Date: 13 February 2002
Leader: Johanna Drucker
Topic: Design Production and Generative Aesthetics
Let's look at three design books:
Lupton and Miller, _Design, Writing, Research_
Tufte, _Envisioning Information_
Horn, _Visual Information_
All three are "how-to" books. Is there an issue that these are all print?
In reference to the assigned readings, all seem pretty straightforward.
The real issue is can you apply the principles here? It really is an
embodied process. Can you train your body to enact these patterns?
JD: Tufte is "dead" in the sense that his pages, his examples are static,
are specimens.
PG: In design firms, Tufte is on everyone's desk, but everyone uses
Lupton, Miller, etc.
JD: Tufte is rational and is thus appealing to certain communities. He
refers to the information as something separate from the form. Look for a
form to contain some information. Begin with the information.
But I'd like to suggest that we begin with the form. Take something that
seems to mean something and make it mean something.
BN: Visual provocation. John, like what you talk about with computer
visualizations. How the computer tells you something you didn't already
know. It produces a form without defined meaning.
JU: Yes, the computer has the power to produce patterns. The human has
the knowledge to put the meaning into the pattern, to explain the pattern.
JD: Bense is interesting here. Writing in the 1960's, seems aged now. He
was a physicist, and mathematician, and a concrete poet. According to
Bense, representation and meaning should be tied as closely as possible.
JM: How does this relate to, say, the Middle Ages. When people were using
cathedrals to build more cathedrals. In the 19th century, artists looking
at images to generate new images.
JD: Technology of production is very important.
JU: What's the tradeoff between interface and design?
Conversation about various IATH projects--Rossetti, telephone, Blake--and
their designs. Many users are frustrated by these sites because the
resources don't easily yield what they're looking for--the date when the
telephone was invented; the text of an artist's most famous poem.
Researchers behind these projects say "good," we didn't build the project
to answer that question. Issue--how does one foreground the question
intended by the designer of a Web resource? How can one design a site
such that users will both find the desired answer/object AND discover
whatever it is that the researcher intended the user to learn--"text"
isn't a simple concept; invention is a complicated technical and social
process; etc.
Johanna and Beth demo the temporal modelling project.
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