February 7th, 2017

Affordances and Limitations

We’re now taking the information we’ve gathered on our people and translating that into three mediums: print, web, and mobile. We were introduced to the affordances and limitations for each medium so that we could start to visualize how we could relay information on these platforms. The relationship between these mediums is something that I’ve never thought about or been introduced to, so this class really helped me get a clear idea of how I could approach this project.

The main takeaway was that navigation plays a huge role. In print, information is limited to the boundaries of the document, whereas digital mediums can create space. The interaction element that exists within digital spaces allows for information to be organized in such a way that does not require designers to compact the information in a single spread. As a result, information can be accessed through interactions such as buttons, scrolling, etc., and therefore creates space. Print on the other hand, requires us to look at information as form. Information is laid out in a spread, so it forces us to consider how, where, and why we place a piece of information; it forces us to create a visual relationship between text and image, and between information and page. I’m not saying that digital mediums don’t do this; it’s just that digital mediums allow us to convert information into interactions which in turn lets us create our own information as forms.

I have yet to discover the detailed aspects of these mediums, but I’m excited to explore them in the coming weeks.