Experience Design

Engaging users with an interaction is a difficult process. I am attempting to engage users in natural mapped interactions through iconography the associats a particular action of touch. Natural mapping is a term for the proper and natural arrangements for the relations between controls and their movements to the outcome from such action into the world. Like that of a door knob or a book.The real function of natural mappings is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. This term is widely used in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interactive design discussed in Donald Norman’s book : The design of Everyday Things.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

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Through out my experimentation with conductive inks and screen printing, I have started to try and engage the user in interaction with the tangible printed artifact. Paper and ephemeral material is inherently tangible and physical you can bend it, tear it, crinkle it, touch it plus it has a texture a quality and a materiality very unique to its form. Unique to the conductive inks is there ability to engage a user. The current experiment is a test to see if certain form structures are inherently engage-able.  With out any signage does a user know to touch the paper and interact with the strips.  This experiment utilizes the nature the higher contact equals a brighter light.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

http://phillipian.net/article/8535

As technology become more and more ubiquitous, instances of technological over hauls should not be a process that should shock and awe. There has not been a revolt from the users of land line telephone into cell phones, or slide ruler calculator users to digital calculators, but still when I hear about the replacement of libraries with digital e-readers it makes me cringe. I want to stand up and revolt. The notion that a digital e-reader can replace the library in my opinion is in accurate. After hearing a story on NPR about schools and universities decisions to replace their libraries with internet cafe’s and Kindles made me very sad for the quality of learning. Technology has the ability to make incredible advances in knowledge space and context but to say that a networked screen is a more effective alternative to quantifiable, tangible, and accessible knowledge contained in a library is completely wrong. The internet is not a big library and a library is not the internet. They work and operate at different levels.

The affordance of a library is one that has impacted knowledge gathering for centuries and is something that intrinsically contained with in a architectural space. An e-reader has the infinite space of the internet where connected can be adhock and the quality of the linked material is maintained souly by a computer algorithm. Since a library utilizes space, the ability to reference books to the left right and behind a particular search allows for much more access to serendipitous connections where as on the internet and networked experience the knowledge is only as good as the question poised to the search engine. The spacial and tangible nature of books is the aspect that I think is completely ignored by the universities, schools, and institutes that think printed knowledge is on its way out. A kindle is not a table in a library nor it is a shelf with spacial hierarchy it is data Zeros and Ones transmitted over wireless signals.

While doing research I may have to opportunity at a library to have multiple sources on a table at once and have the opportunity to make connections between content purely due to the spacial juxtaposition. Try and accomplish this on a kindle or a web browser or wikipedia and the limitations will astonish the user.

I believe the movement to contain library data with in a e-reader illuminates the spacial aspect of learning and reference material. The idea that the e-reader and the library are in opposition is in my opinion faulty thinking and fails to consider the unique affordances of library use and of e-reader use.  The two are not equal and therefore should not be the replacement for the other.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

In the process of looking at printing material and contemplating the possibility of the end of print where a screen replaces all print material, I was struck by something that to date has not really been handled by screen based technologies.  The Margin! Margins in technology since are locations for buttons, actions, and tools associated with the particular application that is being used.

Since the margin has excuse my pun been marginalized by technologies, I decided to do a number of explorations in to the potential of the margin when given a computational aspect and affordance. In order for me to get a good grasp on the design nature of margins with in printed matter, I have taken 9 of my books ranging from design porn to technical textbooks, I have done an analysis of the margin and implied usage and created a piece of relevant print material describing each examples margin design and use as associated with grid, layout and space.

