One example after today’s discussion about the relationship between “the author is dead” and interaction design is: customization. And a further example of customization is iPhone.
I have no idea about the original intention the designers have about iPhone, but let me just make up one here: say, to create a fashionable, multifunctional mobile platform for personal usage. People who have iPhone make it into different roles in their lives, for example, some of them make iPhone mainly as their entertainment tool, they may download related apps like YouTube, Ted, Pandara, etc. and enjoy the videos, talks, songs, etc. Some of them make iPhone mainly as their social tool, they use apps like Facebook, Twitter, Line, Talkbox, etc. to make them connected all the time.
Customization is one reason that I think why iPhone succeeded, using the chief metaphor Jeff used today, it provides us a half-cooked dish with a large bowl, and we can add whatever we want to customize it. The customized dish may result as a Chinese dish, an American cuisine or whatever we like, everybody can enjoy it and in this way, the original “author/chief/designer” is “dead”…
This iPhone example also brings me an insight that, a good design won’t limite users’ intentions by the original intentions from designers, it should support them.
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January 30, 2013 at 8:49 am
Katie O'Donnell
I think the practice of jailbreaking iPhones to allow for even further customization speaks to your point, too!
January 30, 2013 at 4:45 pm
zlovall
This also brought up an interesting point in my head just now too. How much freedom does a designer give up once a product is released? As Jon alluded to in class, books and the like generally don’t get modified or changed once they are released to the public (I’m sure there are examples where this has happened, but I feel like it’s far rarer than say for an iPhone app).
For designers, you release a product (like an app) and generally the population at large shapes how it will be used. The designer had an intent for how a product was supposed to be used, but that’s not always what happens at the end. It would be interesting to see examples where a product was released that the designer didn’t really have an intention for how it would be used. From our class discussion, it seems like WoW had this a little bit with the API, but generally the game is made to be played in at least somewhat of a pre-defined way.
Multiplayer Online Worlds (like Second Life) come to mind as perhaps an example, but I think there was still at least a little pre-determined intent by designers.
Does anyone have an example where a product or service is released where designers really have no intent on the final purpose, but rather want it to be shaped by the end-user? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but the idea sounds interesting to me!
January 30, 2013 at 8:10 pm
mengyao
Hmm.. It’s really hard to say something is produced without any intent… But there are things created with just a general/blurred intention. For example, paper (like letter size, A4 size paper..) is too basic a thing existing around us for a long time to ask or think about the intent. And we can really make use of paper with any intentions actually