Inventing the Medium: Approaching Design as a Collective Cultural Task — Talk by Dr. Janet Murray

Описание: On 2/10/11 Georgia Tech's Dr. Janet Murray spoke at ICT.
Abstract: The design of digital artifacts is often done by interdisciplinary teams with conflicting design values. This talk presents an approach for focusing design goals by seeing all digital artifacts as part of a single common medium with its own unique affordances for representation: participation, procedurality, encyclopedic capacity, and navigable space. It is our collective task as designers to identify, elaborate, and refine the conventions that maximize these affordances. This talk will give an overview of this approach and then discuss four models of the computer that are useful reference points in maximizing and scripting participation: the Tool, the Machine, the Companion, and the Game. These are some of the key ideas in my forthcoming book, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction as a Cultural Practice, which will be released by MIT Press in fall 2011.

Bio (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray):
Professor Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized interactive designer, the former director of Georgia Tech's Masters and PhD Program in Digital Media, and a member of Georgia Tech's interdisciplinary GVU Center. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; MIT Press 1998), which has been translated into 5 languages, and is widely used as a roadmap to emerging broadband art, information, and entertainment environments. She is currently working on a textbook for MIT Press, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction as a Cultural Practice. Recent interactive design projects include a digital edition of the Warner Brothers classic, Casablanca, funded by NEH and in collaboration with the American Film Institute; and the InTEL Engineering Education Project, funded by NSF. In addition, she directs an Experimental Television Laboratory, which has worked on interactive television applications for PBS, ABC , MTV, Turner, and other networks. She is also a member Georgia Tech's Experimental Game Lab (EGL) . She holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, and before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999 taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects at MIT. Dr. Murray's primary fields of interest are digital media curricula, interactive narrative, story/games, interactive television, and large-scale multimedia information spaces. Her projects have been funded by IBM, Apple Computer, the Annenberg-CPB Project, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.

Learn more about ICT at http://ict.usc.edu/.