Portability

Tactility
Size
Weight
Value
Location
Participatory
Duplicability
Juxtapose
Speed
Accuracy
Intent
Range (input/output)
Personality (mediation, organic distortion)
Isolation
Editability
Viewability
Simultanaity
Divisibility
Modality
Immersiveness
Inspirational
Educational
Friction
Action

I think at the heart of what we are trying to do lies a need to fully appreciate and understand what it is that a project entails, and to then figure out how we want to create, capture, and navigate, and share them. Above is a stab at a taxonomy of the concept of “project”. Each piece and sub-piece of the project is surrounded by a cycle of thinking and making, and each piece is capable of informing or contributing to the other pieces. What is important here is not that the causal process of the project be defined, but rather the basic categorization of the pieces that both support the process and are a product of the process. Also, it is important to note that it is the whole project that creates a bridge between a designer and the audience designed for, not just the final output, and that the relationship between the designer and the project is itself mediated by the tools which allow the designer to work within it.

Some definitions for the diagram:

Brief: the initial starting point for the project, the constraints, and the anchor for its development.

Library: the place where project related content lives, whether generated through process, or gathered as reference material from elsewhere. Sketches, comps, writing, photos, etc. This includes past projects, your own, and those of others.

Tools: a collection of project relevant, non-volitional assets.

People: collaborators whose consultation, content based contributions, or tool based expertise are an asset to the project.

Formats: A collection of possible ways to curate, package, and share content.

Output: The combination of content and its pulished qualities (location, format, time, distribution). This may also include a piece of contents location within the library of someone elses project.

To state that I once hated graphic design is neither, provocative nor original. Many graphic designers before me, have felt the physical and creative malaise I experienced after twelve-hour days of mouse-clicking week in, week out. This chapter describes the creative equivalent of a recovery program for disenchanted designers. This story narrates how my colleagues and I conceived of an ongoing research project, that positioned our studio practice as the research subject, our professional dissatisfaction as the primary issue and calling for creative speculation within the workplace as our key argument.

Speculation, Serendipity, and Studio Anybody

ABSTRACT

This work presents the results of a comparative study in which we investigate the ways manipulation of physical versus digital media are fundamentally different from one another. Participants carried out both a puzzle task and a photo sorting task in two different modes: in a physical 3-dimensional space and on a multi-touch, interactive tabletop in which the digital items resembled their physical counterparts in terms of appearance and behavior. By observing the interaction behaviors of 12 participants, we explore the main differences and discuss what this means for designing interactive surfaces which use aspects of the physical world as a design resource.

Affordances for Manipulation of Physical versus Digital Media on Interactive Surfaces

Large websites and intranets can benefit from improved methods of search and navigation. These include site maps, A-Z indexes, sophisticated search engines, and generally improved navigational design—and playing a potential role in all of these methods is well-planned taxonomy.

better-living-through-taxonomies

INTRODUCTION
Traditionally, input devices have been discussed in terms of their mechanical and electrical properties (Foley & Van Dam, 1982; Sherr, 1988). Discussions centre on “joysticks,” “trackballs,” and “mice,” for example. Several studies have attempted to evaluate the technologies from the perspective of human performance. Many of these are summarized in Greenstein and Arnaut (1988) and Milner (1988). A common problem with such studies, however, is that they are often overly device-specific. While they may say something about a particular device in a particular task, many do not contribute significantly to the development of a general model of human performance. (There are exceptions, of course, such as Card, English and Burr, 1978.) With the objective of isolating more fundamental issues, some researchers have attempted to categorize input technologies and/or techniques along dimensions more meaningful than simply “joystick” or “trackball.” The underlying assumption in such efforts is that better abstractions can lead us from phenomenological descriptions to more general models, and hence better analogies.

Taxonomies of Input