Reading Response #5: Artful Design Chapter 5 + Interlude: “Interface Design”

Alanna Sun

October 24, 2021

CS 476A, Stanford University

Reading Response: Funny is Often Better Than Serious

This week’s reading focused on how interface design shapes the user’s interaction and therefore their experience. There were so many awesome examples of instruments designed with the human form in mind that go beyond the traditional engineering approach of interface design (a linear path through input, signal conditioning, logic, and output). The way the laptop orchestra performs with mapping of outputs like pitch and volume to physical actions really does seem to create an embodied interface, and subsequently a cohesive performance. It was really interesting to think about an instrument’s mental model of its user, which body parts take priority and which senses are included as input. I was reminded of Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, a classic HCI book on how objects inspire satisfaction or frustration depending on how intuitive it is for users to operate them. The ideas in the book align closely with the concept of embodiment and making sure that the designer’s mental model of their instrument takes into account different users’ mental models. However, in the digital space of demutualization, it’s so much more difficult to create these intuitive mappings of function and form that can yield the same level of feedback and satisfaction that physical objects can. On the other hand, as we can see from the examples in the reading, this also creates so much more space for the potential to delight through defamiliarization and playful design.

This brings me to the design principle that stuck out to me most this week--I.1: Funny is Often Better Than Serious. Wit and whimsicality reflects a level of intention and thought that I always appreciate in the objects that I use as well as the artists and authors that I love most. It’s nice just knowing that someone has put something out there simply for the sake of inspiring joy or wonder. I really enjoyed the interlude with Perry, which ties together the different themes that we’ve been exploring regarding ends, means, medium, and, perhaps most importantly, intention. For what and why do we design? What exactly are things that we value for their intrinsic worth? To an extent, language can only capture so much of how we feel, and we can only approximate our experience and thinking through the words that we’re afforded. Music programming and interface design is really another language that allows us to express ourselves and communicate on a level different from that of conventional communication through language. And maybe that’s why we can’t quite put it into words, because certain things are always lost in translation. But in the end, who knows what it all means!