Designing for Mutability

The imperative is identified.

the need to make design as fluid as possible so that it can pour across the wires into the unpredictable receptacles, rhythms, and ultimately the lives of others.

Alan Liu is here referencing material accessed through the Web. What he here describes in The Laws of Cool can also be valid if in a more limited sense for print and television. The key is the accommodation of rhythm. And this design principle can even be extended to theatre hacking by Olivier Choinière or imagine a stroll through the Oakville Galleries in the Gariloch Gardens with the Janet Cardiff's A Large Slow River (2000). Life presents us with opportunities to resize, delay, pause, in short mashable moments, and as the description of the Cardiff piece says "Our attention is fixed on listening and imagining. Synchronistic events also play with our understanding of reality as events and scenes described on her CD coincidentally come together in the physical world." And as any meditator can tell you — sounds occur in one's head often unbidden.

And so for day 347
26.11.2007