Skills for Designing in Different Media

From DesignWiki

Contents 1 Foundational 2 Advanced 3 compare and contrast interaction design with traditional 3.1 Key Similarities 3.2 Key Differences 4 types of skills for different design activities 5 files

Foundational

Visual Literacy —

Research Skills —

Critical Analysis Skills —

Technical Skills —

Advanced

Simulation

the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation

the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking

the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition

the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence

the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment

the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation

the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking

the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation

the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

advanced list from Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, 2007

compare and contrast interaction design with traditional

Key Similarities

• both use similar formal language
• typography
• use of imagery
• foundations-based vocabulary

• both are concerned with semantic uses of graphic language
  • hierarchy
  • balance
  • contrast
  • alignment
  • repetition
  • metaphor, symbolism

Key Differences

The interaction designer is concerned with:

• use of polymorphous narrativity
• consideration of channel context
• consideration of the experiential domain
• a visual design that communicates both syntactic and semantic information
• graphics represent opportunity for user to have effect upon the system, provide affordances

types of skills for different design activities

	Traditional Designer	Time-based Designer	Interaction Designer
primary artifacts	poster	book, movie	software, signage system
communication goal	change opinion	tell story	facilitate action, not opinion
key strategy	rhetoric	narrativity	affordances, feedback
visual vocabulary	semantic	semantic	syntactic
viewer’s way of seeing	simultaneous gestalt	experienced over time	analytic, sequential
viewer’s mode	see <-> read	sr>sr>sr>sr>sr>sr	call and response
communication model	Shannon-Weaver	Shannon-Weaver	polymorphous feedback
key aesthetic practice	type and image	montage	standardized visual vocabulary

files

Current chart of the organization of course prerequisites in Comm Design. Image:Prereqs.pdf