[IxDA Discuss] Aesthetic craft (was "Elements of InteractionDesign")

[Christopher Fahey]

Jonas wrote:
> 3. no communal sense of the "aesthetics of use" and no established  
> venues for collectively developing such a sense.

When you write "aesthetics of use", I think of the difference in "feel"
between, say, using Flickr and using Amazon.com. The amount of information
per interface, the complexity, density, and compartmentalization of
affordances, the difference in mental models and motivations. Is this what
you mean? Because I think this is an excellent area of inquiry and thinking,
and the word "aesthetics" I think is applicable because so much of what goes
into an interface is a kind of "usage style", independent of productivity
and efficiency metrics. 

If two interfaces have roughly the same visual style, and have nearly
equivalent empirical performance results, they still can differ radically in
how they actually feel to the user. This difference is a kind of aesthetic,
I think.

-Cf

Christopher Fahey
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