HCI Paper Review: Alignment in the Design of Interactive AI

In 2024, I set the goal to learn more about designing for human-centered AI and would love to share my learnings from reading academic papers in the field as part of the journey. The hope is to make knowledge in design, behavioral science, and human-computer interaction friendly and accessible for everyone.

In this blog post, I’ll share my review notes for the paper AI Alignment in the Design of Interactive AI: Specification Alignment, Process Alignment, and Evaluation Support by Michael Terry, Chinmay Kulkarni, Martin Wattenberg, Lucas Dixon, and Meredith Ringel Morris. 2023. arXiv:2311.00710.

User Interface Shifts in Computing History

For those who are unfamiliar with user experience (UX) or human-computer interaction (HCI), here is a high-level overview of how user interfaces (UI) have evolved in the past 60 years:

1. Batch processing: The first general-purpose computer was introduced around 1945. The UI was a single point of contact where people needed to submit a batch of instructions (often a deck of punched cards) to a data center, then they would pick up the output of their batch the next day. It was common to need multiple days to fine-tune the batch to produce the desired outcome.

2. Command-based interaction: Around 1964, the advent of time-sharing (multiple users sharing a computer’s resources for tasks) led to command-based interaction, where users and computers can take turns, one command at a time. In particular, graphical user interfaces (GUI), using visual elements that convey information and actions a user can take, have become the dominant UX since the launch of the Mac in 1984. A strength of GUI is that it shows the status after each command if designed well. Users don’t need to have a fully specified goal initially because they can reassess the situation and modify their goal/approach as they progress.

3. Intent-based goal specification: With the third UI shift, represented by the current generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini), the user tells the computer what outcome they want, but does not specify how it should be accomplished. Today, users primarily interact with the system by issuing rounds of prompts to gradually refine the outcome, which is a form of interaction that is currently poorly supported with rich opportunities for usability improvements and innovation.

From batch processing to command-based interaction, the speed of fine-tuning the desirable outcome improved drastically. However, with the third shift to human-AI interaction, the lack of transparency of how the AI performs a task, especially for the increasingly complex and high-consideration scenarios, presents new UX challenges for the HCI community today.

Photo by Falco Negenman on Unsplash

Interaction cycle for human-AI systems

The ultimate goal of human-AI interaction is to efficiently achieve a desirable goal for the user. Today, this process involves 3 basic steps: user input, system processing, and system output.

Different from the traditional command-based interaction, where a user monitors and gives commands at every step in the process, with an AI system, the user’s skills shift to focus on (1) being clear and effective at articulating the goal and providing input, and (2) once the output is available, being able to assess if their goal has been achieved.

As an analogy, a human’s role switched from being the executor (take main control to execute) to being the manager (tell another person to execute for you). It requires a different set of skills and mindset, just as when an independent contributor switches to a manager role. For a team to be effective, the manager can’t micromanage every step, otherwise, it decreases the overall productivity. In this case, what are the key touch points where humans (the manager) need to intentionally “align” with the AI system (the executor) to ensure the interaction is effective?

Overview of the paper

To ensure an AI produces desired outcomes, without undesirable side effects (also termed “AI Alignment”), Terry et al. introduce 3 dimensions to consider as we address user interface challenges with AI systems: Specification alignment, Process alignment, and Evaluation support.

• Specification alignment is the first step in human-AI interaction, where the user defines the desired outcome for the AI system to execute. In addition, the paper also points out the importance of specifying constraints (e.g. safe, cost-effective, aligned with human values). As an extreme example, consider the paperclip thought experiment, where an AI is tasked to produce as many paperclips as possible. The AI may eventually start destroying computers, refrigerators, or anything made of metal to make more paper clips, which is not aligned with how humans will achieve the goal.

• Process alignment refers to providing the ability for users to view and/or control the AI’s underlying execution process. The paper proposes providing mechanisms that ensure (1) the user can understand how the system executes the task in ways that can be understood by humans (“means alignment”), and (2) give users the ability to modify these choices (”control alignment”).

• Evaluation support is the final step where users validate that the AI’s output meets their goals. As AI becomes increasingly capable of difficult and complex tasks, a significant challenge is evaluating its outputs. The problem of evaluation can be further divided into two problems: (1) verifying the AI’s output correctly and completely fulfills the user’s intent and comprehension, and (2) understanding the AI’s output, with comprehension being a much more important problem to solve.

Photo by Kiara Sztankovics on Unsplash

Personal notes

1\ Cognitive challenges with defining outcome. Counterintuitively, this step can be tricky because humans are not good at knowing or being able to describe what they want initially, especially for complex and high-consideration tasks. Considering human cognitive limitations, it’s important to account for the process for users to learn, then gradually understand and be able to describe their goal. This resembles a classic decision-making challenge when people shop. Although you know the goal is to buy a vacuum, you still need to go through the lengthy process of reading articles to learn about its major categories and functionalities and talking to friends and families before you know what you truly need and want. Similar to shopping research, the learning process is where we gradually build confidence in our judgment. Open question: how might we help users learn while maintaining efficiency in the process? One idea could be dynamic, personalized support for more or less explanation as users specify the requirement.

2\ Verifying interpretation upfront. One way to improve specification alignment for general-purpose AI is by providing the ability for users to verify and make necessary corrections to the AI’s interpretation of the intended outcomes before it proceeds. I love this direction because it resembles how real-life human collaboration works. Think about the manager and IC example, to ensure your project goal is aligned with what your manager has in mind (which could sometimes be under-specified or ambiguous), paraphrasing the requirement and sharing your plan of action beforehand helps confirm again that you and your manager are on the same page. Future research to understand (a) how real-life human collaboration and communication best practices can be applied for human-AI interaction, and (b) the right balance for efficiency vs. efforts for verification will be interesting to explore.

The Two UX Gulfs: Evaluation and Execution (2018)

3\ Bridging the Process Gulf with a Surrogate Process. The paper introduces the concept of Process Gulf, as an extension of Norman’s concepts of the Gulfs of Execution and Evaluation, that highlights the gulf that can arise between a person and an AI due to the qualitatively different ways in which each produces an outcome. For example, a diffusion model for image generation transforms an image of statistical noise into a coherent image, an image creation process unfamiliar to most people. To bridge the Process Gulf, the paper proposes creating a simplified, separately derived, but controllable representation of the AI’s actual process, also termed a Surrogate Process. With a more accessible representation of the set of choices the AI needs to make in the process, the user can better intervene and guide the execution. Open question: since AI systems can be understood at many levels of abstraction, what’s the right level of explainability so that humans can easily understand and control how AI solves a problem?

4\ In-context evaluation and learning. Today, an AI tasked to recommend clothes you like would simply show you visuals of the clothes for at-a-glance evaluation. However, when the task becomes complicated, like creating code for an app, the AI system may provide comments, a natural language summary, or an architectural diagram of the code produced to help you evaluate. Future research: explore ways to provide simple, dynamic, and accessible explanations (e.g. visual, links to learn more) of the outcome produced would be useful for in-context evaluation and learning — it also assists with understanding the state of the problem after the AI performs some work, as the paper alluded to.

