- What’s something (not mentioned in the reading) that drives you crazy and how could it be improved?
One thing not mentioned in the reading that could be improved is the car dashboard. Nowadays, many car manufacturers are leaning towards a fully digital car dashboard, moving away from physical control switches, nobs and buttons. I’d like to call this the ‘iPadification’ of cars, a term that may or may not have been used somewhere before, as the dashboards of many modern cars have just become a giant iPad. Many people may think it’s just easier to have everything digitized, but I think when it comes to driving that may not always be a good thing. Focus is very important when you’re on the road, and having the physical buttons and nobs made it easier to tell if you were able to do what you wanted, such as changing the temperature. Additionally, the static nature of physical buttons made it easier to remember where certain features were, allowing drivers to build muscle memory, meaning less focus would need to be given to those tasks. Meanwhile, with a touchscreen, it may be more distracting for drivers, as there are many menus that need to be navigated for different controls, and the overall process may be longer, leading to the driver having to multitask for longer, increasing the chance of them losing focus on the road.
- How can you apply some of the author’s principles of design to interactive media?
When applying these principles to Interactive Media, since the focus is interaction, I think keeping human-centered design at the forefront is really important. Putting a priority on clearly indicating to users the intention, the means of interaction a project could have, and some kind of indication that something happened represents the affordances, signifiers, and feedback principles, which, for interactive media, may be some of the most important. If a project fails to communicate how it works, what it does, or that something happened, people would likely lose interest in interacting with said project. User attention is also very limited, so for an interactive media project, whether it’s a website, installation, or game, if users are unable to figure out how to use it or if it’s actually working, they will naturally move on, especially if there is another project a few steps away capturing their attention because it has some kind of audio or visual response to the user’s interaction.