3 Review(s)

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. 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, the author provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It is be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in the evolving field of interaction design. The author explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bitswhether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer appsas belonging to a single new medium: the digital 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: computational procedures user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity. Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorationscreative 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 also provides more than 200 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts. Inventing the Medium gathers humanistic insights from Murrays pioneering scholarship, demonstrates how they apply to a wide range of digital design problems, and invites readers to begin using these conceptual tools themselves in an engaging and broadly accessible manner. Ive already seen it have a powerful impact on my students. Noah WardripFruin Computer Science Department University of California, Santa Cruz author of Expressive Processing. Table of Contents Acknowledgments. Introduction: A Cultural Approach to Interaction Design. I Changing Technologies, Lasting Innovations Design in an Evolving Medium. Affordances of the Digital Medium. Maximizing the Four Affordances. II Designing Expressive ProceduresComputational Strategies of Representation. Building Procedural Complexity. III Spatial Design StrategiesDefining and Navigating Spaces and Places. The Library Model for Collocating Information. IV Designing Encyclopedic ResourcesThe Database Model: Strategies for Segmentation and Juxtaposition of Information. The Structural Document Model: Using Standardized Metadata to Share Knowledge. V Scripting Interaction The Tool Model: Augmenting the Expressive Power of the Hand. The Machine Model: Visibility and Control as Design Goals. The Companion Model: Helpful Accompaniment as a Design Goal. The Game Model: Scripting Interaction as Structured Play. Glossary. Bibliography. Image Credits. Index.