Experience Design

Multimedia: media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun (a medium with multiple content forms) or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which only use traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material. Multimedia includes a combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactive content forms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia

Multimedia has become a popularized notion for aspect of what designers make. The nomenclature for our craft exists in the many rather then the specific. A designer who applies their craft to a variety of mediums may it be print and animation, photography and interaction, etc etc. could be considered a multimedia designer. The ability for a designer to call themselves multimedia was a distinguishing aspect at one time, this distinction has now become less relevant in a world of ubiquitous computing and homogenized tools for design and media making. A designers ability to use the tools, not the it is not important, becomes background chatter in the face of design thinking, methodology, and creative problem solving. Multimedia has then been wrapped up in design and the distinction of the new role of designer is left open. The question is: what is a designer when everyone knows how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Quark, AfterEffects, Final Cut, etc?

Ubiquitous computing and the rise of the personal computer has dropped the level of entry for design so low that anyone who can buy a computer and software can say they  are designers.  The creation of the distention of a multimedia designer was to emphasize the ability to perform on multiple platforms of making. The new designer has to be able to move beyond the aspects of designs current roles and place their thinking and process in new and innovative aspects. Designer as curator?, Designer as futurist?, Designer as hybrid-maker? Designer as Creative? Designer as Systems thinker? maybe there isn’t a distinction yet but if multimedia designers continue to see their value as the tools they can access and use they will relegate their role to the spit and polish of industry rather then the innovator of new forms of media and design.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

Screen printing has been an Art Form and Industry process for many years. Screen printing is extremely useful for artifacts of print nature from posters to t-shirts to business cards. Screen printing as an art form has been used from as far back as Chinese textiles, the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD).

The process of using a screen to pull ink puts the maker in control of the printed output rather then a machine in form of a digital printer. The physical nature of applying ink has given arts and designers inspiration and a style that can exist outside newly conventional means of digital printing or offset lithography.

The physical affordance of screen printing allows the maker to thinking differently about the process of production. Screen printing has more steps in the production run then just asking a machine to print but also includes a aura of craft, value and specialty that is missing in the digital output. The production process for screen printing invites the idea of multiplicity. Where a digital printer can make just one,  screen printing just one would be entirely to much set up and work.

Hybrid Media Systems is an idea that takes the craft and unique nature of printmaking and blends it with technology to give the artifact an experience aspect, mediated by the dynamic affordance of screen based media and enhanced by the uniqueness of artifacts.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

Screen printing is a starting place for my work as a way to explore the possibilities of giving paper and tangible objects a computational affordance. As screen media continues to becomes the replacement to print, I asked the question why are we eliminating artifact. A screen can be anything it wants media wise, however print media establishes a specialty that distinguishes it from its screen counterpart. With the onset of ubiquitous computing, the users ability to contain and possess data will change. As cloud computing become more relevant and owning actual data becomes obsolete, what will be the new attachment to data? I am proposing that paper with a connection to that computation cloud be the interface for the artifacts that we are continually discarding.

Screen printing is a mode of making that produces an artifact that has a textual aspect that lives out side of digital printed media. The hand made unique aspects of layering ink builds on the ideas of attaching to items of value and care. The ability of an artifact to embody the essence of an experience or a piece of data.  Screen printing artifacts with computational affordance is helping me ask questions?

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

A electrical conductor is a material which contains movable electric charges. In metallic conductors, such as copper or aluminum, the movable charged particles are electrons. Positive charges may also be mobile in the form of atoms in a lattice that are missing electrons (known as holes), or in the form of ions, such as in the electrolyte of a battery.

All conductors contain electric charges which will move when an electric potential difference (measured in volts) is applied across separate points on the material. This flow of charge (measured in amperes) is what is meant by electric current. In most materials, the direct current is proportional to the voltage (as determined by Ohm’s law), provided the temperature remains constant and the material remains in the same shape and state.

Most familiar conductors are metallic. Copper is the most common material used for electrical wiring. Silver is the best conductor, but is expensive. Gold is used for high-quality surface-to-surface contacts. However, there are also many non-metallic conductors, including graphite, solutions of salts, and all plasmas. See electrical conduction for more information on the physical mechanism for charge flow in materials.

Non-conducting materials lack mobile charges, and so resist the flow of electric current, generating heat. In fact, all non-superconducting materials offer some resistance and warm up when a current flows. Thus, proper design of an electrical conductor takes into account the temperature that the conductor needs to be able to endure without damage, as well as the quantity of electrical current. The motion of charges also creates an electromagnetic field around the conductor that exerts a mechanical radial squeezing force on the conductor. A conductor of a given material and volume (length × cross-sectional area) has no real limit to the current it can carry without being destroyed as long as the heat generated by the resistive loss is removed and the conductor can withstand the radial forces. This effect is especially critical in printed circuits, where conductors are relatively small and close together, and inside an enclosure: the heat produced, if not properly removed, can cause fusing (melting) of the tracks.

Since all non-superconducting conductors have some resistance, and all insulators will carry some current, there is no theoretical dividing line between conductors and insulators. However, there is a large gap between the conductance of materials that will carry a useful current at working voltages and those that will carry a negligible current for the purpose in hand, so the categories of insulator and conductor do have practical utility.

Thermal and electrical conductivity often go together For instance, most metals are both electrical and thermal conductors. However, some materials are practical electrical conductors without being good thermal conductors.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

Hybrid Media Systems

A methodology of researching, making, and experimenting that drives at the concept of media that is neither a screen or a printed artifact but rather a combination of the two. Technology seems to take the role of replacing older media ie the kindle for the book, but what if thinking, design, and prototyping concentrated more on the affordance of both screen and cloud computation and the affordance of print artifacts? Could a poster be more engaging through computation? Can embedding functionality and technology allow the artifact to take on an extended experience beyond the visual and into the interactive?

The notion that a designer is a visual problem solver is not hard to dispute, but what if being a media designer is about asking questions and not just solving specific problems? The role is switched and the designer becomes the question and problem maker and not just the solver. The media designer is then responsible for answering their own questions. The ownership of the ideas and the possible solutions are then responsible to the designer. I see the media designer’s role as a methodology of making and thinking that drives not singularly at a problem but more at understanding the problem. Through asking questions around, in, and through the existing problem, the media designer utilizes the skills of experimentation, prototyping and analysis to generate new understanding and insight into otherwise unexplored areas with in design, culture, and business. Questions are posed outward while solutions are inward. A media designer should be able to do both with out getting dizzy from all the round and round. The ability to research and parse out specific questions allows for media designers to challenge the larger questions. Christopher Reid Becker

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook