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Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press)

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A foundational text offering a unified design vocabulary and a common methodology for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts. Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world.


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  2. Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice;
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  6. Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice | Janet H. Murray.
  7. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is A foundational text offering a unified design vocabulary and a common methodology for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals.

    With Inventing the Medium , Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field. Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits--whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps--as belonging to a single new medium: Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium.

    Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorations--creative exercises for students and thought experiments for practitioners--that allow readers to apply the ideas in the chapter to particular design problems.

    Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice by Janet H. Murray

    Inventing the Medium also provides more than illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts. Hardcover , pages. Published November 25th by Mit Press first published November 23rd To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

    To ask other readers questions about Inventing the Medium , please sign up. Excellent text on interaction design as cultural practice.

    Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice

    See 1 question about Inventing the Medium…. Lists with This Book. Jul 04, Mjhancock rated it liked it Shelves: Murray presents her philosophy of digital design, that we are still inventing the digital medium, and we need to consider how improving it improves human communication. Her thesis, taken from her earlier book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, is that the major representational forms enabled by digital technology is the procedural, the spatial, the encyclopedic, and the participatory.

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    The book is divided into five sections; the first section of the book of media design, with digital technology in particul Murray presents her philosophy of digital design, that we are still inventing the digital medium, and we need to consider how improving it improves human communication.

    Hamlet on the holodeck: Kindle Edition , Inventing the medium JH Murray The new media reader, , Hamlet en la holocubierta. El futuro de la narrativa en el ciberespacio J Murray Signo y pensamiento 19 36 , , Hamlet en la holocubierta: From game-story to cyberdrama J Murray First person: Toward a cultural theory of gaming: Digital games and the co-evolution of media, mind, and culture JH Murray Popular Communication 4 3 , , Companion apps for long arc TV series: The pedagogy of cyberfiction: This is obviously a consequence of every attempt to categorise and create universal models even if they are flexible but it also means that as a teacher, I need to figure out if I buy these premises or not, and I need to try to figure out what buying into the mindset will bring with respect to those projects my students will eventually do both during and after their time at university.

    These design explorations are good: For instance on p 80 where students are instructed to analyse and reconstruct the algorithm and the rules controlling a computer game e. Tetris thus working with algorithms and the inherent structure of computers on levels that are both very concrete reconstruct the algorithms and abstract structured pseudocode and not actual code. This particular exercise then also leads to a discussion about the role of the interactor and about agency.

    At the risk of being too dogmatic this is, however, also a point that I believe should be put differently. And my teaching should help them figure out how to do so.

    URBAN INTERMEDIA: City, Archive, Narrative

    Technology especially the highly manipulable digital technology thus becomes more than something we can learn how to understand and master to perfection. Firstly, I do not agree that the digital medium is not yet mature. Yes, design conventions change often but this to me has nothing to do with immaturity but everything to do with a technology that develops and transforms in close connection with the digital or computational culture it is deeply embedded in.

    For all I know it may never settle into known genres.

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    Secondly, to me as an educator, the most important thing to teach students is that they need to continue this challenging of technologies and design trends. They need to never be satisfied with programmatic conventions and instead if not oppose then at least realise the premises on which they are built.

    Murray never writes the opposite — that the digital medium should never be challenged — but there are very few if any examples of how conventions are challenged. In a way, this is also what Murray states on p. Students are very good at translating themes from extreme examples to everyday artifacts, but it is harder for them to do the opposite. So to me, the ideal textbook should exemplify the radical and make exercises that would have students explore the everyday in light of the radical.