Wilson Miner  “When We Build”

Inspiring designers.

My thoughts;

Wilson Miner brought up the phrase from Marshall McLuhan , ‘The medium is the message’ Which I had never heard before and it really made me think about how, the medium a message is presented in can influence the message itself. How certain camera angles in film can promote a different message than the literary message of the script. Sometimes people get lost in the content of the message when actually, the medium or presentation of the message is the real content.

An interesting topic Milner brought up was the idea that, within design there is no intuition, only learned convention. Previously I had never thought about it that way and I assumed my knowledge of how computers worked was through intuition. When in fact it was something I had learned through watching others while growing up. This is an interesting thing to keep in mind when designing and interface in my opinion. When designing something for the elderly demographic, which may not have much IT knowledge it is important to think of the learned conventions they already know. An elderly woman may not know how to operate an iPad or tablet but they would already know how to read a book or newspaper.  You can take interaction inspiration from the physical interaction of reading a book, to explain how to operate an iPad.

Wilson Miner also made me think about how important it is to adapt to an environment as a designer. The way humans interact with technology has changed significantly in even just a decade. The time taken to record  and upload a video has significantly decreased with the advancement of mobile technology. No one knows what will be available for us to design in another decade which is why its important to understand how to create from what’s given to you.

In summary I really enjoyed this talk and I actually learned a lot about what I should be able to do as a designer in the future and what I aspire to be.