5\ Control mechanisms inspired by real-life tools. The importance of control mechanisms has been discussed extensively in the HCI community and I especially love the principles outlined in the People + AI Guidebook. When thinking about the appropriate levels of control, the common mechanism is providing parameters for a user to play with. For example, in Midjourney (a text-to-image model), users can adjust the “chaos” parameter to produce variations of the image. However, no support is currently provided to understand how a particular value will impact the generated images. Relatedly, as an interesting research exploration, PromptPaint provides users the ability to influence the text-to-image generation through paint medium-like interactions, using the paint palette metaphor to provide more control. As a result, it helps users specify their goals at greater granularity and gives users the ability to modify the choices involved as AI is producing the image. Future research: based on the specific task, what other real-life metaphors can be referenced as inspiration for control mechanisms (like pain palette for image generation)?

In Prompt Paint, the user can specify the area of generation with brushing (dark grey) with a prompt stencil. When the user completes brushing, the tool starts generating a part of the image while showing the process to the user (Chung and Adar, 2023)

6\ Interactive alignment for multi-users. The paper has been primarily discussing the user interface challenges and opportunities of a single user interacting with a single AI. As the paper alluded to, it would be useful to consider the alignment for interactions that include multiple parties, which introduces additional dimensions and complexity. For example, when an AI engaged in a music creation task involving two people. Future research: how would the alignment goals, processes, and dimensions evolve for a wider range of collaboration scenarios?

Thanks for reading

This post covers a broad set of themes in the AI alignment problem space. In upcoming HCI paper reviews, I’d love to explore specific use cases and verticals in the field. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please leave a comment or get in touch!

Thanks to Bonnie Luo and Benjamin Yu for helpful discussions and feedback.

References

Jakob Nielsen. 2023. AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years”. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ai-paradigm. Accessed: 2024-03-01.

John Joon Young Chung and Eytan Adar. 2023. PromptPaint: Steering Text-to-Image Generation Through Paint Medium-like Interactions. In Proceedings of UIST 2023. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606777

Michael Terry, Chinmay Kulkarni, Martin Wattenberg, Lucas Dixon, and Meredith Ringel Morris. 2023. AI Alignment in the Design of Interactive AI: Specification Alignment, Process Alignment, and Evaluation Support. arXiv 2023, arXiv:2311.00710.

Negotiation and Human Agency

Negotiation has been a term I mostly associated with business or politics in the past, involving intense debates and advocating for the interests of each party. However, I began to appreciate and explore this concept more intentionally since last year, when I was exposed to a more diverse set of collaboration scenarios. Then, I realized negotiation is everywhere and understanding its history, philosophy, and practice is important for thinking about how humans interact in a world of complexity. With a background in behavioral science, human-computer interaction, and design research, I began to see deeper connections between negotiation with each of these fields.

Okochi Sanso Garden, Kyoto 京都大河内山庄

Evolution of negotiation theory

Two notable milestones in negotiation literature are Getting to Yes (1981) by Fisher and Ury, and Never Split the Difference (2016) by Chris Voss. The former focuses on identifying interests and creating value for both parties, while the latter recognizes the emotional nature of negotiation and emphasizes the importance of building tactical empathy to gather information and influence the other party's thinking.

The shift from objectively identifying a win-win solution to challenging the idea of seeking a compromise is fascinating and counterintuitive at first. As the title Never Split the Difference suggests, Voss believes it’s better to not make a deal if compromise is involved. Instead, drawing from his experience as a former FBI hostage negotiator, he focused on uncovering Black Swans, which are hidden pieces of information that can change the course of a negotiation and push the other party towards a deal. This became his primary strategy for finding unconventional solutions.

This evolution in negotiation philosophy is an interesting parallel with the shift from classical economics to behavioral economics — both evolved to recognize the limitations of purely rational and utility-maximizing models. Similar to Never Split the Difference, behavioral economics shifts the focus from simplified, rational economic models to a more nuanced understanding of human behavior, which is shaped by emotions, biases, and heuristics.

Konchi-in Temple, Kyoto 京都金地院

Human agency at heart

People want to be heard, understood, and respected. In Never Split the Difference, building tactical empathy in negotiation means ensuring sufficient trust and safety for a real conversation to begin. Since change represents uncertainty and people want to be in control, saying no to a proposal is the easiest way to maintain that control and the status quo. This completely changed my perspective on the nature of negotiation because it’s ultimately about addressing fundamental human needs with psychological principles. It’s not just about fighting for individual interests, it’s much more about building connections, helping each other feel in control, and identifying creative solutions together.

Another memorable idea is that “Yes” has multiple layers (i.e. counterfeit, confirmation, and commitment), while “No” is the gateway to “Yes.” Saying “No” allows us time to pivot and adjust, creating an environment for the one “Yes” that mattered and gives us an opportunity to convince others that the proposed change is more advantageous than maintaining the status quo. Then, negotiation is the process of helping the other party feel protected and safe, so they can consider other possibilities with a relaxed mindset.

This also resembles the dynamics of how humans interact with technology, especially with AI systems. When systems (e.g. algorithms) collecting human input (e.g. data) without making people feel heard, respected, or in control, it becomes difficult to establish a genuine conversation (e.g. engagement). An effective feedback and control mechanism needs to account for human motivation and provide a clear incentive structure, so that the value and impact of input is meaningful. When considering human-computer interaction through the lens of human-machine negotiation, it’s interesting that we’re applying similar psychological principles to help individuals maintain their agency as foundational needs.

Practice of tactical empathy

When it comes to tactical steps to build tactical empathy or uncovering the black swan, the approach mentioned in Never Split the Difference shared a lot of similarities with user experience research moderation practices. Methods like asking calibrated question, focusing on discovery and uncovering insights, and active listening are all familiar to researchers. Although the relationship between a user and a researcher isn’t a negotiating one, the process and desired outcome is similar. Both the negotiator and the researcher aim to uncover insights about the other party to deeply understand their needs, so they can identify unconventional solutions or framing that change the course of the conversation or strategy.

Finally, the practice of emotional labeling reminds me of methods used in psychotherapy. It involves identifying and verbalizing the predictable emotions of a situation, which helps build empathy and insights for both parties. Once the emotion is labeled, we can talk about them without getting wound up because using language to objectify negative thoughts make them less frightening and disrupt their raw intensity.

Nanzen-ji Temple, Kyoto 京都南禅寺

At its core, negotiation is not about being competitive and skillful in applying complex methods or tactics. It is all about creating the right environment for genuine connection and conversation to begin.

Elon Musk: Reading Notes

Reading notes from Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

01 Musk’s Production Algorithm

First-principles thinking has been a well-established practice for some time, which involves questioning all assumptions about a problem and creating new solutions from the ground up. Reading about how Elon Musk applies it extensively in design, engineering, and manufacturing, from building rockets to designing car factories, made me appreciate even more its elegance in finding creative solutions to complex problems.

Here is Elon Musk’s version (“Algorithm”) of applying first-principles thinking:

1. Question every requirement. Each should be attributed to the person who made it. Think for yourself and don't simply follow instructions. Never accept a requirement blindly just because it comes from a department.

2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.

3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.

4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, Musk mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that he later realized should have been deleted.

