Readings for 4/23

Takeaways and Questions from the reading:

Takeaway: Every design decision should be purposefully decided with the intention of fulfilling the goals of your informative experience.

Takeaway: How you organize data is vital to the informative experience. You have to consider what you are trying to get users to experience in order to understand how you should organize that data. For example, the chronological listing of deaths in the Vietnam Memorial in DC would have a lot less of an impact if they were in alphabetical order because the message would be unclear.

Takeaway: Physical computing isn’t always necessary to create meaningful experiences considering that there are “only a few categories of successful interactive media products: children’s books and lessons, games, reference works, and pornography.” Most of these successful products have nothing to do with physical computing.

Concern:
The article criticizes the use of random, “meaningless” interjecting data, the example being CNN’s use of “factoids”. A majority of mainstream media today thrives and succeeds off of random data. There’s clearly a disconnect between the 20-year-old texts we are reading and the reality of the world we live in today...It’s wonderful to discuss these intellectual views on design but as far as I’m concerned most of this is completely irrelevant to how the world actually consumes interactive/non-interactive media and so we should really be learning strategies relevant to this current age of media consumption.

For perspective, I think it would be important to look at our current model for recieving information. Information is distributed and consumed much differently than it was 20 years ago. There isn't actually much organization to the consumption of media these days. Information is now organized by keywords and hashtags, NOT any of the data organization strategies described by the text.

VR and AR experiences may be on the rise again (because it actually existed 20 years ago) but I do not believe they match the current methods of consuming media because they are too slow, too expensive, and not readily available. And unless you have hundreds of dollars, it is NOT POSSIBLE to create an ARDUINO project that will ever distribute any actually meaningful data, unless it is some abstract art piece.

Kids my age are the people that are driving the media industry these days are focused on smart-phone quick consumption of Media. Video Games have to be elaborate and have fast moving stories in order to keep players interested. The world wants fun, exciting experiences, not experiences driven by distributing meaningful data. The future is in FUN. Maybe VR and AR projects should shift to being accessible by smart-phones in order to make those types of projects more successful. Pokemon go has AR. It's on cellphones. It's great. Media is consumed so fast that designers these days need to learn how to work at a fast paced. We cannot employ these slow, drawn out, tactics that the texts describe any more. If we want to work at a job and not be in academia for the rest of our lives, we have to focus on the attainable, not some massive fluffy froo froo art projects that cost thousands of dollars to make.

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