• Exercise for Thursday o The following exercise shall be led and facilitated by the three Ph.D. students. o 45 minutes: Get into groups of 2-3. Answer the following questions: 1. What are some specific cinematic issues or techniques in the representation of reality (e.g., realism versus formalism)? Come up with a list. 2. Pick…
Jeff’s last lecture has got me thinking that much of Massive Amateur Culture is about emergence. Platforms emerge, the things that people create on them emerge and cultural phenomena emerge as people interact with (and even change) those products. The whole thing is one big complex system, whose most beautiful and exciting output is often…
One line in Gimhyewon’s post got me to thinking about a topic that comes up a lot in art and design – the notion that creative work always feels incomplete and that a mature artist/designer develops the ability to know when to walk away from their work. I’ve seen this play out in a particularly…
Christian Briggs and I were recently discussing the role of feedback (i.e. focus groups, formative and summative evaluations, etc.) in the design process – specifically how it can be a real double-edged sword when you’re developing an original idea. While there’s undeniable value in having your work evaluated from a fresh perspective, there’s also the…
So, I wrote Jeff an email mentioning that I was really curious about the design orientation of the program. The more I’m here, I told him, the more I appreciate the interdisciplinary approach to informatics that the program embodies. So many different perspectives, so much emphasis on social and aesthetic aspects – it’s all very,…
All that stuff that Jeff mentioned in Tuesday’s lecture about the sort of dialectic analysis that structuralists employ actually reminded me of something from my design workflow. It’s an ideation technique that an Industrial Designer friend of mine (“Dale”) showed me when we were collaborating on an museum exhibit design a few years back, although…
Christian’s excellent introduction to Lev Manovicht focused in part on the power of the medium to shape communication. The term “medium” refers to the communicative substrate that we chose to “fix” a given message, different examples include: print, radio, film, television, web and so on. What’s fascinating about media is how they invariably shape both…
Something in the reading got me to thinking about the old “form versus function” discourse, specifically in the context of digital design. As you may already know, all designed things have both a form and function component. The “form” of a thing can generally be described as how it looks or is shaped, while its…
Interaction Culture 