5. Automate. That comes last.

Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

Noteworthy examples of applying first-principles thinking:

• Innovate on material and product design. When designing the cybertruck, the Tesla team initially considered using titanium for its durability. However, Musk was reevaluating the material choice for SpaceX's rocket ship at the time and realized stainless steel could be a viable option, which could also be used for a pickup truck. A stainless steel body eliminated the need painting and could bear some of the vehicle’s structural load. This opened up new possibilities for a more futuristic and edgier design, featuring straight planes and sharp angles, which pushed the team to explore new ideas.

• Cut costs in the auto and rocket industries. Musk believed that reusable rockets were essential for establishing a multi-planetary civilization, particularly for sending humans to Mars. To achieve this, he introduced the concept of the "idiot index," which measures the ratio of a component's total cost to the cost of its raw materials. A high idiot index indicates overly complex design or inefficient manufacturing processes. By reducing the idiot index, Musk aimed to lower the cost of rocket production and make space travel more affordable.

• Reinvent the policy incentive structure. Musk proposed an alternative incentive process to the traditional "cost-plus" contracts used by NASA and the Defense Department. Instead of providing detailed specifications and awarding contracts to large companies, SpaceX introduced a new method where private companies bid on specific tasks or missions. This approach allowed SpaceX to have more control over the design and construction of their rockets. They took on financial risk and were only paid upon successfully completing milestones, which incentivized results and fostered innovation.

Photo by Sebastian Leonhardt on Unsplash

Another important production philosophy of Musk is to have tight end-to-end quality and cost control through vertical integration, while also applying first-principles thinking:

• Design-manufacturing feedback loop: Musk follows the principle instilled by Steve Jobs and Jony Ive at Apple, where design is not just about aesthetics but also about connecting the looks of a product to its engineering. However, Musk takes it a step further by applying this obsession not only to product design but also to the underlying science, engineering, and manufacturing. This approach highlights the importance of connecting the art form with its underlying science, which is one of the key themes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

• Redesigning the manufacturing process: While creating a good car is important, Musk believes that creating efficient manufacturing processes and factories is even more crucial. In order to have tight control over the manufacturing process, Musk redesigned the assembly line. This involved questioning every requirement, making quick decisions to change or remove elements, and iterating on a daily basis. This design-manufacturing feedback loop has given Tesla a competitive advantage in its manufacturing process, resulting in solutions that are simple in design, communication, and cost.

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

02 Inspirations from science fictions, toys, and games

Musk often thinks at the scale of what truly impacts humanity, and this includes endeavors in space travel, internet infrastructure, sustainable energy, and artificial intelligence. He believes technology does not automatically progress, it requires human agency. While he sees the mass production of electric cars as inevitable, he believes that becoming a space-facing civilization is not. For example, although America had achieved sending men to the moon in the 1970s, there had been little progress until Musk founded SpaceX.

Musk had founded SpaceX, he liked to say, to increase the chances of human consciousness surviving by making us a multi-planetary species. Tesla and SolarCity were established to lead the way towards a sustainable energy future. Starlink was created to promote freedom of information, while Optimus and Neuralink were launched to develop human-machine interfaces that would protect us from malevolent artificial intelligence.

Photo by Leyre on Unsplash

Beyond thinking at the grand, historical scale of humanities, I really enjoyed learning how he took inspiration from science fictions, toys, and games, exemplifying combined creativity at the intersection of arts and technology.

Inspiration from science fictions

The most notable source of sci-fi inspiration was from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which featured a supercomputer designed to figure out the “Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Moreover, the idea for Neuralink was inspired by the space-travel novels Culture by lain Bank, which feature a human-machine interface technology called “neural lace” that is implanted into people and can connect all of their thoughts to a computer.

Inspiration from toys

Musk mentioned getting ideas from the design of toys and the production process of the toy industry. For example, a little model car has inspired him to make real cars using big casting presses and Legos helped him understand the importance of precision manufacturing. When Musk inspected the Lego factory floor, he learned that each piece is accurate and identical to within ten microns, which means any part can easily be replaced by another — precision is not expensive, it’s mostly about caring to make it precise. On the production process, Musk also learned that toy companies need to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws and manufature them all by Christmas.

Inspiration from video games

When designing new car models for Tesla and someone proposed something conventional, Musk would push back and forth to the car from the video game Halo, Cyberpunk 2077, or from Riddle Scott’s movie Blade Runner as design inspiration. The other genre of games Musk loved is strategy games, including Civilization, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and Polytopia. Players in these games take turns making moves as they compete to win a military or economic campaign using clever strategy, resource management, and decision-tree tactical thinking. Musk’s passion for strategy games provides a window to understand his intensity, focus, competitiveness, die-hard attitudes, and love of strategy for business.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

03 Bridging virtual and physical AI

Solving full autonomous driving is to solve real-world AI and Musk attempted to bridge virtual and physical artificial intelligence with Tesla and Twitter/X, which could provide the data sets and the processing capability for both approaches: teaching machines to navigate in physical space and to answer questions in natural language. In his grand vision, with Full Self-Driving, the Otimus robot, and the Dojo ML supercomputer, Tesla will not just be a car or clean-energy company, it will be an artificial intelligence company that operated not only in the virtual world of chatbots but also in the physical real world of factories and roads.

Musk sees his ventures as different, yet connected experiments for exploring AI.

• Tesla: Besides freeing people from the drudgery of driving, Tesla aims to eliminate the need for people to own cars. Musk envisions a future dominated by Robotaxis, driverless vehicles that can be summoned, take passengers to their destinations, and move on to the next customer. While some Robotaxis may be owned by individuals, most would be owned by fleet companies or Tesla itself.

• X/Twitter: The video footage from self-driving cars and the posts on Twitter offer vast flows of real-time data for training and analysis. Musk sees the Twitter feed as a representation of humanity's collective knowledge, capturing real-life human conversations, news, interests, trends, arguments, and lingo.

• Neuralink: A device to explore the human-machine interface by connecting our brains to computers through a skull-implanted chip. This allows for faster information exchange and promotes collaboration between humans and machines.

• OpenAI: Musk initially had the vision to make OpenAI truly open, allowing many people to build systems based on its source code. He believes that the best defense against AI misuse is to empower as many individuals as possible with AI technology.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

04 The other sides of Elon Musk as a human

Much more can be said about Elon Musk's achievements as a technology entrepreneur. However, beyond his accomplishments, the biography also sheds light on other aspects of Elon Musk's life, including his role as a partner, father, and friend. It explores his risk-taking nature, a maniacal sense of urgency, recklessness, mood swings, and occasional toxicity towards towards people around him. Elon Musk exemplifies the human experience - daring to dream big and change the world, while also grappling with his limitations and weaknesses.

If anything, reading Elon Musk made me realize the greatness we can achieve as humans, while reminding us of the underlying trade-offs we’re constantly making for ourselves, our loved ones, and the environment.

Finite and Infinite Games as Modern Analogies

I was first introduced to Finite and Infinite Games in 2016, a book by James P. Carse, who was a Professor of History and Literature of Religion at NYU. At the time, its influence was cited by Chinese tech entrepreneurs like Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, and Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control. Lately, I started this book out of curiosity to rethink the familiar concept of gameplay in everyday life.

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01 Boundary differentiates finite and infinite games

As the title suggests, Carse argues that there are two types of game in the world: finite and infinite games. Finite game is played for the purpose of winning, with an agreed winner and an end, whereas an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.

