Why are you here? What are you trying to learn?
The fact that you are here and ready to learn bodes well for your reception to the confusing and exciting world that is Interactive Design. You must be the kind of person poised over the keyboard ready to air your views and spend your two cents at the hint of a biased view. Does the dominance of television news bug you? Do you itch to write in to the newspaper?
Then let us begin.
Here in these pages we will take a journey through the world that throws about buzzwords and new fads like a cloud to confuse the relative simplicity of the whole idea. It will be an overall look at the role of Interactive Design in today’s marketplace and into the future.
Today it is easy to take interactivity for granted. Almost every one of us has had some form of contact with a computer in our lifetime, and the people this site is aimed at certainly have had a great deal of it. Every day we use these machines that churn out letters and memo’s, emails and presentations but do we stop to think about the people who designed the interface we are using? Do we think about why the new Microsoft Office seems annoying at first then finally becomes simpler and faster than the previous version once we grow to understand it?
The thing about this industry is that it takes a back seat to the hype that surrounds the overall product. The interface is by far the most touted part of an operating system but how often is it that you can pin down exactly what it is that makes it better or worse than it’s competitors?
There is a space for Interactivity in almost every aspect of life these days. Gone are the times when you were told how something worked and had to mold yourself to the product. Today you are given a chance to customise, offer an opinion and in some cases comment on an open forum about the design prototypes of a new item.
Reading the news, watching video’s, researching information are all places that the new generation of web users are taking the new format at face value. It is only by looking to the past that we can see how far it has come, and yet there is plenty of room for future development.
The Web 2.0 movement has opened the doors for Interactive design to areas that were assumed permanently shut. Consumers have found the possibility to produce as well as consume and thus the term ‘Prosumer’ was born. These users are the ones with a Flikr page, a deviantART site or even a MySpace profile. Everything is becoming customisable and interactive. Services like Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and a multitude of others offer a space to ask a question and receive an answer within minutes. Anything is allowed, very little is taboo and the answers are very often helpful. There are websites like eHow, Instructables and WikiHow that provide user generated tutorials on anything from building a chair to bleaching your hair.
Because this whole movement is accelerating at such an exponential pace it is difficult to find a conclusive and coherent explanation of what it all means.
-What is Interactive Design?
-What the hell is Web 2.0!?
-How do instructable sites and all the other examples relate to this topic?
Well you ask, because these are all topics that are going to be covered in the coming weeks.
So stay in touch; comment, flame, troll, rage or lurk quietly and say nothing.
But please, do something, because that is what this is all about…
