Reading Assignment
A NEW PARADIGM
- At the same time as post-modern ideas presented interesting challenges to the dominant modernist paradigm, the digital revolution of the late 1980s and the 1990s distracted designers with more practical concerns about how they did their work.
-The expansion of the internet, originally designed as communication technology for research scientists and the military, also opened the door to entirely new areas of design practice.
THE INSIGHT OF MARSHAL McLUHAN
- Was responsible for the some of the earliest discourse about media culture and its impact on society, and many of his ideas are still provocative today.
- His ideas within the context of the networked environment include: The medium is the message, hot and cool media, acoustical space, and the global village.
- McLuhan posed four questions that we should ask about any medium in order to understand its effects. He called these the "tetrad" or laws of media: Amplification: What aspects of society or human life does the medium enhance or amplify? Obsolescence: What aspect of earlier media does it eclipse or obsolesce? Retrieval: What does the medium retrieve or pull back into center stage from the shadows of obsolescence? Reversal: What does the medium reverse or flip into when it has run its course or been developed to its fullest potential?
A CONVERGENCE OF MEDIA
- The collision of convergence of old and new produce outcomes that often define particular periods in our technological world.
- Remediation is the process through which the characteristics and approaches of competing media are imitated, altered, and critiqued in a new medium - representation of one medium in another.
- Hypermediacy - bits and pieces of other media assembled as fragments within the context of the new medium, or completely subsumes older media so that they are no longer recognizable.
WHAT IS A SYSTEM?
- Graphic designers tend to define systems as something they make: a graphic identity system; a packaging system for a family of related products; or a typographic system for the layout of magazines. In these cases, the designer determines rules for how visual/spatial components relate to each other in a variety of applications.
-We need to to consider design as an element or force that produces some kind of change within other systems that are included in the definition of the problem.
-Systems may be affected by outside forces, but they always respond in ways that are characteristic to the system itself. If the same force were to affect a different system, the result would be different, even through the force is the same.
COMPLEXITY AND EXPERIENCE
- Implicit in design work or the technological mediation of experience at these levels is the ida of complexity, or an increasingly intricate web or interactions among people, objects, and settings.
THE NATURE OF EXPERIENCE
- In the 1930's, John Dewey wrote that an experience must have a beginning and an end; we know when it starts and when it finishes. He referred to this as "material running its course to fulfillment."
- It is also important to understand that we as designers cannot design someone else's experience. We can design the conditions in and through which someone constructs his or her own experience.
THE CHANGING NOTION OF AUDIENCE
- Under post modernist frameworks, the designer was also a critic, intervening on the audience's behalf to point out the character of the social landscape: its plurality of meanings, its relationships of power, and the shifting value of its signs.
-Under such communication missions, the designer's concept of audience was shaped largely by personal experience and longstanding cultural conventions governing the presentation of printed information.
SCENARIOS, CONCEPT MAPS, AND PERSONAS
-Scenarios are stories or scripts for projected action. They break down the activities of users into narrative episodes that describe what a user is trying to achieve and the conditions and sequence of steps under which he or she is likely to achieve it.
- Concept maps illustrate how actions or events may be sequenced in larger systems.
- Personas are descriptions of actual or invented people with particular social roles that allow the designer to think of user interactions in terms of specific goals and behaviors.
A NEW PARADIGM
- Hugh Dubberly, came up with questions we must ask ourselves when designing a system:
- For this situation, what is the system?
- What is the environment?
- What goal does the system have in relation to its environment?
- What is the feedback loop by which the system corrects its actions?
- How dose the system measure whether it has achieved its goal?
- Who defines the system, environment, goal, etc.; and monitors it?
- What resources does the system have for maintaing the relationship it desires?
- Are its resources sufficient to meet its purpose?
