Week 1 (Fri 3:15-6:05) with Greg Van Alstyne

Hello and welcome to the first post for G Van Alstyne’s class. I hope these notes will be of help to you outside of class times.

lecture:

Marshall McLuhan – invented the ‘tetrad’- a technique for analyzing media
- 4 questions can be asked about any medium
- we touched on the four areas – extend, replace, retrieve, flip into
- McLuhan invented the term ‘Global Village’ and theorized the effects of electric technology (we can follow chain of technology-medium-environment all the way through to global effects)

from powerpoint on G Van Alstyne’s work, we asked ‘now that we can do anything, what will we do?’
- ‘ibot’ – wheelchair able to climb stairs and allows occupants to be at standing height
- our best computers now used for purposes other than war i.e. mapping ocean currents, air traffic control, measuring energy, market economies, social changes...


ibot


ocean currents

24hr time-lapse of US air traffic space

from the 2nd powerpoint, we looked at interaction design – what does it include and what does it mean?
- several suggestions: art medium, people, message, communication, technology, feasible, physical, intellectual, media, global, conference room, virtual, illusion, responsive...
- interaction design...when people interact and the device or technology ‘disappears’
- it has less to do with objects and more to do with experience...

interaction design is broad!
- several examples: telephones, intercoms, voice over internet protocol (VOIP), plain old telephone service (POTS), texting/short messaging service (SMS), email, blogs, wikis, ipods/podcasting, peer-to-peer file sharing, radio frequency identity tags, GPS, ATMs, Kiosks, etc
- it includes experience design (ie Mall environments, board games such as monopoly), human-computer interaction, 3-D, N-D (with any number of dimensions working together)

what is NOT interaction design?
- yesterday’s media...

links of interest:
massive change
jeremy blake
IDEO

for other links, refer to course outline

Role of the Scribe:

As I have done, the ‘scribe’ will take notes during the class and publish a post of his/her notes, along with relevant links, pictures etc on this blog. You will receive an email invitation from myself and then, upon accepting the invite, will receive privileges to post. As you scroll down to the end of each post, you will see a ‘comments’ link, where questions and further discussion is encouraged.

2 students will be informed that they will act as the ‘scribe’ before each class begins.