http://hci-fun.org.uk/blog/?disp=comments en-UK http://backend.userland.com/rss 60 Tue, 16 Jan 2007 11:28:34 +0000 simon poulter [Visitor] c444@http://hci-fun.org.uk/blog/ I think McLuhan had a lot of this in mind when he wrote 'Understanding Media'. Quite how he did this is another matter, given that this was written in the early sixties. The medium is the message has entered into media ecology as a given term to describe the way a medium affects its surroundings irrespective of its content. Within a digital age and a neo-liberal economy phrases such as 'content is king' have become prevalent and Web 2.0 takes this paradigm further - where the 'user' develops the content (the corporations just sort out the banner ads). But the thing in itself, the physicality of a piece of technology affects how one behaves around it. I am sitting on my bed cross-legged at the moment typing this into a laptop, whereas some years ago I might have been publishing a paper based short edition type-set on an old Olivetti. Consequently the aesthetics of interaction are directly connected to ones behaviour. This is of course a truism but pushed a bit further we can see that devices such as Nintendo's Wii are beginning to break into the physical/virtual space (previously occupied by artists messing around with sensors and MAX/MSP). The leap away from the screen based interaction towards real time play with these kinds of technologies places the human body back into the experience. Still a hardcore of gaming officionados rule that the graphical performance of a machine determines its status, while I am arguing that any lower resolution gaming involving physical role play unlocks the desire to move in space. http://hci-fun.org.uk/blog/2007/01/15/aesthetics_of_interaction#c444