Reading Response 5
Elisse Chow | October 29, 2023
This week, my response may be a bit less focused than other weeks, and instead I
think I have thoughts on a wider range of ideas brought up in Artful Design in
Chapter 5 Interface Design.
To begin,
> Principle 5.1 Interaction is a loop. Think. Do. Feel. Repeat.
I do love a good loop, and this one has given me a lot to think about in my
design process for interactivity. For another one of my classes, CS448B, we had
to create a visualization of Bay Area software companies and include interactive
filters and searching. I have to say that unfortunately, I don't think I gave
myself enough time to really think through this cycle of interaction—though I
guess it wasn't a musical instrument so perhaps not all parts of the loop apply.
I do wonder what I could've done more to influence feeling beyond creating a
simple but effective visualization that provides useful features to understand
the dataset. I think that it's really quite interesting to have two concurrent
classes that require elements of design and the difference between certain
perspectives on aesthetics.
extra note: This loop made me think of a loop in my robot autonomy class,
which is See, Think, Plan. Definitely a different domain but again it's
interesting to see where things could align.
> Principle 5.4 Bodies matter!
This might take a deviation from the point of this principle in that bodies are
our gateway to understand the world through movement and sensations, the
interface for our brains. I think though, that some of my thoughts during this
section included memories from my time in my high school's a cappella. To give
context, I wouldn't say I'm a stranger to performance—I danced competitively
starting at 6 years old and had a few years of piano performance at that time.
But the thought that my body was producing sound by itself, without much else
was so incredibly odd. As a dancer, movement is everything, but singing was
still. Well, not entirely still, but the comparison between flying across the
stage versus swaying in place is drastic. Producing sound and treating my body
as an instrument is still something that I think of as a bit odd, specifically
in the performance aspect, but I also think that learning to sing again would be
fun, especially with this perspective.
Then finally, I just want to say that oh my goodness, it was just a single
picture and really just a small box allocated to it, but Tomie Hahn's Pikapika
is something I'd love to try and it immediately appealed to me. I think that
would be such an interesting system to develop and make my own.