mcgeeciaran Lecture Notes

Lecture Notes Week One

  • Interaction design is design focused on people, and how they interact with the world
  • When designing for interactive purposes, the designer must consider the user. How does the user affect the design (pushing/pulling or discrete/continuous control), receive feedback from the design (fuzzy/cool media and distinct/hot media), and how do they know what to do? 
  • Smith (2006) “about shaping our everyday life through digital artefacts for work, for play and for entertainment.”
  • All design is also contained within the Continuum of Interactivity (COI). The Continuum of Interactivity contains all products and experiences,
  • The COI can include the amount of control the audience has over the tools, place or content, the amount of choice this control offers and the ability to use the tool or content to be productive or create.
    • Feedback – clear and immediate visibility
    • Control – advanced navigation, high audience control
    • Creativity/co-creativity – creative tools & help distributed collaborative platforms
    • Productivity – productivity tools, “intelligent and living information”
    • Communications – chat, email, conferencing, sms, identity (profiles), community
    • Adaptivity – personalisation capabilities, modifiable behaviour, pseudo-intelligence
  • Interactivity is different to production value or “richness”
    • Tv/movies offer rich stories, techniques and presentations but offer no interaction besides the tv remote/sitting down and leaving theatre
    • Video game – story created as user plays
  • Experience design
    • Data – Research, creation, gathering, discovery
    • Information – presentation, organisation (stimulus)
  • Knowledge – conservation, storytelling (understanding)
  • Wisdom – contemplation, evaluation, interpretation, retrospection
  • 5 key design areas
    • Interactivity
    • Information architecture
    • Time and motion
    • Narrative
    • Interface

The most important part of this lecture pod to me was the explanation of ‘how do you do, how do you feel and how do you know.’ Considering how the user affects, receives feedback from, and knows what to do with the design is a vital part in the design process.