September 3rd, 2018 - Day 1
Today as an introduction to the course we learned about some abstract concepts of aesthetics in interaction. Our group of 4 created a video showing some of our interpretations of definite and ambiguous interactions for the apparent and covered attributes.
This task was particularly difficult for me as going into design was a way for me to creatively focus on practical tasks, but since this was such an abstract concept it was difficult to see how we could apply such concepts to the real world.
Apparent is translated as something that is the “conscience of the significance of your own doing, assurance, assurance, security, goal mode, seeing what’s going on, expressive, very easy” and covered is translated as “magic, excitement, exploration, action-mode, witchcraft, deeply impress somebody”.
With this, after some brainstorming we had different ideas of each. For apparent we were going for very literal meanings of ease such as turning on a light and plugging in a cord which you could tell was meant for that plug etc. Looking into this, we noticed there are many ambiguities between the two because some things can seem very literal, such as the light switch, but be covered when they don’t turn on the light that we think it will. Similarly driving a forklift, you steer in one direction but the machine moves in a different way. These we found to be easy examples but when it came to a definite example of covered it was confusing to find something that is constantly surprising no matter how many times you do it. Ultimately, we found that rolling dice and flipping a coin are good examples since although there are a concrete number of possibilities, and you know the outcome has to be one of them, you still never know what that outcome will be.