Lecture Pods Summary
The Week 1 Lecture Pod explores the following areas:
What is Interactive Design, and what do Interactive Designers do?
- Interactive Design cannot exist without other specialist areas of design such as Information Design, Web Design and other Software Design. It is an area of design which has features of many other disciplines, including Engineering and Psychology (amongst others).
- It may be defined as designing spaces for human communication and interaction, as well as designing products to enhance and support people’s everyday lives.
- Interactive designers create user oriented products that are practical and widely applicable. The main focus of these products is how they affect the experience of the user, and how they can affect broader communities – what they do and why they do it. They receive feedback from the community and use this feedback to either create maps and guidelines for the product or allow the user to move steadily through the product on their own. A key part of this is figuring out what kind of knowledge (and how much of it) the designer expects from their users.
- There are five key areas of Interactive Design: Interactivity, Information Architecture, Time and Motion, Narrative and Interface.
What is Interactivity?
- In a broad sense, Interactivity is a process relating to a program or system that responds to user activity – wherein each element is capable of responding to and influencing the other.
- It can also include the amount of control the users have of the pace of the tool and its content, the choice this control gives to the user and the ability to use the tool to be productive. In this way, all experiences and products can be placed in this category.
Experience Design as an introduction to Interactivity:
- Data can only become meaningful information when it is organised and presented.
- Interactive Design allows meaningful experiences to be created, which can build knowledge and therefore wisdom.
Reflection
The lecture pod provided a much clearer insight into the structure and fundamental information of Interactive Design. It gave resources and alternate definitions so I was able to gain multiple perspectives on the topic. I think the lecture pod was extremely thorough and is an excellent introduction to the unit, allowing me to gain more understanding into what I need to do as a designer in the Unit Assessments.
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