Re-post, originally published Sep. 6th, 2019
Hello everyone,
For this blog I just wanted to talk about what I have learned so far from my Interactive Media 1 class and what I find interesting about Interactive Media. Before taking this class I did not know much about Interactive media. I think I always knew a little bit about it but it has always been at the back of my mind. Now however, I find Interactive media to be very interesting. The first week of class we had to read a book called Atomic Design Methodology. Out of the whole book, I really enjoyed reading chapter 2. It made thinking about the layout and process of Interactive media seem a lot easier. The atomic design methodology is basically, from what I understand, splitting up the process into five easy steps that get their names from basic chemistry terms that most people should have learned about when they were younger. This shared understanding of a naming convention makes the process of Interactive design easier as everyone will be on the same page.
The first stage is Atoms. They are the basic building blocks in chemistry and so are the basic building blocks in Interactive design. They consist of basic elements that can not be broken down any further like a button or a label. The next stage is Molecules which if you remember from chemistry is two or more Atoms grouped together. So if you apply that idea to Interactive design a Molecule is two or more of our basic core elements grouped together to form a single unit like a search bar. The third stage is an Organism. An Organism is almost exactly the same as a Molecule but instead of grouping together two or more Atoms, it groups together Molecules to form a single unit like the header of a website. The last two stages are pretty self explanatory and have nothing to do with chemistry but everyone understands what they are. They are Templates and Pages. Templates are your wireframes and lays everything out so you can get a feeling for how everything will fit together. A page is actually plugging in items to the wireframe / template basically making a prototype to the final outcome or actually completing the design. I found all this and the rest of the book to be very informative.
Interactive media is a supper interesting field and as technology advances so does Interactive media. One thing that interests me the most is all the different ways people are coming up with to interact with computers. It is not all just typing on a keyboard or touching a screen. There are things like VR that makes you feel like you are in a different world and lets you interact with the things you see making you feel like you are actually there. Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and ever wondered if the technology depicted would ever become a reality? I remember a couple years ago when I was watching the remake of Total Recall and all the characters had phones built into their hands. I remember thinking that that was so cool but it also looked a little dumb now that I think about it because it was weird seeing them talk into their hands. More recently, in the video game Detroit: Become Human the androids in the game were just able to pay for something just by thinking about it and I thought that was pretty cool. I know that it makes more sense that they were able to do this because they weren’t human and were robots but wouldn’t it be kind of cool if sometime in the future we could do this. You never know it might not be too far in the future where we will be able to interact with computers using only our mind, as we have already started to figure it out. As they have figured out how to control a prosthetic arm only using the mind (https://futurism.com/mind-controlled-robotic-arm-johnny-matheny).
I have learned a bunch more that I will not talk about at this moment in this post but there is so much that can be done with Interactive Media and so much to learn. I am excited to learn more about it this semester and the semesters to come.
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