Kaleidocycle - Nour Diab Yunes

‘The Changing Sites of Value’

As part of The Internet as Playground and Factory, a conference series on the politics of digital media organised by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Orit Halpern, and Melissa Gregg introduced their individual areas of research and idiosyncratic takes on the notion of 'affect' and its evolution in meaning today as a result of technological progress.

Foundations of ‘Information Design’

Because information design is not a unified field and because its practice is highly context dependent, it has long been a challenge for designers and researchers alike to develop a vocabulary to describe and pass over the essential ingredients necessary for effectively communicating meaningful and persuasive information.

Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. – Steve Krug

Steve Krug explains how we can create better Websites if we just stop wasting time on useless debates within teams and engage in 'usability testing' early on in the development process. His book provides the antidote.

He distinguishes between designers and developers in what they consider to be a 'good' website design. Designers prefer pleasant layouts, whereas developers enjoy a good amount of features. This is also compared to the duality between commercial culture and craft culture. Which is a question of aesthetics versus usability. Ideally, we would want to have both.

“calm technology” (Weiser & Brown, 1996)

According the Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown (1996), "peripheral information" extends the notion of "affordances" to describe action enabling technologies that are reachable, yet on the periphery of perception and therefore encalming.

Designer/Artist + Co-Creation

With the advent of new technologies and the rapid dissemination and accessibility of information, artists and designers develop increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about the world in visual forms and of approaching open-ended questions or specific problems in new and exciting ways. It seems that design and art now represent blurred categorizations: artists and designers grow more apt at interchanging roles and are increasingly willing to collaborate and co-create.

Kuniavsky’s “Information Shadows”

Information shadows enable users to access information about their products and experience them in very different ways than could have been imaginable before the Internet. Today, products mean so much more to people and impact their product/customer experiences in new ways. With built-in ubicomp, customers experience products that have a much wider network of associations.