What Does a City Know About Interaction Design?

Ulu Mills
Ulu Mills
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

The three pieces we’ve read this week deal with how buildings, or technology, or a city relate to people and vice versa. Choose one (or more) models to think through how a person might relate to something that an interaction designer might create.

The opening lines of Learning from Las Vegas quote TS Eliot, and highlight that writing, even fiction, is never a purely formative¹ act. Writers do not simply create stories from thin air —they are always, at least in part, illustrative¹ of the landscape of preexisting literary consciousness. We always build ideas on a precedence, and there is no such thing as a clean slate. The slate itself has a color, texture, weight, warmth that alter what is written upon it.

What follows is an essay intended to illustrate the ways that the city of Las Vegas came to be — a conglomeration of design considerations that established an aesthetic found nowhere else.

We as interaction designers focus first on use. We often dream about the best-case behaviors and tweak our designs to facilitate them. Las Vegas does this as well: it is designed to promote certain behaviors — the essay highlights how casinos are lit and colored to feel limitless and erase architecture, creating a disconnect with the present world.

But casinos are not unique to Vegas. What stood out to me most were these lessons we could learn from its signage, arguable Vegas’ first outwardly identifiable feature:

Constraints can be generative.

In line with what Stewart Brand presents in How Buildings Learn, the site of the city in the Mojave is responsible for its first iteration’s diminutive buildings. Buildings could not be grandiose when resources were scarce, so the oasis fantasy facade was outsourced to the building’s signage.

Static interactions still may be consumed dynamically.

The Stardust (pictured above) designed its traffic-facing signs for an audience that first sees it from afar, then again up close. For the faraway audience, the sign is large, simple, and eye-catching. For the closer audience, the sign is readable and detailed.

Competitors must both contend and cooperate.

The essay addresses the tension between a sign being designed to outshine competition while still ascribing to an overall aesthetic. Interactions, too, must ride this line — ascribing to convention brings context and familiarity, but alone falls flat.

“Good design” is not always appropriate.

If Vegas were preoccupied with taste and convention, it would lose the excitement that defines it. The garish landscape is harmonious because everything was designed to stand out.


  1. Crisp, D. G., & Temple, W. F. Typography (Graphic Design in Context).

MPS Seminar One

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Ulu Mills

Written by

Ulu Mills

MDes_IxD_CMU. Wonderer-wanderer. ulumills.com

MPS Seminar One

More clever title to follow.

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