Science fiction isn’t a literature that tells you what will happen tomorrow. It is a literature that tells you how to prevent the bad tomorrows and usher in the good ones.
This post by Cory Dotorow on the role of science fiction is a telling one on the role of language in general. We do not have to predict, so much as create a metaphor that sticks and can help guide us. I wonder if this is relevant when it comes to understanding touch and the language we use for it?
Aesthetics is a word that I keep scampering around in my research. Lucky there’s a reader for that (Aesthetics by Feagin and Maynard). Continue reading
One of the key papers that I keep coming back to is Jeffery Bardzell’s work on interaction criticism (most recently discussed in his 2011 Interacting With Computers paper Interaction Criticism: An Introduction to the Practice). His background is in the humanities, so (along with doing a lot of cool studies on the edges of HCI), he is able to bring a understanding of people to HCI that’s also relevant more generally in design (he notes that notes that current work on HCI aesthetics pits it against mainstream aesthetics, when in fact they might feed each other.)