an organization creates

a new language”

Language of social systems

How will we increase opportunity and guarantee

transparency through language?

The limits of the language we will design will be

the limits of the world we will live in

How can we design with language?

Helena Almeida

https://medium.com/intercom-inside/why-conversational-design-is-the-future-2c05f65aa68e#.3k7szbvn8

Prototype conversations

1 - Syntax

Play with metaphors

2 - Semantics

Be aware of biases

2 - Semantics

Design to increase friction

and truth

3 - Sociolinguistics

3 - Sociolinguistics

Design for systemic changeFraming design as conversations around systems, Dubberly design office

“Love words, agonize over sentences, pay attention to the world.”

Susan Sontag

Jung Lee - The end

@clementina_g