Présentation de l'éditeur
Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the
design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and
understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical
innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by
their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle
to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium, Janet
Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of
digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students
and practitioners in this evolving field. Murray explains that innovative
interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits--whether games or
Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps--as belonging to a single new medium:
the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation
by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring
strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray
identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments
that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational
procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity. Each
chapter includes a set of Design Explorations--creative exercises for students and
thought experiments for practitioners--that allow readers to apply the ideas in the
chapter to particular design problems. Inventing the Medium also provides more than
200 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and
platforms and a glossary of design concepts.