To play a finite game, players must agree to a set of externally defined spatial and numerical boundaries. For example, a game is played in that place, with those people. Each game is defined by its rules, or its range of limitations on the players, which allow considerable room for choice within those restraints and by which the players can agree who has won.

On the contrary, an infinite game does not have such boundaries. The rules of an infinite game evolve to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many people as possible into the play. This resembles the mechanics of open-world games like Minecraft and The Legend of Zelda, where players can freely choose how to approach the game without the traditional linear structure. In short, finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.

Emotionally, it’s interesting to note that finite game feels serious because of the competitive nature of the zero-sum game, whereas infinite game comes with laughter and feels like play because new possibilities are continuously discovered to be explored with other players.

02 Power through title is won in a finite game

In a finite game, what one wins is a title. When a person is known by title, the attention is on a completed past and may take a person out of play. On the other hand, infinite players are only known by their names and the attention of others is open to the possibility of their future interactions. This is a gentle reminder to focus on the concrete, specific person, instead of the abstract titles.

Carse argues that titles are theatrical, where each title has a specified ceremonial form of behavior. This reminds me of a common improv acting technique to assign titles to your partner to shape the relationship in the narrative. For example, using titles such Captain, Mrs., Professor, Comrade, Father, Secretary signals the mode (e.g. appropriate respect), the content (e.g. only certain subjects are suitable for discussion with the District Attorney), and the manner (e.g. shaking hands, bowing, averting the eyes) of address.

Unsurprisingly, titles also conveyed power. Power can only be measured in relation to others and is determined by the amount of resistance one can displace within spatial and temporal limits. Those around them are expected to withdraw their opposition and conform to their will in the area (i.e. the game) the title was won. Validity of these titles depends on the repeatability of the game.

The finite player plays to be powerful, whereas the infinite player plays with self-sufficient strength. Power refers to the freedom people have within limits, strength is the freedom people have with limits. Strength is allowing others to do what they wish in the course of my play with them, whereas power is considering how much resistance can I overcome relative to others.

Carse further argues that society is a finite game whereas culture is an infinite game. A society preserves its memory of past winners with record-keeping functions like large bureaucracies to maintain social order. Culture, on the other hand, has no boundaries and anyone can participate and shape. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what had begun and not finished in the past. In contrast, social convention requires that a completed past be repeated in the future.

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03 Storytelling can be seen as an infinite game

Storytelling can be seen as an infinite game. A good story presents a vision that moves and inspires you with its underlying belief. The interactive and engaging elements of storytelling is what truly connects the speaker and the listener. The end of a compelling story is the new beginning of the listener’s imagination and reflection on their own journey, which is similar to how an infinite game continues the play without true ending.

When comparing storytelling with explanation, Carse argues that explanation settles issues, showing that matters should reasonably end as they have. Narrative raises issues and inspires reflections in others. In this case, explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside, whereas narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. I see where Carse’s argument is coming from, but am not convinced that explanation is a finite game in this sense.

The concept of explanation actually makes me think of its inherent role in interpreting and predicting the future. If the rules governing past events can be discovered and explained, we can make better prediction about the future. This captures an important philosophy of user experience research as a discipline: if we can understand the motivation that guides human behaviors and perceptions, we can meaningfully derive aggregate patterns of human needs to inform investments for the future. Investing in research is a way to play the infinite game, where the focus is to co-create a long-term vision on the horizon. The more insightful framework we have to understand a problem space based on existing behaviors, the better we can predict and build for the future. In this example, explanation is also an infinite game that opens up new possibilities.

04 Garden is an infinite game, while machine isn’t

Carse further extends the finite and infinite games framework to the machine and garden analogy. Think of a gardener who uses machine as a tool to help with gardening. Machine is a finite game because it is operated to complete a task. When it is most effective, the tool becomes invisible and eliminates itself because the effort is minimal. Garden, on the other hand, is a place of growth and maximized spontaneity. “To garden is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature.”

Machinery can exist in the garden quite as finite games can be played within an infinite game. Technology is a tool that helps with gardening as a means to an end, not the end itself. The question is not one of restricting machines from the garden but asking whether a machine serves the interest of the garden.

Additionally, the relationship between the machine and its operator is very much like how humans interact with technology today. We often think of a machine as a tool—the extended arms and legs of the operator. However, Carse suggested that “to use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine.” For example, when using a search engine, many start with a broad query then gradually refine and add keywords as they review the result. This is not how we naturally talk to others when we look for things. Search engines are designed to help look up information today as a tool, but we as operators are also trained to interact with it in such specific ways.

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05 Celebrate spontaneity and forgo control

In the garden analogy, gardeners celebrate variety and spontaneity, which may seem chaotic and out of control on the flip side. But vitality comes from an abundance of styles and sources of change. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns of natural order, while having the freedom to choose how to play with nature and its force.

If we play the finite game, the more power we exercise over nature, the more powerless we become before it. In a matter of months we can cut down a rainforest that took tens of thousands of years to grow, but we are helpless in repulsing the desert that takes its place. The human desire to control and organize chaos means transforming the remote into the familiar. When we attempt to take control of nature, we’re essentially reducing an unpredictable vitality to a predictable mass. Sometimes, the desire for control, just like the need to declare war, is a way for us to re-identify ourselves.

Ultimately, Carse gently nudges us to rethink the type of game we are playing. When it comes to interacting with other humans or with nature, it’s easy to go straight to playing the finite game, so we can gain the immediate reward quicker. Carse reminds us to think about the trade-offs behind these finite games and whether they truly serve the interest of the garden—the infinite game—that we are working towards.

Improv Comedy and Collective Imagination

Recently, I completed a 6-week Improv 101 class and had a lot of fun trying out acting and improvisational comedy for the first time. I was initially curious about improv because its philosophy is very similar to design thinking and participatory design methods. Although improv comedy and design thinking may seem unrelated, they actually share important principles around creativity and collaboration.

As I learned more each week, I realized that the art of improv is not only about being funny, but also about behavioral observations and analysis, creating and deepening relationships, and understanding power dynamics, among other things.

Rule-of-thumb: “Yes, and …” and avoid asking questions

The "Yes, and …" rule is a guiding principle in improvisational comedy. It advises improvisers to accept (”yes”) and build on what their partner has stated (”and”). The “Yes” portion of the rule encourages the acceptance of the contributions added by others, fostering a sense of collaboration, rather than denying the suggestion or ending the line of communication.

Another helpful rule is to avoid asking questions. This can be difficult to follow at first, since we often ask questions for clarification or to learn more. However, asking questions in an improv context does not build or expand on your partner's input. Instead, it’s best to rephrase questions into statements and hand them over to your partner to move the plot forward.

After we get comfortable with following the “Yes, and …” rule, it feels just like the idea generation process in design thinking. The feeling of letting go of control and embracing uncertainty is similar to rapidly iterating crazy new ideas without judgement in product design. It reminds me of a design workshop like crazy 8s, a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes, with the goal of generating a wide variety of solutions to your design challenge. Creativity, collaboration, and collective imagination are the key spirits of improv, which are also qualities commonly shared in a good design brainstorming session.

Establish relationships and keep the plot moving

Every week, we learn about different techniques that help us establish partner relationships, set the scene, and keep the story progresses.

