Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice

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, the author provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It is be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in the evolving field of interaction design. The author 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.