When I was attending in the lecture, the language of new media the last week, I was thinking again and again that it was hard for me to read Umberto Eco’s novels such as the name of rose, Baudolono, and Foucault’s pendulum. I couldn’t continue to read the books, and then threw them away somewhere…
Read more In my current brain’s context
So Erik presented his notion that interaction design works with a ‘material without qualities’. By this he means that digital artifacts can take on so many different forms–and the forms possible are constantly shifting due to technological advances–that is very hard to pin down a set list of qualities to describe the medium, as say…
Read more materiality in language(s) of interaction
As Tyler Pace elaborates, mention of a “material without qualities” by Eric Stolterman stirred much curiousity about its existence. The authors of Thoughtful Interaction Design mention the material without qualities because interaction design possesses few qualities as a material. There is nothing that we can perceive as a material without qualities because those qualities are what permit us to recognize it as a material. There are so many perceivable…
Read more Designers: The Materials of Design
Inspired by Erik Stolterman’s guest lecture, many bloggers this week have discussed that interaction design concerns itself with the “material without qualities.” As mentioned in lecture, all designers work with materials and the qualities of those materials have a profound effect on the product. Many have commented on the growing struggle within the field to…
Read more Choice: A Material of Interaction Design?
While reading through Barnard, I couldn’t help continuously going back to the idea of ‘understanding’ and how it relates to the idea of ‘material without qualities’. Understanding, from my interpretation of the assigned Barnard’s chapters, seems to contain both aspects of meaning and intention. What I interpreted the chapter to be saying is that to…
Read more meaning vs. intention
After reading Manovich this week, and making a dent in Barnard, I find it really very interesting how open the topic of visual culture seems to be. I’m no expert (obviously) but it seems in a lot of other fields out there that most professionals / educators / researchers / bums seem to really focus…
Read more Visualization
I took a class in the school of education’s IST department over the summer and did a short collection assignment. We had to choose a set of instructional/informational graphics from our lived environment. I took my road trip from Indiana to California when I moved Aaron to San Francisco as the perfect opportunity to work…
Read more signs and information culture
Well let me say first of all I have enjoyed reading all your posts this week and last week. I don’t always have something meaningful to say (that doesn’t stop me a lot of the time, but I DO love how there has been some conversation going on) so I don’t always respond. A recurring…
Read more Are we attempting the impossible?
I have been thinking about Erik Stolterman’s lecture about design. A large part of the lecture was about the tools and materials used by designers. He used a carpenter analogy and stressed that the skilled designers, including carpenters, carefully select the tools they use for a task. As interaction designers, one of the most important…
Read more Tools For Interaction Design – Experience Prototyping & Beyond
I’m involved in an interesting informal “Brand 2.0 Master Class” over at Innovation Playground. The question we’re all wrestling with is what “Brand” is now with the numerous changes in the consumer culture. For those of you who have not encountered formalized definitions of “brand”, here is a pretty good sample from the Wikipedia entry:…
Read more Brand = People = Medium = Message