• Naming and Identity: Assigning a name other than your partner's real name, such as "Josh," can help them establish a fictional character and give them permission to unleash their imagination. Assigning an identity, such as "captain" or "principal," also helps establish the scene by framing their roles. In this case, it can ground the scene in a specific setting, such as a ship, sports team, or school.

• Social status: Assigning a rank to individuals in a group immediately shapes their relationships with each other. It influences how they choose to look, act, and respond to people with different ranks.

• Holding on to a secret: When developing a scene with your partner, you can imagine that you are holding on to a secret. This secret could be something like "please don't leave me" or "I'm ashamed." Your partner may also be holding on to a secret. This approach is similar to design thinking, where a particular user group may have persistent, hidden motivations or needs that will manifest in different forms in a user journey. Understanding these "secrets" is key to unpacking people's behavior on the surface. This concept also occurs in psychotherapy, where certain internal motivations, fears, or desires drive consistent behavioral patterns. It is only when the client becomes aware of these persistent, hidden triggers that they can gain a new understanding about themselves and assess them objectively.

• Choosing a posture: It's no surprise that your body language when sitting, standing, or walking can reveal a lot about your character. For example, leaning forward while sitting on a chair may make you seem attentive, nervous, or younger. Holding one hand under your chin may make you seem observant, judgmental, or thoughtful. In one class, everyone sat in a circle and took turns analyzing each other's posture while sitting on a chair. Then, based on the information inferred from the posture, each person started an opening line.

• Overusing a word: You can choose to overuse certain words such as "like," "awesome," "honestly," or "actually." These words can become a part of your language system and act as signals that guide you as you establish and develop your character.

• Emotion: Assigning a mood or emotion to your partner's character is a common way to establish their personality and the scene. For example, the opening line could be "You seem [sad, anxious, nervous, happy, scared]."

• Relationship history: Setting the rule of knowing your partner for more than 3 months adds depth and shared memories to the relationship. This can be used to expand the story and shape both of your characters.

Our Improv instructor Maurissa holding the drawing co-created by our class

Status game as a social experiment

One of the most memorable exercises during class is the status game. You get assigned a card with a rank from 2 to ace, without knowing your own card. You have 15 minutes to socialize with everyone else, who you imagine you're at a party with, and figure out your rank. Then, everyone lines up from low to high, and you try to guess your relative ranking.

For example, you are more likely to approach and talk to someone who has a similar ranking as you. When people with significantly higher status approach you, you may appear more respectful and attentive, whereas you may seem more impatient or dismissive when people with significantly lower status approach you. Therefore, if you are either on the higher or lower ends of the rank, it’s relatively easier to tell based on the kinds of numbers that proactively approach you. But if you’re in the middle rank, such as 6 or 7, it can be harder to assess.

It's interesting to observe how people's actions can be influenced by the cards they receive and the power dynamics within relationships. It brought to mind the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a psychological study that explored how roles, labels, and social expectations affected behavior in a simulated prison environment. While the status game is not as extreme as a prison environment, it highlights how status plays a significant role in shaping and defining relationships.

In addition, when someone is given a certain status, people often make assumptions based on that rank. These assumptions are used as a guide for the character and their partners to act in the story. For instance, status is often linked to wealth, political position, career, attitude, and lifestyle.

In a different situation, two people of different social status are waiting for a bus at a bus station. Their status may influence how they look, stand, and act. The person with the higher status may intentionally keep their distance from the person with lower status while waiting, and may be more relaxed since they can afford to take an Uber instead. On the other hand, the person with the lower status may appear more anxious and stressed because taking the bus is their only affordable option to get to work.

Final thoughts

The most counterintuitive moment for me was when I realized that all of these improv techniques are about giving structures and signals to help actors build their relationships as the story progresses. I used to think the plot came first, and that characters were just there to act it out. But in improv, I see that by focusing on the characters and exploring the complexity, nuance, and layers of their relationships, the story will naturally progress in interesting ways. This is similar to the logic behind producing reality shows. By inviting celebrities with distinct characters and capturing their interactions and relationships, an entertaining show can be created without the need for elaborate storylines or scripts.

Photo Essay: Museums in Boston

When I wrote this post, I had the song Dancing with my phone by HYBS playing in the background. You can try that while reading, too. Totally optional.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

María Berrío is a Colombian-born visual artist based in New York City, who crafts her large-scale paintings through a meticulous process or collaging layers of Japanese paper with watercolor. When I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) on March 4, 2023, her exhibition The Children’s Crusade was on display. Her series blends the history of the Children’s Crusade of 1212 with the contemporary mass movement of peoples across borders.

Cavalry, 2022. Collage with Japanese paper and watercolor paint on canvas. Interesting to note the dynamics between the children and their guardians (reflected in the mirror).

Idea: Seeing art projected on the dining table makes me wonder if we can explore showcasing artwork in a restaurant more and incorporate dishes as a component of the art installation. Visitors can also co-create with the projected art with food on their plates.

Noted the header “Invisible Ground of Sympathy” because I was thinking about sympathy vs. empathy in the context of practicing stoicism earlier this year.

This work made me appreciate the method of collaging Japanese paper with watercolor paint because it nicely conveyed the glassy, reflective medium of the window and the floor.

Besides the exhibitions, the real highlight was about the modern architecture, the seaport view, and the many interactive installations and workshops in the museum.

I drew the card on the left: My childhood summer is all about hanging out with grandma, watching TV shows, carving out a huge chunk of watermelon with sister, and delicious steamed egg with rice for dinner in Zhongshan, China.

Here are a few adorable ones drew by others as part of the “Childhood is …” workshop.

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

It was raining lightly when I arrived at the Harvard Art Museums near Harvard Square. The gloomy weather made the courtyard and ceiling lighting somewhat mesmerizing, especially when viewed from the upper floors. Many thanks to Boge for showing me around!

This view of the museum was so mesmerizing, with the perfect lighting from a rainy day.

The statue is the real protagonist in the courtyard.

Mardi Gras on the Boulevards, 1897, by Camille Pissarro (Danish, 1830-1903). Oil on canvas. An impressionist read of Paris in the 1890s, capturing the evanescent energy of the large crowds on the boulevard.

Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, 1873, by Hilaire-Germaine-Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917). Oil on linen. This painting caught my attention because the man appeared to be arranging fluffy clouds on a table.

Charing Cross Bridge: Fog in the Thames, 1903, by Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926). London in the fog.

Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston

My first impression of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum was its elegance and liveliness. The courtyard gave the museum a vibrant ambiance, which was balanced by the classic cloisters and galleries surrounding it. Isabella’s personal motto “C’est mon Plaisir” or “It’s my Pleasure” echoed on my mind throughout my visit. I could imagine the joy she felt while designing this masterpiece, in the hope of celebrating art with the city. This is a powerful reminder that sharing pure joy and beauty is always a great reason to create. As my friends mentioned, visiting the Gardener Museum is all about experiencing good vibes and enjoying the atmospheric views.

Thank you Boston for the vibrant art scenes and inspirations. Till next time!

Generative AI Summit at MIT 2023

Sharing my conference notes and thoughts from a UX and behavioral science perspective after attending the inaugural Generative AI Summit at MIT on March 3, 2023. If you’re exploring similar areas or interested in collaborating on a generative AI project around tools for thought and co-creation, let’s connect.

