The Book
Carmen et Error
Multiplicity, embodiment, and poetic practice
Twenty-three essays developing theories of practice for interaction design.
Carmen et Error develops an approach to interaction design grounded in multiplicity: the capacity of a single form to sustain different worlds of meaning, and of a participant to move among them. Philosophy, social science, and narrative theory meet music, ritual, performance, and spatial composition in an inquiry into how experiences acquire their form through the bodies and interpretations of those who inhabit them.
The theories emerge from tracing lines across practices that are rarely considered together. Musical phrasing becomes a way to think about spatial narrative; embodied technique raises questions about the knowledge an interface admits or excludes; commentary and ritual offer architectures for holding different readings in relation. Across these crossings, the book asks how to compose an experience whose coherence can accommodate difference—and what it means to take responsibility for a world another person will inhabit.
The Arc
Five parts. Twenty-three essays. Ideas recur, change company, and take on different meanings.
Four Routes
Read from the beginning, or follow a thread that interests you. These four routes offer a few ways through.
Making things
7 essaysMusic, tools, rooms, and worlds
How an arrangement becomes a place, a tool becomes familiar, and a room invites someone to act. The choices I encounter in making work, and what happens when another person enters it.
Follow an idea into practice.
The whole book
23 essaysFrom the first question to the last turn
Read in sequence and let the recurring objects gather meaning: a spinning disc, a trained hand, a room remembered, a song that returns differently. The argument grows through their crossings.
Begin with the gap between a work and an experience.
What we owe
5 essaysAttention, consent, and consequence
What does someone carry away from an experience? These essays ask about memory, responsibility, and the limits of what I can know about another person's life.
Stay with the person who comes out.
Lives in company
8 essaysPlaying, cooking, remembering, returning
A session circle, a shared kitchen, a virtual hotel, a familiar song. What becomes possible between people, and what remains difficult when the gathering ends.
Enter through a room or a voice.