Interaction Design, Design Education, Design Thoughts
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Well, now that we did the big 4 it was time to work on the more mundane crud of my financial and personal life. In my first installment I gave a pretty intense and long list of everything that needs to be done in this regard and since there is so much, I’m definitely not going to go into the detail that I went into before. I’m just going to highlight a few examples of the good the bad and the ugly …
First I want to say, that it is VERY cool that for the most part you don’t really need any of these in order to do any thing else below. For almost everything you do, just having your court papers will be enough.
The difference with the “Big 4″ is that these 4 require at least to see an original certified (embossed) copy of the court order, while everything else can just use a copy. Fortunately, they all return your court order to you. If I was to do this again, I wouldn’t have bought 5 copies, but I guess at $6 a piece it does save a lot of aggrevation. You really only seem to need 3 copies if you want to do everything at the same time as the Passport and Birth Cert. are done via mail. You’ll get back your originals, but not in a timely fashion.
Walking around the city today, it really occurred to me that when we speak of “richness” in RIAs the “I” (Internet) while relevant techologically, isn’t really all that relevant from a designer’s perspective. … well maybe it is.
It seems that people have responded to my name change and want some more info about it. I thought I’d discuss service design and my name change. Might even be helpful to folks. As a summary, the following agencies or types of agencies are required for changing your name. Most of these are what a woman traditionally goes through if they take their spouses name. I had the added luxury of having to deal the county Kings County (Brooklyn) Civil Court. So here is the fun list:
Ok, that’s quite the list and after a bit, I’m sorta giving up on trying to find more items that will require my attention, though I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Continue on to read my little critique of the various types agencies I’ve had to deal with thus far.
Some of you may have been noticing that as of this week as I post to lists, my name on my e-mail and in my signatures has changed.
I am no longer “David Heller”, but I am now, “David Malouf”. I have been keeping (Heller) in parenthesis for a short while, to give people a chance to adjust (shoot to give me a chance to adjust).
Moving forward and hopefully (I pray) by year’s end, everyone will be used to the new ME: David Malouf.
I’m sure the question for many of you is “Why?”. Why does someone go about and change their name at this late stage in their lives and why the chosen name. The answer is simple. I am expecting a child, and while my wife for reasons sound and fair of her did not choose to change her name when we were married, as his her perogative and right, I also have the right , and the perogative if I want to take it to change my name.
I have decided though that the decision about the unity of my family around a single family name is not solely up to my wife, but I do have a say in it, and it is important to me that my wife, myself and my child all share the same last name, and well being a designer and concerned about the aesthetics of all, hyphenations just will not due.
I want to point that out again. The use of “(Heller)” is not some sort of warped hyphenation of my new name, but rather a temporary thing to help myself and others migrate to the new name and so people retain some recognition in this virtual world, where all you have is your name, that the work of David Heller in the past is connected to the work of David Malouf moving forward.
Of course, being a man the social norms do not easily allow for such constructs to take place. Basically, people get weirded out by it. So feel free to get weirded out if you must. You will not be the first, and you will be in good company.
Dan Saffer, gives us a teaser into his upcoming book, Designing for Interaction in this UXMatters piece exploring a possible breakdown of the core elements of IxD. On his preorder site about the book, Dan has also been divulging more teasers on his blog, with great interviews with some key people in the IxD world.
In this excerpted chapter, Dan looks at some core elements of IxD:
These make up a great list of components for us to look at, though I do find it a bit incomplete. But before we add to it, let’s just acknowledge the importance of some of these. The 3 that pop out to me are Appearance and Texture. These show how much there is overlap between IxD and other disciplines. But this is not a bad thing because the reasons why we are interested in them as elements of IxD is b/c of how we look at them in designing an interactive experience. Yes, they exist in Industrial Design, Graphic Design, shoot! even interior and fashion design, but in each one of these, the way we look at them is very different from the way we will explore them here within IxD. Often we will need to use these on two different levels.
But what is missing here? And I’m sorry to say that I do think there are some things missing here.
Context
The above elements are all about the object itself. But interaction design is about dialog with the environment in which it is used. Now you can say that this environment cannot be manipulated in most product design scenarios, and I would agree, but the object I’m designing will be substantially different dependent on the context in which the product will be used. It is an element that we cannot ignore, and has many sub-attributes we can explore more deeply as elements that when played with, effect the final solution of the object itself. Maybe this is a reference element, while the ones listed about are tangible, or objectified elements.
Designing context or for context most likely will speak to reflective emotional responses citing D. Normans Emotional Design).
Some of the sub-elements here are:
Linguistic and Semiotic
Whether audible or cartographic, explicit language like appearance are important parts of the communication layer. Icons, words (text & speech) can all play a part in communicating capabilities and expected reactions to user interaction.
Dialog/narrative
Well, this might seem odd following linguistics, but while individual or micro words in text and icons play a part, they need to be used as a new coherent and comprehensible semantics and syntax to be used to create a dialog between user and object. How this narrative as a whole comes together will effect the final use, through eliciting tone and evoking emotion at a more behavioral level (citing D. Normans Emotional Design) than the visceral responses that often come through appearance, texture and sound (sensory input as opposed to linguistic).
To me the Dialog, Linguistics and Context along w/ the visceral queues of Appearance, Texture and Sound are what together make up the aesthetics of an interactive piece.
The last thing missing from Dan’s elements is negative space. There are very few design forms and art forms that do not try to account for negative space. I have tried to look at negative space or white space in some of my past articles on this blog. Basically, inactivity on the part of the user &/or the system on purpose or systemically are probably in some way the “negative” space of IxD.
All in all, I think that Dan’s chapter is a great start for important work that will be very relevant to a studio education in IxD. I hope schools look at this type of break down and start developing curricula around it.
To get the background on this piece, I suggest you jump to the archive page that started the thread. I don’t want to just repeat everything that a lot of great people already said and have a blog of quotes.
The question about the nature of web apps being similar to desktop apps to me is a false question. Anything at some level can be generalized to be similar to something else (within reason). In the end web apps and desktop apps are similar in that they share some pretty important qualities, so it to say that they are the same is like saying that an apple and an orange are both fruits.
Bill Scott from Yahoo, has articulated in this thread really well what is special about thinking about the web, and he re-iterates some important considerations that I’ve made in the past. To sum all this up the most important take away from this list is contextual mindset as triggered by visual cues. To paraphrase, if it floats like a duck, it must be a duck.
Ok, that’s a bit too general … The point is that people respond to different types of cues depending on the visual and social context of what they are using. This design consideration is of paramount importance when thinking about any application design. The example that Bill gives is whether or not desktop metaphors will be accepted when old-style web presentation and interaction models are intermingled with those metaphors?