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life, and the parts have certain necessary relationships to one another. He
identifi ed six qualitative elements of drama and suggested the relationships
among them in terms of formal and material causality
8
(see Figure 2.2).
I present his model here for a couple of reasons. First, I am continually
amazed by the elegance and robustness of the categories and their causal
relations. Following the causal relations through as one creates or analyzes
a drama seems to automagically reveal the ways in which things should
work or exactly how they have gone awry. Aristotle's model creates a dis-
ciplined way of thinking about the design of a play in both constructing
and debugging activities. Because of its fundamental similarities to drama,
human-computer interaction can be described with a similar model, with
equal utility in both design and analysis.
Figure 2.3 lists the elements of qualitative structure in hierarchical order.
Here is the trick to understanding the hierarchy: Each element is the formal
ELEMENT
IN DRAMA
IN HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
Action
(Plot)
The whole action being repre-
sented. The action is theoretically
the same in every performance.
The whole action as it is collaboratively
shaped by designer and interactor. The ac-
tion may vary in each interactive session.
Character
Bundles of predispositions and
traits, inferred from agent's pat-
terns of choice.
The same as in drama, but including agents
of both human and computer origin.
Thought
Inferred internal processes
leading to choice: cognition,
emotion, and reason.
The same as in drama, but includ-
ing processes of both human and
computer origin.
Language
The selection and arrangement
of words; the use of language.
The selection and arrangement of signs,
including verbal, visual, auditory, and
other nonverbal phenomena when
used semiotically.
Melody
(Pattern)
Everything that is heard, but
especially the melody of speech.
The pleasurable perception of pattern in
sensory phenomena.
Spectacle
(Enactment)
Everything that is seen.
The sensory aspects of the action being
represented: visual, auditory, kinesthetic,
tactile, and all others.
Figure 2.2.
Six qualitative elements of structure, in drama
and in human-computer interactions.
8. The explicit notion of the workings of formal and material causality in the hierarchy of struc-
tural elements is, although not apocryphal, certainly neo-Aristotelean (see Smiley 1971).
