Interaction Design

I'm going to start posting once a week. I'll design a piece, based on a topic I've been thinking on and wish to write about, and I'll publish both. I've found, partially because of my senior project, that I have a lot to say (whether or not anyone wants to hear it is another story). And I hope that writing these ideas down may help me to understand them better. Design plays a wonderfully important role in the communication of ideas, and helping people (including myself) to make their ideas heard and understood is one of the driving forces behind my passion for design.

The preceeding image for this post is a rhetorical question, but I'll throw my answer out there.

Yes.

I was watching "Objectified", the Gary Hustwit documentary, yesterday and I was incredibly inspired. To hear fellow designers (yes, they were mostly industrial designers, but I think that is beside the point) saying things that I have thought and felt about design and the world in general for years was awesomly satisfying. I can see many future posts taking inspiration and quotes from the movie. I think it stands high above "Helvetica" conceptually. I hope he does more movies like it (I did like Helvetica).

"Nowadays, Interaction Design mainly refers to the software on the screen... But the way I think about it... designing hardware, things that we can touch... solid objects...is all Interaction Design" says Naoto Fukasawa, a Tokyo-based Industrial Designer. I think this statement can be directly applied to type and typography as well.

I'm not only talking about rotating type, or shrinking it, or embossing it, or animating it, or any other of the millions of ways designers manipulate characters to evoke a physical or mental experience from the reader. I'm also talking about the way in which the reader is often affected by the content of what is written and how the design of it reflects said content.

The ability to place in the reader's mind an image or thought is the first part of interaction. A typographic piece that allows the viewer to expand on this image or thought and actually do something becomes a very real example of typographic design as interaction design.

I want to learn to design successfully in this fashion. The driving force behind my desire to design is becoming more and more an eagerness to educate and inspire human beings to expand upon and better themselves and their surroundings. I believe that thinking about all fields of design with respect to the idea of interactivity is a necessary step in acheiving successful, positive, and meaningful design.

Thank you.

Craft

Well, I thought about it for a while yesterday, and I think I will treat this blog as what the subtitle suggests: writings on whatever I feel like. I imagine that will cover a satisfactory collection of ideas.

I'll start on the topic of design.

Recently I have been reading quite a bit over at Design Observer and it seems they have a recurring theme. There have been several articles in the past month examining the different ways to create *things*. Craft, they seem to be saying, is a special thing. And attention to the process of creating something is in some ways becoming less and less important in the design world. I am not saying the writers are a group of luddites, or that they even hint that computers and efficiency are ruining design. Which is what I thought I was reading when I first noticed this pattern of topics in the articles. What I gathered from reading these articles though, was basically a reaffirmation of my own beliefs about design and process. Balance is a good thing in all aspects of existence, including design. Just because you always set type on your computer and can precisely position every object down to the pixel (or smaller) doesn't mean that's always the best way. Designers used to hand-set type, maybe there is nothing wrong with going back and attempting to do something like that sometimes, even if just for fun. There was a great comic posted a few weeks ago that I thought fit perfectly with this idea. It made me laugh, I enjoyed it on a comedic level, but I also respected it as the critique it was undoubtedly intented to be, some of us are loosing where it all came from.

The comic, from Married to the Sea:

Reading that article on velvet touch lettering really made me think about my style. I want to include more non-digital pieces in my work. My girlfriend's roommate has one of those old electronic Brother typewriters and after seeing it one day, I immediately wanted to have one of my own. Random users, over the course of a few days, had written various sentences on a single sheet of paper in the typewriter. Accompanying these phrases were ink blotches, deleted letters, and even folds in the paper. All of these jumbled elements created a visually interesting and inspiring *thing*. Very similarly, DO did an article on makeready proof sheets, the pieces of paper that, once upon a time, would run through a printing press to get the ink balanced and ready for the run.

The random marks you get from doing things like these, things not on a computer, things that still have the touch of human imperfection, are becoming more and more intriguing to me. And I hope my fellow artists and designers see some merit in these articles, and maybe even this post. Efficiency is not always the key, exploration and mistakes often benefit people and movements in important ways.

-z