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.