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Nearly 20 years later, in his book Emotional Design , Norman (2004) says:
We cognitive scientists now understand that emotion is a necessary part
of life, affecting how you feel, how you behave, and how you think. In-
deed, emotion makes you smart.
In more recent years, Norman might say that direct engagement arises
from the emotional pleasure of a well-designed affordance; the character-
istics of immediacy and lack of fussy procedural steps simply make direct
manipulation feel good to us.
Here, I think, is an important articulation between psychology, inter-
face design, and theatre. Direct engagement in the theatre arises fi rst of
all from real-time enactment and the enhanced attention it evokes. Audi-
ences (and actors) have immediate emotional responses to the action on
stage. Over the course of a play, emotions take on greater resonance, ideally
producing empathy (literally, “feeling with” the characters). The interface
(the venue, stage machinery, etc.) is not a matter of direct concern; when
an audience is directly engaged with the action of the play, these elements
literally disappear from conscious awareness. Further, theatrical audiences
have an expectation of emotional pleasure. We will examine the nature of
that pleasure in the next chapter.
Psychology is a familiar domain to dramatists, actors, and other the-
atre artists because of its focus on the human mind, behavior, and emo-
tions. Understanding how psychology and theatre are alike and different
may illuminate the distinct contributions that each can make in the fi eld
of human-computer interaction. The two domains have several elements
in common. Both concern themselves with how agents relate to one an-
other in the process of communicating, fi ghting, solving problems, building
things, having fun—the whole range of human activity. Both interpret hu-
man behavior in terms of emotions, goals, confl icts, discoveries, changes of
mind, successes, and failures. Both observe and analyze human behavior,
but each employs those means to different ends: In general, psychology at-
tempts to understand what goes on with humans in the real world with all
their fuzziness and loose ends, while theatre means to represent a kind of
thing that might go on, simplifi ed for the purposes of logical and affective
clarity. Psychology explicates human behavior, while theatre represents it in
a form that provides intellectual and emotional closure. Theatre is informed
by psychology, but it turns a trick that is outside of psychology's province
through the direct representation of action.
 
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