Where I let others tell you the details on the history of IA and we think about IA in the context of IXD This week we are going to deep dive into Information Architecture. Many interaction designers do information architecture as a practice — after all, much of what we work with is information and…
Maligned AOL and research into gender differences in games In the 80’s, on the east coast, another community was created by Steve Case. AOL started as a BBS and eventually evolved to developing its own proprietary software. Not the web, but not a BBS anymore, AOL grew to be one of the most influential and…
Where Interaction Design History and my personal history as a designer begin to overlap Once folks start having computers in their homes, they want to do more than just create files. They want to connect with and talk with other people. In the 1980’s and early 1990’s software called Bulletin Board systems started appearing. There…
Finally we are going to talk about early personal computing and computer games. This is the beginning of what we are more familiar with compared to what we have talked about up to this point. Early in the days — the 1970’s and 1980’s — of computers and computer programming, lots and lots of people…
The week we learn how architecture in the physical world can teach us about designing in the digital world. And about design patterns. This week we’re going to think about architecting spaces and talk about a couple of people who helped us all think differently about how we can use these concepts in Interaction Design….
We finally start to hear about the origins of Interaction Design as a distinct practice. It still doesn’t have the official name yet but Bill Verplank, talks about the work of doing interaction design. Read about the concepts for the Personal Dynamic Media — Dynabook — concept put forward by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg…
This is a short intro as the content of the videos covers everything needed to think about in this section. So far in our journey we’ve seen the evolution of symbols and pictographs into our current alphabets, as well as the birth of printing, type design and graphic design. We’ve explored the rise of industrial…
When designers designed across disciplines and brought learnings from one discipline to another After WWII the U.S. enters a time of incredible innovation and expansion in design. Thousands of GIs return from the war and start families. They take advantage of the GI bill to further their education and they come back to the workforce….
The Bauhaus spreads to America. Diving into the concept of hypertext with the Memex and how WW2 gave us human factors engineering and Fitt’s Law Between World Wars 1 and 2 there was a rise of artist and political groups that created many of the manifestoes you read in the intro lecture. In 1919 Bauhaus…
The Machine Revolutionizes the World and our field begins to find sparks The industrial revolution starts around 1760 and lasts nearly 100 years. By the 1800’s steam engines and steel come into play, resulting in the railroad which opens up travel and commerce possibilities beyond what people had seen before. Starting in England, but spreading…
Where we learn that moveable type & paper making came to the west from China first & Da Vinci had his hands in everything Around 1040 AD moveable wood type is developed in China and it is believed that Marco Polo saw money being printed on paper in China around 1298. Stories about these new…
In which I go back to the beginning when humans started making marks to tell stories In the early stages of civilization humans made marks on walls and drew pictures of experiences to tell stories, share their successes, or to leave information for future visitors. We actually will never know exactly why, but story telling…
At my core, I am archivist and historian. I have always been the one who saved everything, took all the pictures, made the scrapbooks to commemorate life and relished doing research for school papers all the way up to current times, researching the best material for teaching the classes I teach at CCA (California College…
In 2016 a bunch of us gathered together with folks from IXDA SF to reminisce and record our collective history from the beginnings of the dot com boom and bust cycle. It was fun to catch up with folks and share our various origin stories. I had forgotten about this until I was hunting for…
[February 2021] I wrote this short piece in graduate school—my first year—when I thought I would still be a graphic designer when I finished school. I think much of this came to pass in terms of technology as a tool—although the typesetters, film separators and other craftsmen probably wouldn’t agree. We also had no idea…