What are Affordances?

James Gibson’s perspective

Gibson was a psychologist influential in the field of visual perception and responsible for coining the term affordance. He defines affordance as qualities that an environment, or object in an environment, offer a human or animal. Flat…

The Pitfalls of Ubiquitous Computing

Mark Weiser’s article “The Computer for the 21st Century” predicts how computers will soon be so integrated into all products of our lives that they will “disappear” and we will stop being conscious of their presence. Although the article was written in 1991, his…

Speculative Design: Artificial Pregnancy

In 2035, scientists were able to grow the first human fetus outside of the womb. This was done in a laboratory setting under careful observation of scientists and doctors. But in the the fifteen years since this advancement, artificial pregnancy has left the…

What is the role of AI in design?

When initial work on CAD began, there was a debate as to whether computers could replace the human role in design and be used to generate potential ideas, evaluate their effectiveness, and determine the best design direction. But attempts to replace humans came up short…

It’s not about if the means justify the ends, it’s about what ends you’re measuring

Otto von Busch sheds light on the dark side of micro-lending and argues that companies with a social focus pride themselves on attempting to improve lives of impoverished communities with…

What is Interaction Design? A Reboot

Throughout this semester our class has read about and discussed a large variety of topics that influence the area of interaction design. We started off the semester, each writing our interpretation of what interaction design is. While my view has not changed, my…

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction Design is the process of evaluating and improving how people interact with products, services, and online applications.

Many people tend to associate interaction design solely with online experiences, primarily with interfaces and site…

When Computer’s Start to Act Like Humans

Lucy Schuman’s book on Human Machine Interaction she argues that computers are becoming more humanlike due to the fact that they often react to human input in real time and can interpret natural language. While this is exciting and many technologists and…

Introduction

Hi there! I’m Emma Zelenko, a current master’s student at Carnegie Mellon studying interaction design.

I took a non-traditional route to becoming a designer. As an undergraduate I studied psychology and film. I was fascinated by both human behavior and storytelling.

Final Paper

So far this semester we have explored many facets of design that have gotten us to broaden our horizon of what design is and what the role of a designer is. For our final paper I think it would be interesting for each person to write about what they believe the most overlooked or underutilized aspect of…