cambu-LookingOutwards04
My Looking Outwards for this week scratches at the confluence of two ideas I’ve been thinking about for the past few days:
- Interaction as Challenge
- Blurring the Physical and Digital (sparked by James & Josh’s talk on Wednesday
With regard to the first idea, it’s very common within the School of Design to talk about what makes something hard/bad, not human-friendly, etc. This isn’t surprising, because almost always, the goal of ‘design’ is to get out of the way and reduce the friction between the human and the built-world/designed-artifact/etc. But, during How People Work (51-271) on Septemeber 28th, the idea of making things ‘difficult on purpose’ came up within the context of learning and video game design. To the second point, after listening to James Tichenor and Joshua Walton speak on the need to create ‘richer blurs’ between digital and physical spaces, I’ve been on the lookout for good example of this in status quo.
When I first saw Mylène Dreyer’s interactive drawing game on Creative Applications, I felt like it was really hard to understand and would probably confuse users. But I also tried to think about how that could benefit her within the context of ‘Interaction as Challenge.’ It also reminded me about some discussions [1, 2] within the UX community awhile back about how Snapchat’s bad user experience is actually to its benefit. Also: Double points for cute music and simple graphics — it really makes the game pop!