Reading response 3: the computer interface
Please write complete responses to these questions—this may mean a paragraph in many cases. You may use this Word file for your answers, or create your own document. Handwritten replies are okay, but typed answers are better. Please bring the completed response to class in hardcopy form
- (1 point) In “Personal Dynamic Media,” Kay and Goldberg describe how the computer interface can become a medium that represents all other media. Based on the article’s description and images of a proposed computer interface (for what the authors call the Dynabook), describe how these interface ideas put into practice at least one of Manovich’s five new media principles. (Note: you should exclude numerical representation here, because it underpins everything!)
- (2 points) In this week’s reading on interface from The Language of New Media, Manovich makes the key point that new media interfaces are constructed primarily out of the metaphors and practices of older media—especially the traditions of print and cinema. Discuss at least two ways in which new media interfaces repurpose print metaphors, and at least two ways in which new media interfaces repurpose cinema metaphors
- (2 points) In the HCI: Representation vs. Control section, Manovich describes the screen of the human-computer interface as “a battlefield for a number of incompatible definitions—depth and surface, opaqueness and transparency, image as illusionary space and image as instrument for action” (90). What does Manovich mean by this, and explore an example of an interface you use that may typify some of the common tensions between representation and control.
