Go for it!

首先要抱怨一下馬得逼,firefox居然當掉還我整篇得重打,開個Menupages.com也會掛點?吼啊!

今天終於跟David Nolen小meet一下,遲來的兩個月meeting(總是在臨時飽佛腳嘛哈哈吼)!We talked about some projects, including his thesis project "Human Paper Interface" which was a sort of software to generate an animation from a piece of paper drawed frame-by-frame character's motions. The software can automatically pull out all shapes by finding their borders instead of traditional way of manually adjusting all character's postures paper by paper. Of course you can do that in Photoshop, but, we both agree that there is a means by which human can easily talk to computer by simply drawing. Ya, we are both drawing maniac. I also showed my ICM projects to David and he was especially interested in my ICM midterm project "Cyou." (BTW, I dont really like this name. It's supposed to be CartoonYou, CarYou something else anyway.) I said, all my projects were persuing a new way to experience comics, which is perhapes so called interactive comics. Anyway, the conclusion is, I should totally work on something I will continue on even after graduate. That's how he treated toward his thesis. I might re-think all my projects and get more ideas about the possiblilty of going any further. Think about the scenario, give the prject a story behind the scene and make it somehting much more than just an excitement, a typical ITP project!

Participating interaction part 2

Just saw a nice example of manual particapation of interaction: Tune 'n Radios. The radio works only after your drilling holes for speaker, choosing a antenna and attaching something on the volume and tune switches for full holding, by which the radio is totally set and customized. It's an ultimate DIY designer craft and everthing is supposed from your own everyday objects.

So, what exactly do I get inspired here? I think my excitement is that the user can totally set his own control panel, which is not just simply personally customized but is to attach the user's memory, habit and memory onto the object. The designer should leave some free space for the user on purpose, which I call unfinished design, of course meaningfully not practically. At a resonable level, the more participation the user is asked to do, the more sense of interactivity this design would convey.

I've been thinking about what I can do with drawing. What is the key element that exists in drawing behavior which is so common experience that nobody can miss it? Could it be some individual event having little to do with drawing itself? Or could be an acident during drawing? Or an opposite phenomenon to drawing? Erasing? Oh, there are too many things going on here. I have to keep writing, drawing, typing and thnking to make the ideas come out continuously.

Particapating interaction?

What the hell is "interaciton"? To get this question clear enough, here I have an extreme personal definition of interaction: unfinished design. A work is not complete yet without the user's full participation. "HIt it", for example, a chair design by Marign van der Poll and produced by Droog, is not a practicalbe chair until the user's final devotion: smashing it with a hammer, which comes with the chair, to determine his prospective form. The result is customized and potential to be kept changing along time. The video below shoes the process of accomplishing "Hit it":

To make things much simpler, let's say that those works which just wait there for people moving closer to operate some unfriednly interface without either narrative or emotional motive are not eligible for being called "interactive design". A successful interactive design should possess some features which can evoke participants' certain experience that make them react both emotionally and physically. From this point, an interaction designer cannot only focus on design itself. The background and research behind all human activities seem more and more important than the form of the design. It is the sequence of events that happen between users and objects that give the design meaning of interaction. It reminds me of an interesting news of RCA, the program Interaction Design just changed the name to "Design Interactions". It's not just reversing two words but indicates and pulls out the importance of interaction in design field which has been misunderstood for a while. Think about it.