Que Multimedia?

Charles Field, Sunday, November 5, 2006 @ 2:21 pm

A local school recently asked me to teach a course in Multimedia. It is a first year grad course for people with little design context. Ordinarily I would have been interested in the school and it’s excellent program, yet I stumbled when I heard the term. Living in our Ajax enriched environment it struck me as an old school term, and wondered why it had faded from use.

After a bit of pondering, I came to the conclusion that it is a bit like carving trees out of wood. The metaphor is reversed. The soul in what we do is the interaction; multimedia is occaisionally part of the vessel.

Multimedia means Flash, cheesy little director games, tiny choppy video. Think of children’s CD-roms where low rent repitition is sort of a crash test stand-in for learning cognition. Multimedia means things that are difficult to sell and typically bring dissappointing responses when you do. And not usually worth producing except for massive media clients as they are expensive and cumbersome to update. These are not positive associations.

What is interesting is interaction design and the ability to synthesize actions and events into tighter groupings, both conceptually & physically - ideas like direct manipulation, contextual logic and coherent paths have utility; making it blink is just not that important.

I thought about for a bit, and realized that the suit didn’t fit. Back on the rack.

user experience design

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment