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June 08, 2002

The Rise of the Creative Class

There's a very interesting article on Salon discussing Richard Florida's new book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Dr Florida is the H. John Heinz III professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University. His book (according to the Salon article) discusses his theories that the "creative class" (scientists, engineers, tech people, artists, entertainers, musicians) drives economic growth, and the models that most cities still use to "attract growth" (malls, convention centers, stadiums, enticing large corps) are not the things that are attractive to this "supercreative" core. The creatives, rather, are drawn to culturally diverse areas that provide flexibility and a dynamic environment - things that are often driven out by the current methods used to attempt to "grow" a city.

The article hints at a very thoughtful book. Might have to pick it up when it comes to print. In the meantime, go read the article...

Posted by jim at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2002

Range and depth of sensoria

So Jenni, duck and I camped out in a smoky back booth last night, drinking and talking bullshit. Damn, it was good. The bullshit, strangely enough, because disturbingly coherent - and we came to several conclusions (and epiphanies) regarding the nature of the senses...

Actually, it all started with an unusual cross-pollination of conversational topics; we'd been talking about video games and the ways in which they engaged (or failed to engage) to player, and briefly took a tangent into how smell is among the most primitive of sense and has the deepest hooks into the brain - both physically and operationally.

Smell and taste, actually, are tightly related (don't believe me? Try tasting something the next time you have a head cold). And they are, it would seem, essentially the same process - chemical sampling from a medium. Smell samples the chemical composition of the air you breathe, whereas taste is a more direct sampling of things that you put in your mouth. Smell/taste is the oldest of senses (coming, one could argue, from cellular life sampling its surroundings to find a food-rich environment), and links back to the most primitive parts of the brain. Duck compared it to a protected or kernel process - since smell/taste is processed in the "older" parts of our brain it manages to bypass our primate forebrain and most of our mammalian cognition centers.

Hearing and touch we also lumped together, with both being relating kinds of frequency sampling analyzing waveform, frequency, or amplitude. Hearing, for example, samples the waveform of pressure patterns in the atmosphere. Touch samples amplitude (resistance/pressure) and frequency (heat/cold). It's a more advanced sense than smell-taste - and requires more processing than smell-taste or vision (more on that later). Studies done - some done to study audio interfaces, others studying cell-phone use patterns - find that someone who is conversing or listening for content is intensely distracted by the mere act. The reaction times of someone driving while talking on a cell phone are as bad, if not worse, than someone who is legally intoxicated (!). Touch, we all agreed, is an intensely distracting sensory input - unfiltered touch sensations easily distract us from other processes. Because of this, we came to the conclusion (in this model we were building) that hearing/touch was linked to the "mainline" portions of the brain - and required the brain to be directly involved in processing the sense.

Sight is pretty much its own beast, and is the newest and most process-intensive sense - while it's still sampling like hearing/touch (sampling the wave/particle action of photos), the quantity of simultaneous sampling and pattern recognition is significantly greater. It has, for lack of a better framework, its own processing center in the forebrain - with a great deal of grey matter devoted to "rendering" optical data. The kind of vision we have - high detail color binocular depth-perceiving vision - is generally reserved for higher mammals with a considerable amount of brain. However, because of the "offloaded" nature of vision processing, along with its "newness" as a sense, vision has the most tenuous hook into our unconcious mind. It doesn't have the power to evoke memory that smell-taste does, and isn't nearly as distracting or cognition-intensive as hearing-touch.

Granted, there exceptions and paths of specialization in all of this. Some species of bat are all but optically blind (but many do have excellent vision) as they went down an evolutionary path of using hearing-touch to perceive. Birds of prey have amazing vision, although it's heavily specialized in the realm of detecting prey at a distance.

But if you're willing to accept the generalization, you end up with a hierarchy of senses: smell-taste is the most basic, operating at our core levels with many hooks into our primitive brain. hearing-touch is mid-range, but is very involving because it's tied into our "general purpose" mental processing. vision is very "high end", capable of a great amount of detail, but the mechanisms that handle the intense processing required "distance" vision from having many deep hooks into our mental processes.

Now take that to our videogames. (HA!). Jenni works at X-Box, so game design is quite a valid topic of conversation - we talk about it much more seriously than just "cool game!". What this model of sense gives us is another tool to determine how best to involve the participant in any sort of entertainment. Visuals, while the primary part of most any game, actually have the least ability to draw in a participant. Combine those visuals with compelling sound and atmospheric music, however, and you've just involved the "offloaded" vision centers and tied in to the more involving hearing-touch processes. Luckily we don't have smell-o-vision, else we'd have an utterly involved gaming crack (but one can argue that highly detailed visual and aural landscapes will allow the participant to sythesize imaginary smells).

It's an interesting new lever, this way of looking at how the senses involve us. And I haven't even subjected you to our tangents of all the unconscious processing we do - the things that manifest as aromotherapy, why certain sounds are grating and others aren't, why some colors soothe us. Like I said, it was a killer night of conversation.

Think and chew, my friends...

Posted by jim at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)