Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice by Janet H. Murray

by Janet H. Murray

A foundational text offering a unified design vocabulary and a common methodology for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts. Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium , Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field. Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits—whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps—as belonging to a single new the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity. Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorations—creative exercises for students and thought experiments for practitioners—that allow readers to apply the ideas in the chapter to particular design problems. Inventing the Medium also provides more than 200 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts.

Genres: Design, Philosophy

Hardcover

First published November 23, 2011

About the author

Janet H. Murray is Ivan Allen College Dean's Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Mjhancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murray presents her philosophy of digital design, that we are still inventing the digital medium, and we need to consider how improving it improves human communication. Her thesis, taken from her earlier book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, is that the major representational forms enabled by digital technology is the procedural, the spatial, the encyclopedic, and the participatory. The book is divided into five sections; the first section of the book of media design, with digital technology in particular. The other four correspond roughly to the four forms Murray identified. There's a section on expressive procedures that resembles the abstract portion of a first year computer science course, involving pseudo code and feedback loops. Section 3 focuses on spatial design strategies, with one chapter on spatial exploration in digital spaces, and one on libraries. It's probably the section that's the most short-changed, as that second part fits more closely with the fourth section, designing encyclopedic resources. Chapters include database types and marking metadata. The final section, scripting interaction, looks at four broad models for designing human/digital interactions: as tool, as companion, as machine, and as game. The text is ideal for undergraduate course on design, or those looking for an update of Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck; for anyone else, there may not be a lot of interest. It's got excellent exercises at the ends of the chapters, makes great use of full-colored examples, and has a very detailed glossary--again, clearly designed for an undergraduate audience.

[Roy Kenagy]

Publisher's web site: http://bitly.com/xc3qAO

"With Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field.

Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits--whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps--as belonging to a single new medium: the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity."

[Tao · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quite comprehensive introduction to core interaction design concepts and principles. The author frames the task of interaction designers as exploiting affordances of this new digital medium. The unique aspect of this book is that it also discusses some key computer science concepts underneath the user interface, such as object-oriented programming and emergent behavior, which I think is helpful for designers to fully understand what digital media are capable of. The book probably lacks depth for readers who has been exposed to interaction design before, but still it offers a new framework to think about interaction design.

[John R Naugle]

Dr. Murray has a formidable foundation in digital tech. She is an asset to the city of Atlanta [ http://etv.gatech.edu ]. I like this quote from her book: "When we expand the meaning-making conventions that make up human culture, we expand our ability to understand the world and to connect with one another.