On Dec 27, 2007, at 7:30 AM, Dan Saffer wrote: > So you feel that everything is contextual, that there are no universal > principles of good design that are always true?
To which Dave replied... On Dec 27, 2007, at 9:08 AM, dave malouf wrote: > Of course, at a biological level we all receive signals > neurologically at the some level of commonality. But I have learned > in my studies that cultural interpretations of signals can differ > dramatically. For example, snow classification among eskimos, or in > dream analysis falling dreams is a positive among people from New > Guinea. Careful Dave... you are showing your education bias here. 8^) Please allow me to respectfully disagree. There are design principals in all design fields, whether you want to believe in them or not. It's like gravity. You can choose to ignore it but it's still there keeping you alive on planet Earth without asking for any compensation in return. Color has core principals that define how color works and behaves. Just look to Josef Albers "Interaction of Color" book for many of these. Typography also has many core principals, many of which can be found in Bringhurst's "Elements of Typographic Style." Tufte explains some great core information design principals in "Envisioning Information"; layering and separation, small multiples, etc. Grids, proportions, composition... it's all there. And it works in the background whether you know it or not in any design field. All of these design principals exist largely outside of cultural boundaries. In the case of type, we're mostly talking about roman letter forms. But there are many principals in Asian alphabets as well. And while it would be true that cultural bias largely dictates the implementation of many core design principals, cultural bias does not define these principals any more than how gravity works in China or Mexico or Nigeria. There are certainly some very sound principals in interaction design, we just need to get better at defining them. One of the few I've been discussing a lot in the recent past, as a means of teaching students and discussing my design process with new hires, is the concept of control via direct manipulation as an extension of ones fingertips. It's long been understood how direct manipulation in software has given normal people the means to work with computers. It's the very foundation of the graphical user interface over the command line. The basis for drag and drop, iconography and the entire mouse interaction. But within direct manipulation, there's a larger point I find a lot of interaction design types not expressing well or neglecting to pay attention to in their work. The principal has largely to do with how all direct manipulation should strive to behave like an extension of ones fingertips. To get a true sense of control over any interface -- and that's the real crux of any interaction with an interface for any digital device, that sense of control over it -- the more the direct manipulation behaviors operate like ones' fingertips, the better the interface will feel to the end user. This is a design principal I have found true in all circumstances, outside of context. This principal by the way is largely why people respond so well to the iPod and the iPhone. The interface's direct manipualtion pieces are driven more by fingertip actions than anything. It's why the interface in the movie "Minority Report" seems so cool and natural. The glass wall computer was driven by using one's hands and fingers. With computer and web software, we are always going to be limited in the short term by the mouse, which can sometimes feel like an extension of one's fingers, but more often then not, it doesn't fulfill on the promise of the touch screen approaches from the iPhone. Yet even with the mouse, there are ways to get as far as one can to make the interaction feel like an extension of one's fingers. This design principal explains why scrolling on the iPhone feels better than scrolling on a computer. Dragging your finger across the iPhone screen to scroll up or down moves the content in direct relation to your fingers, and as such, feels as if you are in direct control of the thing you are touching. On a computer, using the mouse to click and drag the scroll thumb doesn't feel as natural in comparison. The main reasons are that on a scrollbar, you click and drag the thumb in the opposite direction to move the content (drag down to scroll up) as compared to the iPhone where you drag your fingers in the same direction to move the content. Further, on the iPhone, you click and drag the thing itself to scroll, whereas on the computer, you have to grab the scrollbar on the side, a control that is ancillary to the thing you want to manipulate, forcing you to drop focus to target the widget, for example. This sort of design principal also explains why actions like holding the spacebar in Photoshop to drag the canvas around horizontally and vertically is something many people who use the product find infinitely more usable than the operating system scrollbars. The hand tool shortcut with the spacebar in Photoshop lacks the directness of touching the screen to do it, but the fundamental concept behind it is the same. Interactions that are designed to feel like extensions of your fingers will always feel more correct than those that require intermediary widgets or controls. So there you go... I'm sure I'm not the first person who has observed this or has thought of this. But Dan's question is important. The answer to his question is that yes, there are design principals that exist outside of context, all fields of design have them. This segment of the design world needs to discover and define its own to better help those that will be changing the world long after we are all gone. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
