Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6
New Terrain in
in the first edition of this topic, I wrote about some of the up-and-
coming things I could see on the horizon in human-computer interaction:
new environments for writing, smart houses, multimedia, and virtual re-
ality. These things and many more have since entered our world. Smart
houses are still not so smart, but I think we have trouble handing over too
much agency to the architecture. Instead, houses have become “smarter”
by incorporating technologies that reduce their footprint in the world,
from new materials to solar panels and graywater gardens. Multimedia in
its most general sense is so pervasive as to be unremarkable except as a
historically situated bridge that people thought of as a media type (usu-
ally employing videodisc technology). I wrote more about virtual reality in
the paperbound version of the fi rst edition, and I will include some of that
writing here.
In the fi rst section of this chapter, we will look at some of the methods
and “media” that have been developed in the last two decades. In the sec-
ond section, we'll explore how some of these methods—along with new
insights and purposes—have extended the geometry of dramatic interac-
tion. Third, we will take a few lessons from biology to talk about design for
emergence. Finally, I'll offer some musings about design for the Good.
If we assert that the computer itself is a medium, how can we talk about
different instances of a computational platform as media in themselves? I
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