I was particularly drawn to two ideas in the piece by Gillian Smith. (i) Computation is a design material (of interaction design). (ii) Interaction design is still drawing on the language of previous creative modes, and has not yet fully developed an independent language of interaction true to the medium of computation, networks, and telecommunications.…
In both major readings for next week’s class, the concept of “materiality” looms large. In Lowgren & Stolterman, the first several pages talk about materiality–for instance, the notion that a carpenter knows that wood (his material) has special characteristics or “qualities”: wood can be cut into useful pieces (i.e., it can be shaped) but it…
Read more Materiality and Qualities (A Prelude to Next Week)
G. Smith concludes her Forward to Designing Interactions by saying that interaction design as a field has solved one set of problems, and it now needs to move onto a new set. However, after twenty years of drawing on existing expressive languages [e.g., film, typography, icons], we now need to develop an independent language of…
Interaction Culture 