Marshall McLuhan was an influential thinker who studied the impact of media and technology. He is quoted as saying that "the medium is the message" and that we fail to fully consider how the choice of medium shapes the message conveyed and its reception. The document presents several of McLuhan's ideas about media and how new technologies can enhance some things, retrieve others, reverse roles, and make older technologies obsolete. It also suggests these ideas remain highly relevant to understanding changes in digital media and user experience design.
10. As Tom Wolfe has aptly inquired,
What if McLuhan is right?
Suppose he is what he sounds like—
the most important thinker since
Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and
Pavlov?
The Playboy Interview:
Marshall McLuhan,
Playboy Magazine
March 1969
20. any understanding
of social and cultural change is
impossible without a knowledge of
the way media work as
environments
- Marshall McLuhan + Quentin Fiore, The Media is the Massage
21.
22. WHY THIS MIGHT MATTER:
•
Has there ever been a time in
digital when there’s been more
interest in and focus on content?
23.
24. WHY THIS MIGHT MATTER:
•
You sometimes
pick or influence
the medium that your work
is expressed within.
25. WHY THIS MIGHT MATTER:
•
You sometimes
do not
pick or influence
the medium that your work
is expressed within.
33. Enhances:
scope and density of
what we can talk
about together in real
time
Retrieves:
dirt + stick
Reverses:
into documentation
Obsolesces:
chalkboard
Cool
35. Enhances:
ability of designers
to specify how a
thing will be built
Retrieves:
engineer’s
―working drawings‖
Reverses:
into the actual
product
Obsolesces:
design ―comps‖
Hot
43. Some sketches by Jordan Little
iPhone 6 Idea Sketches by Luke Zammit
Mobile UI Wireframe by Siska Flaurensia
Wireframes for sticker app by Jordan Price
UI Wireframe Sketch by Chris No
52. Enhances:
ability of co-located
mixed-context groups
to simultaneously
view what’s being
considered
Retrieves:
stained
glass
windows
Reverses:
into
billboard
Obsolesces:
boardroom projector
/ jumbo-tron TV
54. DO THREE THINGS
•
Be Perseus, not Narcissus.
•
Consider the not-necessarily-connected –ness
of message and media.
•
Align medium and message (and temperature),
then set everybody’s expectations accordingly.
Why do architects need to create stars? Because, I think, architecture deals with unmeasurables… Architects, grappling with the intangibles of design, select a guru whose work gives them personal help in areas where there are few rules to follow.” – Denise Scott Brown
The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.
We do social and cultural change. All the time.
“The ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists”
“Intense participation and low definition, where viewer has to fill in or complete the image themselves = “cool”
“In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience”
“Low in participation by the audience, extends a single sense with high definition” “Fragmented, exclusive”
Tsien and Williams withhold certain views in certain media from the client
Proposition: don’t *ever* show web / app / digital UI / UX / IxD work that’s not a figured-out product yet on a computer or projector. Never. Our content may be hand-rendered and sketchy as all hell but photographing it and sharing and presenting it on a digital device / screen / projected image involves the effects of a new medium, and the message of that additional layer of the digital/projected medium “says” stuff that’s at odds with what and where you’re at in your process. So don’t.