1. Explainability and Trust

The explainability of an AI system is inherently tied to user trust. To calibrate trust, users must set proper expectations and understand what the AI system can and cannot do, as outlined in the People + AI Guidebook. People learn faster when they can see the system's response to their actions right away. Therefore, it's important to help people understand the cause-and-effect relationship between their actions and the system's response, which fast-tracks human reasoning and learning of the machine's "thought process." As AI increasingly helps solve important tasks in everyday life, how do we deal with the growing complexity of AI systems when we may not understand why they work so well?

In the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari argues that humans' unique ability to create and spread fictions, leading to shared beliefs/religions and collective imagination, makes large-scale human cooperation possible. Ultimately, the ability to quickly establish trust with many strangers fuels human productivity, institutional stability, and industrialization. In the future, when the cost of producing seemingly correct information becomes minimal due to advances in LLMs (Large Language Models), how do we scale trust?

Ellie Pavlickm, Google Research

Keynote by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

2. User Feedback and Control

AI systems are probabilistic, which means they can give an incorrect or unexpected output at times. Therefore, it's critical to develop the right mechanisms to gather user feedback and give users control. This will improve the AI model's output and ensure the user experience is personalized, valuable, and trustworthy.

When errors occur, we need to help users understand the machine errors and provide controls and alternative paths to navigate. This means new mental models will emerge for how humans interact with machines, requiring new levers and interaction patterns, as emphasized by both Linus Lee and Catherine Havasi during the summit. I am curious to explore new human-centered, participatory design research methods to better understand the future relationship between human input and machine output.

Today, a significant portion of UX research and behavioral science involves studying, modeling, and framing specific contexts of a problem space, so we can better reason which design direction or intervention might be more effective in solving user problems. As explained in the essay The Science of Context, the real skill here is “recognizing and articulating context with enough clarity that it illuminates how small changes (e.g., nudges) will affect behavior.” As we explore new levers and interaction patterns for AI product design, the application of behavioral science could play a bigger role in the product development process.

Panel: The Future of Creation (Linus Lee, Nicole Fitzgerald, and Russell Palmer)

3. Augmenting Creativity

While some may question whether human creativity will decrease with the advances in generative AI, I really like how Linus Lee raised the question of whether humanities have been getting better at making music over the past few centuries. Since the key to expanding creative expression is having an augmented ability to say the things we want to say, I see generative AI as a new tool and lens that can introduce inspiring perspectives during the creation process, much like how cameras facilitated new multi-modal art forms (e.g. films and photographs) over the past few decades.

In a previous discussion on creativity that I helped moderate with a group of friends last summer, one key aspect that emerged was the importance of cross-pollination of ideas, which can be facilitated by LLMs through the introduction of serendipity and randomness early in the creation process. In other words, LLMs can help humans quickly explore the unknown. We know that creativity can be fostered conscious actions, which is at the core of human-centered design, emphasizing the process of divergent and convergent thinking. In the future, the creative process may place greater emphasis on elements of chance, selection, and iteration, and augment human decision-making at each step of the human-machine feedback loop.

To effectively interact with generative AI models, it is critical to also augment our ability to accurately communicate what we want and develop clarity of thought, so we can be more capable in the co-creation process of prompt engineering. For example, how might we better describe voice and texture? People need to get better at communicating exactly what they want, whether it is a high-level concept or the specific way we want audio or images to be produced when interacting with LLMs.

4. Emergent Value Systems

With generative AI models now capable of quickly producing vast amounts of open-ended, creative, and multi-modal content, our tastes, values, and evaluation criteria as a society will also evolve. As emphasized by Nicole Fitzgerald during the summit, the ability to curate and fine-tune this content with taste will become critical. We can already see the education industry's evaluation system as one of the first to respond to this impact.

I'm optimistic that social curation and co-creation with collaborators, including both humans and machines, will play a big role in future information discovery processes. Content curation from trusted networks will be key in helping people discover, filter, and digest useful information.

During his keynote speech, Eric Schmidt emphasized the need for new thinkers and interpreters with multidisciplinary backgrounds in both science and art (e.g. math and philosophy) to help people understand the implications of the new AI-powered reality for society. I strongly believe in the value of multidisciplinary conversations, and this reminds me of Robert Pirsig's argument in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig distinguishes between two kinds of understanding of the world: classical and romantic. Classical understanding sees the world primarily in terms of the underlying form itself, with the goal of making the unknown known and bringing order out of chaos. Romantic understanding, on the other hand, sees the world in terms of immediate appearance, and is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, and intuitive.

Currently, there is a lack of reconciliation between classical and romantic understanding. In the case of motorcycle maintenance, for example, although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classical. The problem is that people tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other, which can lead to misunderstandings and underestimations of what the other mode is all about. The real reunification of art and technology is long overdue.

Léonard Boussioux, MIT Operations Research PhD

Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or feedback on this blog post or are interested in collaborating on a generative AI project, I would love to connect. Please feel free to email me.

Practicing Modern Stoicism (Part 1)

Image generated from DALL·E 2 with the prompt “modern stoics”

One of my New Year's resolutions is to be more focused and disciplined. To help achieve this, a friend and I decided to read A Handbook for New Stoics by Massimo Pigliucci together this year. The book offers 52 weekly exercises that teach us how to train our minds with Stoic practice.

Stoicism is a Greco-Roman philosophy that began around 300BCE with Zeno of Citium. Stoic ideas influenced thinkers throughout the Western history (e.g. Descartes) and inspired an effective psychotherapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in the 1950s.

The Stoics believe the best way to live our life is to “live according to nature.” To decide how to live meaningfully (ethics), one has to understand how the world works (physics), and reason appropriately about it (logic). This leads us to the idea of living according to nature—using reasoning-based problem solving to improve social living, as we are social creatures who are deeply interdependent with other people.

To do so, the Stoics, and Epictetus in particular, translate this into living by practicing three disciplines: desire, action, and assent. The Discipline of Desire teaches us what to want (or to avoid), while the Discipline of Action shows us how to act in social situations. The Discipline of Assent helps us make correct judgments about the obstacles that arise in life.

The central concept of Stoicism is the “dichotomy of control,” arguing we should focus our energy on affecting what we can control while regarding everything else as indifferent. This practice is the path toward ataraxia, the Greek word meaning serenity. By training ourselves to only want what is completely in our control, which is the promise of the Discipline of Desire, we become serene.

According to Epictetus, “thought, impulse, and the will to get (and to avoid)” are ultimately under our control. Accounting advances in cognitive sciences, modern Stoics define them as follow:

• Thought is the judgment that things are inherently good or bad; can be implicit or explicit

• Impulse is the urge to act based on value judgments

• Will to get and will to avoid is deciding if it is worth spending the energy, time, and money

Although these three things are in our control, which we can make a conscious decision of, they’re sometimes influenced by external factors (e.g. other people’s opinion) and internal factors (e.g. physical sensations and cravings). Epictetus concludes that everything which is not in our own doing are not under our control (e.g. the body, property, reputation).

Image generated from DALL·E 2 with the prompt “modern stoics”

1. Focus on what’s completely in your control

Counterintuitively, aversion can be seen as a type of desire: the desire to avoid misfortune. The important idea here is to redirect our aversion away from things that we dislike but are not in our power, and to transfer it to things that we can completely control.