The idea revolves around the notion of marginalia and the use of margins with in written content in order to apply notes, reflections and sketches.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

Now the conductive inks that I have made work, I have started to dive into breaking the perception of what a circuit should be and should look like. With the addition of user interaction, turning a light on becomes more interesting and engaging. The earlier experiments are mostly a process of seeing and thinking about paper differently, this is a experiment into giving paper an added interaction through the conductive ink and the simple switches.  The form of the conductive lines are skewing the efficiency ideas associated with circuit board design, and the interaction allows the user to piece together the shapes of both the form and of the shape the lights make.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

Now that I have gotten an ink that can conduct an current over a relatively decient distance, I have started to play with the notion of what can a circuit look like. Can it be anything you want it to be as long as there is a positive and negative in and out. Can the form start to speak about it functionality, can the forms be unique and artistic rather than function based. Most circuitry disappears and becomes invisible. To most who use electronics and understanding of the work, skill, craft, and planning that has gone into a majority of the things they operate on a daily basis is pretty minimal. Electronics work and we rarely pay attention until they stop working. An interest in involving conductive ink is to challenge the expectation and visibility of otherwise invisible things. The mixed media piece of conductive ink, copper tape on paper is an experiment into changing and evaluating the expectations of electronic conductivity and use.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

I finally have had some success with screen printing conductive ink or my own concoction. The image is a picture of a mixed media experiment with screen printed graphite based conductive ink and copper tape for power and light source.  The form of the line printed in the conductive ink is the shape of a book spine based RFid. The RFid market is one of the largest outcomes of printed circuitry but the implications of “big brother” tools leaves the novice and consumer out of the loop. My experimentation into conductive inks has not been rooted in invention but rather in the exploration space and thinking that I have now started to give paper. The question of networked, self aware and linked paper artifacts could be a possibility through RFid or other circuitry based functionality. My ability to get a screen printed line to be reactive to electricity has helped my pursuit into thinking about paper in a new and unique ways. The ability to make paper an interface is now a distinct possibility.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

“It’s just stuff on a piece of paper, or canvas” – Tony Zepeda.

My Printmaking teacher Tony Zepeda likes to explain that ink, paint, chemicals, materials etc is all just stuff the interest is where that stuff makes meaning. The artist and designers role is to use the materiality, ink, image, typography, and meaning space.

Ink is just stuff, it can become a paint, or a printer ink, or a screenprinting ink, or a pen ink, or a drawing ink the final form outcome is less import than the fact that it possesses a new and unique quality that before in making and design inks have otherwise not and that is the ability to conduct and be linked and connected to its technological brethren.

The intent of using and experimenting with conductive materials and inks was not to create a new ink, rather it is giving me the space and advantage of working with stuff to might make new meaning where other wise there hasn’t been. I see the potential of thinking about paper and the ink that gives it meaning a larger breath of influence. Paper has been divided from its digital counterpart but what if we starting to mold them together?

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

The experimentation process with making my own conductive ink has been a process of thinking about what paper + ink could be when given conductive attributes? The power of giving ink conductivity to me is starting to be interesting when I start to use in as a mode of communicating its function. The ephemeral nature of paper and printed object start to change and become more interesting when digital affordances of awareness, networking, communication and delivery system come into play.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

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As I research and explore the ideas of conductive circuitry that could start to engage print media as a platform for interactive based computational experiences, I have started to explore the ideas of interactivity and affordance.

Interaction is based on the assumption that a user understands the applied action to accomplish a task. Something as simple as turning a light on can be made incredible complex by not hinting at learned and understood experiences. In Donald Norman’s book – “the design of everyday things” http://www.jnd.org/ he talks at length about the importance of visible interfaces and interaction parts know as natural mapping which comes from proper and natural arrangements for the relations between controls and their movements to the outcome from such action into the world. The real function of natural mapping is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_mapping) Essentially when a user participates in a task that action is the out come of a plethora of learned, cultural and socio-economic process that have been ingrained into the users understanding.  The idea of natural mapping techniques allow things to be perceived as being intuitive. Objects that need no prior instruction. With contemporary electronics the cultural and social economic inundation of computation has started to become learned and performed by cultures at an extremely high rate and at younger and younger ages. The importance of this technology revolution is that artifacts like the cell phone etc have started to be perceived as naturally mapped artifacts with interactions not that unfamiliar to a user than the interaction of a door or a tea kettle.

The question is are the interactions that we engage with our computational electronics the right interactions? Can we engage naturally mapped ideas from culture to engage new and innovative products that rather than force the user learn a new system, are engaged to the perceived natural mapped system?

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook