A Comparative Review of ‘The Story of Your Life’ and ‘An Empirical Perspective on Visual Icon Design’
It is always very interesting to look back on the fictional stories written in the past and how people envisioned a fictional world with a different science, society, and technology at that time. Comparing their depictions to what researchers are actually working on in the same year show us what drives their inspiration, how much they imagined out of the box and how their fiction can be relevant to the existing disciplines in that year. For this review, this comparison is made between the short story of Ted Chiang [1] called “The Story of Your Life” published in 1998, and the research paper “An Empirical Perspective on Visual Icon Design” by Andrew Sears et al. [2] from the same year.
The story follows through the events that Dr. Louise Banks, who is a linguist, encounters throughout her lifetime. We see the story alternating from what is happening in her life at the present time, and some memories with her daughter at various times in her life. At the present time, she is recruited by the government to decipher the language of the aliens that have arrived at earth, and we witness her process of learning the foreign language. In the meantime, she narrates her memories with her daughter in the future tense, which gives us a clue about the time sequence of the story. By understanding the language, science and the thinking process of the aliens, Louise becomes able to think like them, thus enables her to see her entire life from that moment until the end. Even though she knows her daughter’s tragic future, she feels determined to play her role in this lifetime and make the decisions that she is supposed to make.
This story gives us a different perspective about how we humans approach language, science and how our thinking processes are shaped sequentially unlike the aliens depicted in the story. The example that best explains this difference is Fermat’s principle of light traveling through water, which is described in the story. It states that the path that light takes from the air through water is the fastest route to reach the destination compared to any other path it might have taken [1]. How our scientists explain light refraction is a cause and effect relationship; the light changes direction because of coming across the water. However, the aliens’ science in the story is based on purposive physical laws instead of causal, which suggests that the light ray took this specific path in order to get to its end goal in the least time. This means that the light ray knows which path to take all along, and decides the path according to it. The way the aliens shape their language is the same as this principle; they know from the start what they want to say, so they write a phrase, sentence, paragraph or even a page long script, starting from any part of it. Their thinking process is therefore not sequential, unlike how we think, talk, write and perceive time. For this reason, they are unable to understand the humans’ scientific laws consisting of cause and effect relationships, and their spoken language is not in a specific order since the words or phrases are randomly placed in the sentence. This way of thinking enables them to see their whole life cycle and live through it non-sequentially.
Our way of thinking sequentially is reflected in many aspects of our life. This includes education, design, research, and more. When we take an overall look at the research paper of Andrew Sears et al., we can see the sequential process of how their research is shaped. They first did a literature research about evaluations of pictographic symbols in our daily lives (e.g. airports, road signs, etc.) and found out that there is a lack of evaluation of the pictographic symbols used in the graphical user interfaces. After that, they conducted a study with participants to measure the effectiveness, identifiability, frequency of use of the functions and icons in the graphical user interface of Microsoft Word 7.0. They gathered and analyzed the data to achieve the results for these topics and discussed them in the paper. Their research study is concluded with some understanding of how the users perceive the icons, how frequently they use them and what affects these results. As we can see, there is a sequential pattern in their research study since they didn’t know from the start what conclusion the research would have, even though they might have had some predictions about it. The way they present their study is also in an order starting from the introduction and ending with a conclusion, which also supports the idea of our thinking and communicating process presented in the story.
However, one would argue that there are some aspects of our lives that involve a purposive way of thinking. Even though we do not predict the end result, our decisions are often driven by our end goal. Similar to the light ray, we try to reach that end goal by going through the best route possible. Unlike Fermat’s principle, our path is not pre-determined and we can never know if it was the ideal path even though we reach that goal. In this paper for example, their end goal was to gain knowledge about the perception and usage of the icons in a graphical interface, which they achieved at the end of their study. But was their method of research the most ideal choice? Would they have gained more information if they included participants without experience with computers or Microsoft Word? We can only predict, but we can not know what the alternative paths that they might have taken would provide.
Also, not every concept is completely sequential or causal in our lives either. To give an example, although there are some steps in a design process, for instance; researching, idea generating, prototyping and testing, the designer might go back and forth between the steps when necessary. Similar to Sears et al.’s paper, the end goal is what drives the project and it affects every step of the design decisions. Throughout the whole project duration, the designer might perform steps of the design process simultaneously at times. However, unlike purposive way of thinking, the end goal might change midway through the project. To give another example, engineers might benefit from reverse engineering, which is the opposite of the design process. This is the process of knowing the result or the end goal and trying to find out what path was taken to achieve it. But of course, these processes still continue in a sequence as time moves forward.
This paper is chosen for comparison because it is a good example of a research process to compare with the ideas in the story, but also because it was investigating how the users read and understand icons. As explained in the story, the aliens were not using sequential letters like us, but their written language consisted of a combination of semagrams, which are meaningful statements on their own, and when combined together with other semagrams they create more complex and meaningful statements. The orientation of each semagram in relation to each other have a different meaning in their language. Even though humans don’t use semagrams as the written language, the icons that we use in our daily lives are very similar to this concept. For example, the arrow icon indicates direction, and when combined with a stair icon we can understand that the sign is directing the users to the stairs. Similarly to their language, the orientation of the arrow brings a different meaning to the statement. While some of the icons we use are based on the actual appearance of what they represent, some of them are metaphorical. For instance, we do not use floppy discs to save our documents into anymore, yet the ‘save’ function is still represented by a floppy disc icon, and we are still able to understand what that icon represents.
Sears et al.’s paper aims to evaluate if the metaphorical representations of the functions are perceived as effective and identifiable by users. The results show that one of the most important factors affecting users being able to identify the icons is their experience with the program used in the study. Since some of the icons do not directly represent the actual appearance of the functions as some of them are abstract concepts, users learned their meanings through experience. However, in Chiang’s story, we do not know if the semagrams are a direct visual representation of the appearances or not, and how they learn the language. Their semagrams are described as looking like “fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style” when combined forming an “Escheresque lattice”, and the aliens are described as “barrels suspended at the intersection of seven limbs”. Since we have no other descriptions of semagrams for other objects, the rest is left to the reader’s imagination.
In the short story, we also see a theme of determinism with Louise’s choices. Even though she knows about the divorce with her husband and the tragic death of her daughter in the future, she does not attempt to change her fate. She sees her own and others’ actions as a role to play in a readily scripted life, instead of having free will and being able to change her predetermined decisions. This might also be interpreted as her way of choosing the ideal path to her end goal, similar to the light rays, or it can be the solution of the author to the paradox that would occur when she knows the future and attempts to change it.
Ted Chiang’s short story provides a new perspective to the way humans think, how our science and language is shaped by this thought process and how alternative ways of thinking would be like. By realizing our causal and sequential understanding of life, it is easy to find many examples that adopt this ideology. The research study of Sears et al. about the evaluation of visual icon designs in graphical user interfaces is one of the many examples that we can see this. However, as discussed in this paper, some aspects of our lives contain alternative ways of thinking. That is how Fermat came up with the principle of the least time for the light rays traveling through water. Furthermore, in both of these pieces of literature, a language as a semagram is the center of the topic. While the story focuses on the logic behind the language, the research paper focuses on the identifiability, effectiveness, and frequency of usage of the individual icons. By comparing this story with other research papers in different fields other than GUIs, it is possible to see how Chiang’s perspective relates or contrasts with the current work at that time, which can provide interesting insights as well.
References
[1] T. Chiang, “Story of your life,” in Stories of Your Life and Others, 1998, pp. 117-78.
[2] A. Sears, J. Jacko, B. Brewer and L. Robelo, “An empirical perspective on visual icon design,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 448-451, 1998.
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