2. Take an outside view

The Stoics suggest that we should cultivate sympathy more than empathy. Sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful, while empathy is actively sharing another’s experiences on an emotional level to the extent possible.

This is initially counterintuitive to me, especially as a UX researcher, because our job is to empathize with users and design studies to enable others to fully understand, mirror, and share another person's expressions, needs, and motivations to the extent possible, so we can create products and services that are driven by real user needs.

The Stoics, along with modern psychology and philosophy, further explain that empathy tends to be disproportionate to the situation (i.e. we feel more empathy for people we know or see directly), and does not scale up (i.e. it is impossible to feel empathy for anonymous thousands of people, regardless of how deserving they are).

Whereas sympathy is informed by reason and is therefore more wide ranging. We can sympathize with people we don’t know or whose specific situation we have never experienced, because we’re able to recognize that similar situations would be distressing for us, and that it would be unjust both for us and for anyone else to have to suffer through them.

It’s similar to taking a third-person view of the things we go through personally. This allows us to develop a more balanced and reasonable judgment, as if these events do not touch us directly. This approach also aligns with the method of practicing more self-sympathy when facing hardship, which is common in psychotherapy.

And here comes one of my favorite exercises: write about a problem or worry and offer yourself some advice from the outside perspective each night for a week. For example, instead of writing “I feel nervous about …” start by writing “You feel nervous about …” Self-empathy may lead to magnifying internal turmoil, whereas self-sympathy helps us take a step back to take the emotion out of frustrated situations, so we can see things in an objective and clearer way.

Generated from DALL·E 2 with the prompt “statue of stoics pondering with a blue sky”

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Practicing Modern Stoicism series to learn more about my journey.

The Art of Loving: Reading Notes

I initially read The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm in July 2022, in the hope of reflecting and learning systematically about the theory, science, and best practices of love. The more I learn, the stronger I felt that the education of love is long overdue and missing from our conversations today. I love how Fromm explains the evolution of love as a concept in the context of our biological needs as humans and the Western capitalist society in which we live. In retrospect, many common misconceptions of love could have been avoided have I encountered this book earlier. I noted a few key themes that I deeply resonate with as I go through the book:

Fromm argues Love is Giving

1. Common misconception: Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or to be loved by—is difficult. Fromm argues love is the activity of giving, which lies the highest expression of vitality and productiveness.

2. In capitalist society, love becomes package and commodities of exchange, as being lovable and attractive usually means a package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market for most people. Falling in love becomes a bargain; “the object should be desirable from the the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities.”

3. The education of love, and of mature, loving qualities, is missing. As in learning any other art (e.g. music, medicine, engineering), one must both learn the theory and the practice. However, “in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims and almost none to learn the art of loving.”

Photo by Jerry Zhang on Unsplash

How might we develop the ability to love?

4. The ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. It assumes the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals.

5. The ability to love requires care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. Respect (the root of the word respicere = to look at) is the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation.

6. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. I personally love this somewhat brutal analogy: “the child takes something apart, breaks it up in order to know it; or it takes an animal apart; cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in order to know it, to force its secret. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.”

7. Common misconception: For most people, their own person, as well as others, is soon explored and soon exhausted. It’s easy to assume we already know our partner when we become familiar with each other. But there were more depth in the experience of the other person—if one can experience the infiniteness of his personality—the other person would never be so familiar. Then the experience of overcoming the barriers and separateness might occur everyday anew.

8. In modern society, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others. Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain.

9. Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence. Real conflicts between two people, those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification, they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned.

10. To master any art, anyone must begin by practicing disciplines, concentration and patience throughout every phase of his life. Concentration is a necessary condition for the mastery of an art. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself—and paradoxically, this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. To learn concentration requires avoiding, as far as possible, trivial conversation, that is, conversation which is not genuine.

11. Love also requires rational faith. Just as the purpose of education is to help the child realize their full potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities, and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adults put into them what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable. Having faith in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment.

The Social Psychology of Emotion in Inside Out

I was embarrassingly tearing up in the classroom when I watched the Pixar movie Inside Out in our final lecture of Social Psychology of Emotion. As a psychology student, I can definitely appreciate the thoughtfulness behind the production of Inside Out. With the five basic emotions as the main characters, the level of scientific rigor is truly admirable. Interestingly, during the planning phase of the production, the team consulted Paul Ekman, a well-known emotion psychologist focused on facial expression, and Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, who explores the science behind happiness, compassion, love, power, and social class. Notably, these two scholars are the foundational psychologists in developing theories on the expression of emotions.

Basic Emotions Theory by Ekman and Keltner

Paul Ekman initially proposes 6 basic emotions, which includes fear, anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness. He later developed the Basic Emotions Theory (BET), where these basic emotions have brief patterns of facial behaviour that are distinct and serve as signals of the senders’ current state, intentions, and assessment of situation. Moreover, these basic emotions also manifest some degree of cross-cultural universality and have evolutionary roots to help us with better adaptation in life.

Whereas Dacher Keltner proposes a multimodal approach to the Basic Emotions Theory (BET), where he believes emotions are about actions. The expression of emotion should manifest in multiple modalities, such as facial muscle movement, voice, bodily movements, and gesture, since emotions cannot happen in isolation.

Sadness can strengthen relationships

Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness in Inside Out

To start off with the definition of emotion: “Emotion is an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus [including] cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, autonomic and neural arousal, impulses to action, and behaviour designed to have an effect upon the stimulus that initiated the complex sequence” (Plutchik, 1982).

In the beginning of Inside Out, Sadness feels that she is not doing any good and only makes things worse in improving and regulating Riley’s emotion. From time to time, Joy tries her best to stop Sadness from touching any memory balls and thus stop “contaminating” happy memories into sad ones. However, the culminating moment (and turning point) in the film is when Joy realizes Sadness evokes reaction from the surrounding and makes other people come help Riley out of the situation.

In the scene where Riley is sad because she has lost a hockey match, her sadness actually makes her parents come out to support her. When her friends later come over to celebrate with her, she is now happy and full of joy. This is a great example of how emotion actually helps evoke a set of complex reactions that help regulate and improve the situation for Riley. From then on, Joy begins to recognize the importance of all five basic emotions instead of trying to get rid of Sadness because it seems “useless.” From a scientific perspective, Keltner proposes that sadness is actually an emotion that can strengthen relationships. Although Joy does play a major role in controlling and regulating the other four emotions, they each have their own job and functionality as a team.

A healthy psychological state is a team sport

Look Out from the “Emotion Headquarter”

In the emotion literature, there are two approaches to understand emotion: the categorical approach, where emotions are distinct entities as in Inside Out, and the dimensional approach, where emotions are defined based on three core dimensions (i.e. valence, activation, and arousal).

In Inside Out, the film applies the categorical approach to define emotion, but at the end of the plot where Riley plays hockey in a team, all of the emotions (i.e. Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear) are activated to perform as a team at that moment. Thus, emotions actually function in a more complex way than simply having the five emotion types function separately at work. In fact, most emotions encompasses more than the dominant type and may shift as we navigate through the situation. For example, an initial sad memory may actually help evoke care from other people, thus strengthening relationships and turn the event into a happy and joyful ending. Inside Out is able to depict this complexity through careful design of the visual depiction, which is really admirable and scientifically accurate.

