I’ll be responding to Ge Wang’s Artful Design:
- Principle 3.2: Animate!
- Principle 3.7: Experience substance not technology, or essentially attempt to highlight the narrative without hiding in the medium!
I believe that animating visuals is crucial to making a visualiser (or any sort of experience with technology) truly engaging. Part of this also ties intrinsically with the way we consume media, which is tending away from static image towards short form video exemplified by the rise of TikTok, IG reel, and Youtube shorts which highlight the acute decline in attention span and people’s need to be engaged by moving visual stimuli in order to be focused, whether for better or worse. No longer is it enough to create a beautiful piece of static art: movement is necessarily needed to keep the audience’s eyes on you at all time. For example, I run a brand called Paws Of Pride, an LGBTQ+ clothing brand. In the past, static images and photos on Instragram have been doing very well for me in terms of finding, engaging, and growing the audience. However, today static images perform extremely poorly and short video does far better despite requiring much more input, thought, and production time.
While there is a good thing to this in that dynamics and movement are necessarily a part of nature and the natural world — nothing is truly still — and this adds an element area city, likeness and engagement — I also wonder what this is doing to, or reflecting about, our current world given user’s lack of ability to focus and the implications for attention span in the future: will we need to move beyond audiovisual and tactile experiences?
Nevertheless, I think a lot of the examples presented in the chapter were very well-equipped to illustrate this notion that animating really brings life to technology and brings it out of the medium into a narrative that becomes the sole focus of the user. Ocarina is a fantastic example as there are particles swarm and glowing as a response to physical interaction, with the addition of both forms and motion giving the object personality. Indeed, the addition of movement through animation makes the visualiser feel “alive and responsive”, and this applies to other products.
When it comes to movement too, I often find myself stuck on what to do. I think the page on expressive verbs has been extremely helpful in helping me to brainstorm things (GLOW! BOOM!) I also enjoyed learning about ways to animate movement, such as the use of Zeno’s paradox to animate explosions.
