"A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space."
Bit of a gadget addict and one of my "one of these days" aspirations is automating everything in the house. I wish I were a electronics/robotics expert so that I could DIY all of that and maybe one day, I'll learn enough.
One thing I've noticed though, just from using off-the-shelf "smart" stuff, that you can be at a point where you've simply swapped the management of physical repetitive to-do's around the house (light switches, locks, etc.) with the management of the devices that manage the physical repetitive to-dos's.
Does that extra layer of abstraction deliver on promised efficiencies? I don't know yet. But I've gotten in the habit of standing in the middle of the room, repeating misunderstood voice commands when I could've accomplished the same task twice over and in less time by just moving my ass.
We cut the cable cord 10 years ago. We have Netflix. And Prime video because it's bundled. Used to have HBO but let it lapse. And the only thing Hulu was good for (for me) was to feed my guilt-ridden Law & Order SVU/OC addiction.
It's death by a thousand subscriptions if you want to capture all the gated content out there. And even then, you'd still be left wanting if you like non-mainstream or obscure stuff. Streaming services cull their non-original content all the time too, so it can be a frustrating experience chasing down an old movie or TV series that you swear was there several months ago.
That "Hello, old friend" meme pretty much describes our experience with streaming. And Bill Watkins was kinda right but wrong, all that storage is also for movies. :-)
Interaction Design, or IxD, is a design discipline that deals heavily in visual communication like graphic design, but focuses on back-and-forth communication, typically in a software GUI. Much like Graphic Design, adding beauty and fun are merely tools in a much more important skillset: interaction designers should also have a good sense for users' goals, workflows and communication dispositions; using layout, form, and animation to communicate meaning instead of verbose language-dependent labels that add to cognitive load and disrupt focus; how to form interfaces to match users workflows rather than the developer's mental model of the process; etc.
Many of the UI practices developers have absorbed through osmosis– such as grouping buttons with like actions and having them change color when you click on them— have their roots in pre-computer design disciplines. While they often work ok, they often aren't optimal, and an interaction designer can make your users lives' much better. For example, I might look at buttons grouped because they perform a technically similar function and think "what are the user's goals here? What likenesses should gestalt communicate for them? Do the other elements nearby alter the meaning of their grouping?"
Or I might see a standard modal where an alert pops up if the form fails validation because it uses an API which can't yield real-time feedback. Error popups are a big emotional disruption— like getting pulled over and given a warning rather than being redirected with a well-placed road sign. They also add cognitive load because they have to read it AND find the problem fields, the extra click can take time, and dealing with all of that can totally kill a user's flow and concentration. If it's common user stumbling block, I might make the button border and problem field switch to the same color and rapidly shake horizontally like a head shaking 'no.' The emotional rebuff and interruption to the user's flow are significantly reduced. It will drastically improve that user's experience.
While many technical folks consider these trivial issues, good interaction design is consistently one of the reasons folks will shell out serious skrilla for proprietary, less technically sound, less secure, and less flexible commercial software and why open-source alternatives will remain alternatives for everything but developer and technician focused software. One of my primary goals is to ply these skills in the FOSS scene.
