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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
I’d like to return to Erik’s discussion for a moment. When considering the designer, his/her tools, and the material, I want to address experience (meaning the empirical knowledge, procedural knowledge, the “know-how,” etc. in observing or working with a thing or event). To use the carpenter as an example again: The carpenter’s material is wood,…
Marty cited the well-known quote from Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the message.” Although the expression elicited lots of debates and some scholars even raised a different idea, “the message is the medium”, his thinking still makes sense to me in some degree. I believe that the characters of different medium would influence how people…
Interaction Culture 