on line and on paper

This is about a book called "on line and on paper" by kathryn headerson. I totally agreed with her words that artistic rendering skills are not just for frill enrichment, instead they are connected to cognitive skills as basic as mathematics and verbal literacy and equally to all sorts of problem solving- in math and science as well as visual arts. she said "learning to draw improved my capacity to see things precisely, in fine-grained detail, but it also influenced the way I process and manipulate viusal information". Exactly, I believe learning to draw make us more sensitive to things around and can learn things others may not notice. At the same time, drawing has its own language to help people observe like structure, brush stroke, texture, palette, depth or flatness of space, narrative or abstract content. With enough sensitivity, observers can inpretate these language to reveal the contextual information of the artwork, like the historical, biographical and contextual information of the artists. With the same song, whether you know the background story of the song or not can really make it different for you to appreciate it. Here the artworks become index and the process of analyzing its formal characters. The skills may deteriorated without enough practice, but the cognitive skills will remain.

For some reason I don't know yet, I didn't her writing so much, but the above words say out what I am thinking.......

By recognition of visual skills as one of the basic cognitive skills, Kathryn questions why there is no corresponding emphasis in the public school curriculum. As for HCI design, both the users and the designers' visual skills are important. It seems visual knowledge got high status in the past, but today is at low status.

media and interaction

These days, I have been hanging around on MIT's acg-aesthetics + computation group-website, and was very impressed and inspired with their works. Like always, I traced back to the person who drives all these fabulous works, and found the name called John Maeda. From John Maeda's simple web page, what impressed me the most is not his novel media arts anymore, but his thoughts, his concerns about education and his ways of teaching. What he teaches in his classes is not only knowledge, but also trainings of their sensitivity to the things around through various activities step by step. He combines art and computer seamlessly, and his progressive view of development and research provides me answers about how I should deal with implementation and research as an ICT(Interactive Collaborative Technology) student. Research and development don't and shouldn't conflict with each other.When I am able to develop, it should become my ways of doing research, and I don't need to consciously focus too much on it.

Art impresses me with its richness of ways to express. I realized to master art can empower me with a variety of novel ways to represent meanings. It directly penetrates the realistic phenomena, and deliever the very essential elements that can evoke our feelings. Repetition, variety, or rhythm are their language to communicate. With true art, we may forget what are the colors, or what are the forms, but we will never forget what are the feelings that are evoked.

From the principles of visual interface design, I learned a computer interface is interacting with both the data or systems underlying it and human input. I never expected that a simple mouse click can be interpreted as so many dimensions of information and parameters. At the same time, computer interface strikes me with its time dimension as well as space dimension. Probably this is its new challenge compared to archtecture.

The meaning of interaction is really rich, and the examples about how designs shape interacte are everywhere. The glass doors and glass windows at the office allow you to see but not hear. The glass counters in the cake store allow you to see but not touch. The paths across the grass land record how we interact with the nature. The location of windows talor the way you interact with the outside environment........They are all basic mundane things, but I learned a lot from these everyday experience.