Reading Tips

Here is an article that I meant to share with all of you sooner. It is a framework for critiquing interfaces, from Bertelsen & Pold. You may find it helpful as you work on your papers. From a philosophical standpoint, I have some issues with it. But from a practical standpoint, I’m really glad it’s…

Read more Interaction Criticism

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…

Read more Key Quote from Readings