A report of the FITC 2008 Amsterdam
KEYWORD: INTERACTIVITY
The lait motif of this design & technology conference was the interactivity as part of everyday user experience. Both if you are navigating the Net or visiting an exhibition the most important thing nowadays is to interact with things around you.
We all like to click everywhere on the screen when there are buttons and icons showing that "something is going to happen then" and at the same way we would like to touch every paintings and sculptures or installations we see in exhibitions. We all want to interact, we all want more action, that’s the main point now. In the design process we must consider people necessity to use things, to find them attractive and even useful, we must create really fancy interfaces even when we follow the usability strict rules.
The world we live today it’s full of new technologies, futuristic approaches and everything it is changing so fast, our minds are most of the time incited by millions of images, videos and sounds so that it’s difficult to capture someone’s attention in a very effective way, in order to make him/her buy or use our product or service. And I doubt it will become easier in the future.
That’s why designers and developers are always looking for something new to surprise people.
At FITC I attended many interesting speeches about the way to use code to create amazing effects, 3d interfaces and website where users could interact with characters inside, and I got really useful advices on how to approach design projects. There were a couple of big company showing great examples of video installations or structures which could interact with the environment.
About the 3D and original interfaces I think that Carlos Ulloa’s work with Papervision3D was really something different for users, you can take a look to the Sony Bravia project to get the idea. The kind of interaction you can have with this tridimensional space is great and the way you can move between different levels to read information or to play with images gives you a real new experience.
It was interesting to see how GMunk use a complex 3d software as Maya, to create really nice special effects in his video ads, even if I found his website a little bit difficult to navigate:) have a look at some of the motion graphics work he has there. How dynamic media design and development converge was the focus of Remon Tijssen (Fluid) presentation, he showed some games’ interfaces where the most important thing was the entertaining part. Flash has been used just to let users play and have fun with characters or environment inside a game, not paying attention only to what a functional application is.
About the special effects I can say that we should call people like Joshua Davis and Erik Natzke artist more than designers, they found the way to use code to create pieces of art, to transform letters and numbers in beautiful moving effects, it was interesting for me to listen how they can found themselves, naturally, writing code in order to reach the final results they have in mind, that was something visible as a static image or a dynamic one.
Anyway, as I saw during the presentations about projects of big company as Imaginary Forces , Bigspaceship or designers as Nikolai Cornell, we can find interactivity not only on a computer screen, but even in exhibition or inside an event going around the showroom. It was amazing to see how architecture can be mixed with technology creating decorative video panel placed on buildings that interact with the weather, changing colors or movies to show, or the entrance door of a car expo that people could touch to get information. I think this is our future, the structure around us can be part of our everyday life not only because they are schools, offices, houses or bars, but also because we can mix pixels with glass, wood and every kind of material to make them interact with us in different way so to be even more useful.
On the other side of the interactivity concept there was a discussion about communication and how to approach design project even with different media. Keywords in these case were: simplicity, detail observation, sharing ideas, experimentation and passion. I agree with Aral Balkan when he says that software are only instruments like brushes for painters and that we must look around us to see how things change, we should use all kind of services on-line to understand better what’s going on in the Net.
If we think about communication generally it’s important for a creative mind to ask the right question while working on a project even if it’s a poster, a logo, a brochure or a video, and Robert L. Peters suggest us the most important ones: how, why, what, whom, when and where. Maybe this seems to be a commonplace idea, but when we are creating something for other people, not only for ourselves, that has to be seen by different people, that’s the way to think because we are part of a big world with lots of different cultures, different way of living, of behaving and we are most of the time responsible for what we do in our works.
In any case all the speakers at Fitc agree with one main point: the real secret for everybody success and to get satisfaction from the work you do, is to work hard, or like hell as someone said:)
