David Roedl

This was written for and originally posted on the Interaction Culture class blog

As Gillian Smith points out (in her forward to Designing Interactions), Interaction Design has drawn heavily on the ‘existing expressive languages’ of non-digital mediums. She breaks these traditional languages down into 4 ‘dimensions’: 1 - words and literature, 2 - painting, graphic design, iconography, 3 - product design, 4 - film and TV.

I agree that much of interactive design to this point, even the really good stuff, has been interesting mash-ups of these various traditions. True, many new activities and applications for both work and play have been afforded by computers. But if you think about the really compelling elements of your favorite digital products, I find that they mostly come the 2nd or 4th D traditions: either really nice visual communication, or immersive cinematic experiences.

I agree with Smith that we need ‘an independent language of interaction with smart systems and devices, a language true to the medium of computation, networks, and telecommunications’. Of course lots of innovation has occurred to take advantage of the unique opportunities afforded by digital technology, and it continues to rapidly. The internet is one space in which we are seeing some promising activity (and a lot of hype as well) in this direction. The whole ‘web 2.0′ and ‘wikinomics’ phenomenon can be seen as web developers trying to craft a language ‘true to the medium’ of networks, and to utilize the power of vast numbers of people networked together.

While I’m excited by these new innovations in web applications, I agree with Smith that we have more than a little way to go to achieve compelling interactions on par with “the breathtaking innovativeness, the subtlety and intuitive “rightness” of Eisenstein’s language of montage”. I think one of the main challenges to this is something Smith touches on in the beginning of her section on Good Interaction Design. Its also I think related to a concept introduced by Lowgren and Stolterman.

Lowgren and Stolterman present their notion that interaction design works with a ‘material without qualities’. By this they means that digital artifacts can take on so many different forms–and the forms possible are constantly shifting due to technological advances–that is very hard to pin down a set list of qualities to describe the medium, as say a sculptor could describe their stone. They make this point more clear by suggesting that we think of bits as our material. Pondering this for a minute, I begin to realize that are an infinitum of possible physical forms and consequently qualities that bits can take on as they are presented to a user.

This fact, as pointed out by G. Smith, is one of the central challenges for interaction designers. In contrast to physical objects, which offer direct feedback when manipulated, “with computers… the distance between… keystrokes and screen image… and what’s happening inside the computer is usually much less direct. Our physical world and the computer’s virtual world seem miles apart.” In other words, the virtual world, the world made of bits, tends to have a lack of physicality at least in the sense that we are familiar with.

However, all digital artifacts have an aspect that doesn’t seem miles away and of which qualities can be quite easily pinned down: hardware used for display and input. While there are vast possibilities in this area too, for most part digital interaction to date has consisted of some basic elements of monitor, keyboard and mouse. It occurs to me now that there a lot of limitations in this configuration, and that by switching it up we might greatly reduce the percieved ‘distance’ between the physical and virtual world. G. Smith talks about the 4 dimensions of previous traditions that interaction design draws upon. I might argue that the 3-D, that is the language of traditional product design, has been the least utilized. With hardware advances this is changing a lot though, and the result is the introduction some much needed physicality to our overall language of interaction.

For example, camera based and multi-touch user input.(I’m sure you’ve all seen many example videos. I believe this one comes out of IU.)

Lev Manovich takes an approach of digital materialism, focusing heavily on the physical conguration of user and hardware. When he was writing the dominant form was still monitor, mouse, keyboard. If we apply his analysis to these newer forms of interface hardware, how does our conception of the medium change?