Visualization of human memory and personality formation

The visualization of how human memory regulate and develop is truly mind-blowing in Inside Out. Just as how the human brain works in reality, Pixar is able to narrates how our personality is supported by several core events and memories, and that each piece of memory is a “memory ball” with a more dominant emotion. I especially love the depiction of the long term memory database in the film, where there are “memory cleaners” who get rid of old and dysfunctional memory balls to maintain a healthy state of memory storage.

From a developmental perspective, the first emotion that Riley born with is happiness, but more accurately, within 30 seconds, other emotions kick in and the baby begins to cry — as part of the developmental process to grow and perceive the world based on these distinct but cooperatively emotion types.

Riley’s Imaginary Friend Bing Bong in the Long Term Memory Database

Long Term Memory Database

Our core memory transforms and helps us grow

Moreover, as in our emotion regulation lecture, when Riley’s emotional state has a breakdown, some of the core memories and islands get destroyed. As much as we lament the disappearance of childhood fun times and our imaginary friends, it is quite true that these may all fade as we grow up and we will meet new adventures down in the journey. Some old memories must go, as we need to build resiliency through each phase of human development from a child, a teenager to a fully grown adult.

Understanding humans inside out is to build empathy

Recall Happy Memory from a “Memory Ball”

Lastly, I love the last scene where we can now take a peak in different characters’ minds inside out, from the teacher, the pizza server, the teenage boy, and even the cat on the street. Recognizing and trying to understand others’ emotional state is part of our ability to empathize with the world. When we attempt to listen, observe, and understand how others navigate the jungle through managing the five emotions in their own heads, we reach a better and more in-depth understanding of each other. The world is more interesting precisely because we have complex and functional emotions at work all the time. Thank you Inside Out for doing such a great job in bridging all this in a fun and accessible way for a broad set of audience.

Value of the Ordinary

This semester, I take a year-long course on Chaucer's literature and we were assigned to read the Canterbury Tales for the spring term. We are now at the Miller's Tale from the first fragment, but I found it quite difficult to appreciate the value behind these medieval comedic stories, where its narration of the ordinary people and their lives are filled with jokes (and sadly I do not find it funny in anyways), adulteries, and superficial horseplays. The style of Medieval conversations for the lower class uses plenty of coarse and even "bawdy" language in their dialogue and storytelling.

Canterbury tales mural by Ezra Winter. North Reading Room, west wall, Library of Congress John Adams Building, Washington, D.C.

During this week's office hour, I asked my professor "what’s the value of comedy, beside serving as a satire and reflecting the state of society at the time? It seems like tragedy has more 'literary value,’ because the themes in tragedy seemed more eternal in humanity research." My professor replied, "the value of comedy lies exactly in the narration of the ordinary. Comedy reflects the social convention at the time, the thoughts, the emotions, the constraints, and the dialogue of the average people … the 'invisible' population from heroic or epic stories. The experience of the ordinary people may be a 'truer' reflection of the society in the history, as opposed to the exciting and heroic stories of the knights and kings. The ordinary has its own unique value, although it is not so easy to appreciate and resonate with what they cared about at the time." I silently agreed and I thought because the value of the ordinary is often "invisible" and "not-so-exciting-to-recount", it is often undervalued and out of sight.

In our modern society, along with our limited attention and mental resources, it is the wisest to place our attention on the more "significant" things and events, rather than spending time on the relatively trivial and mundane. With this mindset, it is great that we can act more efficiently, by attending to the most important and the most "valuable" aspects of the world. But with this focused and "filtered" mindset, we are also vulnerable to overlook the value of the ordinary, the "not-so-significant" events, and the trivial every day life that occupies a huge portion of our daily experience. A hundred years from now, the part of our experience that does not fit into the category of having "historical significance" may be forgotten and become irrelevant for the future, just as how we may find it difficult to appreciate the mundane life of the average medieval people narrated by Chaucer. 

The Beauty of Emotion Narrative

A film review of “Call Me by Your Name”, directed by Luca Guadagnino, 2018

On a bright summer day in northern Italy, the 17-year-old Elio puts on his sun glasses and lies on a chair in the yard with sunlight washes over him. A typical pleasant summer afternoon with cheerful music, hot air, shiny green leaves, and cool water in the pond. Orange trees have filled the garden, leaving plenty of space for shades and gentle breeze. 

Elio writes music. Delightful and simple tones are the most beloved in the film, partly because it suits the best with the relaxation (and perhaps idleness) of the day to day life in the villa. He is having the best time in his youth, enjoying the glittering days of inspiration and exploration.

Things have changed once Oliver, a charming visiting scholar, arrives to spend the summer with his family. Every eye contact, body movement, and slip of word between the two becomes hint for emotion narratives. There are different phases of emotional development between the two protagonists. Elio and Oliver first begin with careful exploration of each other, where both of them are aware of the emotional tension, but will not disclose it. The awakening desire for sensual pleasure gradually dominates Elio, where he craves deeply for Oliver, for an unexplored territory and sensation in his life. These subtle desire are narrated in a very open and unsophisticated way that guides the viewers to appreciate the authentic desire and sensibility of human experience.

As a viewer, the mundane day to day narration of their summer seems perfectly ordinary. But it is evident that Guadagnino embeds complex emotional tension within the simple family dialogue. By gradually unveiling the relationship of Elio and Oliver, Guadagnino in fact investigates the nature of love, emotion, and relationship, as well as their influence on human experience as a whole.

Specifically, Guadagnino conveys a stance on the significance of having courage to confront your own awakening desire in life, because there is nothing to be shameful of when you encounter your true emotion. As Mr. Perlman says to Elio, “you had a beautiful friendship...Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you.” Encountering and embracing your true desire and emotion is a courageous thing to do, and it is incredibly beautiful too." 

In every stage of our growth, we gingerly perceive, silently observe, and sometimes reluctantly constrain our emotion toward a relationship, a desire, or an experience. Instead of snuffing the flame at the root, Mr. Perlman reminds us to all be gentle to these precious moment of emotion awakening. As Perlman points out “withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better...to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” Indeed, we value emotion and regard it as a unique human experience that distinguish us from the crowd. The process of emotional exploration guides us to understand ourselves, our identity and our value. When Oliver and Elio initiate their jargon of “call me by your name” and repeatedly call each other “Elio” and “Oliver”, the intimate affection leads to something symbolic and abstract that represent their hearts.

Interestingly, in Chaucer’s writing, he also repeatedly mentions that “love is the greatest law above all”. However, in this film, neither the fidelity of love nor the promise of love matters that much. It is the emotion within human affection that moves us and guides the growth of the protagonists. Love can be arbitrary, demonstrated in the final phone call from Oliver, telling Elio that he will get married soon. Love hurts. But love, as well as other types of emotion, has the power to move us and reminds us of its preciousness.

Lastly, the title “call me by your name” is a hint of intimacy for those who are engaged in a deep relationship. It serves as a symbol that suggests a blurring line between “you” and “me”, which is referred by the blurring identity between the two names. Eventually, Guadagnino reminds us to never devalue the beauty of emotion, the confusing moment of ambiguity, and the precious awakening moment of desire.