Hello dear readers! Try not to think about that hilarious evolution of dance video now….
This semester is getting well underway and my vision for my digital project has finally started to come together. As I said last week, I will be created a timeline of the Parliament House Resort and its history here in Orlando. Last week I did a little work on creating a timeline, this week I read Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, by Janet H. Murray. In this work, Murray provides a method for understanding a wider view of design possibilities, a vocabulary for identifying design elements, and a set of principles for making choices within the design space (Murray, 2). Murray’s focus is mainly on digital artifacts, but she relates these to more common place items and urges readers to “think aloud” and practice what she terms “design explorations”. In these explorations, Murray presents a series of questions and asks readers to contemplate different aspects of design, especially the underlying motivations and choices behind specific designs.
Along with these “think aloud” sections, Murray hammers home the idea that design decisions, especially those in the digital world affect the way we think, act, understand the world, and communicate with one another (Murray, 2). This idea really struck a chord with me and I have been trying to incorporate it into my digital project design for this semester. As I said earlier, I will be creating a timeline of the Parliament House’s history here in Orlando, and I hadn’t considered that the way in which I designed this site would have an affect on the way people perceived the site and its content. This idea has given me much to think about and I think will help to led me to create an interactive, transparent, functional, and beautifully designed site.
Inventing the Medium, is a work that is directed at beginners in the design field, even with this introductory nature, the work was still difficult for me to get through. The sheer amount of new vocabulary in the introduction alone, was daunting, but after getting through this work, I feel like I have a better understanding of the nature of design, the “think aloud/design exploration” sections were invaluable and really helped me to grasp some of the broader more theoretical language used by Murray.
After the readings this week, and some practicing with the timeline JS tool, I feel a lot more confident going forward with my project and I’m really looking forward to finding some great photos and stories to include on my timeline.
Until next week.
-E
preservingorlando 