And we’re off!
The past few days have been my eye candy. I chose my thesis “topic” at the end of the winter quarter (March) and am starting to really explore the territory in front of me.
With this project, I’m working to conceptualize the future of reading, much like Portigal Consulting did with their recent work. They have laid a fantastic piece of groundwork for Design of the Future Book to move forward. The research wasn’t overly extensive, but it did express a concrete understanding of how (a specific) public views the “book” today.
Looking ahead, there are a lot of potential issues for taking the book digital. A number of those I’ve highlighted in my blog, but to name a few: copyright, sharing, and ownership issues (to be duked out by the gods of i.p. law), tactile and visceral design challenges, and the overall rebranding of the newly crafted experience of reading.
So where do I fit in? Well, I’m not sure yet. My interests gravitate towards interpersonal interaction. I think it all began with a piece I did in college where I created overlapping concentric circles representing the relative proximetrics of two individuals. *Note To Self: Recreate that sometime to share visually…* But from there on out, a lot of my work centered around the space and interactions between people, or the interactions between people and objects.
It’s taken me about 5 years to realize that the word Interaction had an entire profession associated with it. (To be fair, it’s not much older than that…) But since that’s hit home, I’ve decided to move forward and shift my skillset about 20 degrees, from “industrial” design to “interaction” design. As far as I can tell, it’s practically the same thing. Though, maybe I should learn some HTML.
