Abstract
Inventing the Medium examines a pressing predicament: how do professionals design for the digital medium, a broad category that includes websites, video games, and handheld devices? Digital media are often merely a ‘good enough’ translation of a legacy format, such as with eBooks. At the same time, digital is disruptive; society is ‘creating complex digital environments faster than we are creating the means of conceptualizing and overseeing them’ (p. 127), leading to a splintered field with few standards. Inventing the Medium unifies interdisciplinary scholarship to propose a design process focused on everyday use. Janet Murray here pushes concepts introduced in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1998) towards pragmatic questions of how to design interactions with technologies. Her theoretical stances, vocabulary, elicitation techniques, and perspectives on design will appeal to a range of scholars interested in software studies, technological histories, computer-mediated communication, and human-computer interaction.
Murray’s primary argument is that digital (primarily but not exclusively related to computers) is a medium still in the process of being collectively created through shared culture. Similar threads of scholarship include Anne Balsamo’s assertion that technological design is a cultural process that begins in the imagination (Balsamo, 2011) and Thomas Streeter’s history of the Internet as deeply tied up with romanticism (Streeter, 2011). A more humanistic design process involves an attentive eye to the user, prototypes, and simulations. More broadly, good design unfolds through interactive rituals between users and digital artefacts in society. She refers to this collective work of expanding the depth and breadth of symbolic representations as ‘enlargening the circle of shared attention’. Her optimistic vision reinforces how coming together around good design practices can connect us and make us, essentially, more human.
Designers must recognize that the digital medium is still in flux and draw on previous affordances while also forging ahead. They should balance cultural context, core human values, and functionality to create artefacts that encourage the experience of autonomy. She connects cognitive and cultural facets of design by drawing on Donald Norman’s interpretation of affordances (Norman, 2002) to describe the natural but often unconscious ways users interact with objects. Individuals unconsciously store conventions of previous media formats in cognitive schema. Designers must master articulating affordances as they activate new and hybridized schemas to ‘accelerate the collective project of inventing a new medium by creating and refining the conventions that will bring coherence to new artifacts and enhance their expressive power’ (p. 39). She thus extends Norman by suggesting that affordances are collectively emergent rather than simply created, and shifts the role of designers towards that of astute interpreter.
The first part of the book summarizes her vision for the design process and proposes how to imagine new artefacts in the digital medium while fostering conventions of inscription, transmission, and representation on specific platforms. Next, each affordance (encyclopaedic, spatial, procedural, and participatory) is considered within the purview of a specific tradition; procedural affordances are considered in the realm of computer science as she traces layers of abstraction from code to digital artefact and advocates for the use of flow charts and pseudocode. She calls on fellow Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2005) to describe how computational procedures reflect cultural values, as when the Sims impose western bourgeois values on players by valuing promptness and possessions in game play. Spatial design strategies include containers, such as file folders, and landscapes, such as in web browsers. The encyclopaedic affordance concerns databases, tagging, and metadata and will be most familiar to those with a history in web development.
The last few chapters unite these affordances to consider how computers can activate four foundational models of the digital medium: tool, machine, companion, and game. The tool model is the most salient, rooted in our ability to point, with goals of efficiency, learnability, and transparency. Rather than being cumbersome or conflicting, tools should encourage expressiveness or creativity and virtuosity, such as with a musical instrument. The machine model promotes the making visible of the ‘black box’ of computation through an understanding of software, resulting in a greater understanding of our power relationship with technology. The companion model is what Sherry Turkle has recently feared: expressive machines that trigger emotional responses. Finally, the game model is seen to undergird all digital design, as it describes fundamental processes of learning and motivation through play. Murray goes so far as to say that ‘humanist designers should recognize games as building blocks of culture’ (p. 289), which is in-line with recent thinking by Jane McGonigal (2011).
Her sacrificing of brevity to unite disparate theoretical traditions is provocative but not without consequences. McLuhan heavily influenced Murray (as seen in the book title and tetrad-esque charts), and her writing is similarly ambitious in scope. Inventing the Medium exhaustively maps all that has converged into the digital domain, no matter how disparate the terrain, including devices, game consoles, and desktop computers. It is difficult to provide contemporary examples in a continually shifting field, which reinforces her assertion that digital media continually outpaces design, even as it occasionally frustrates the reader. Chapters that broadly trace digital media from bits on up for a wide audience may frustrate those in software studies by prioritizing the basics.
Minor quibbles aside, Murray succeeds in grounding design practice with an ambitious history of the digital medium using coherent examples, applied activities, and a useful vocabulary. She expands the role of digital designers, putting pressure on them to be aware interpreters, knowledgeable in multiple fields, and astute visual communicators. The four affordances (spatial, encyclopaedic, procedural, and participatory) and four models (tool, machine, companion, and game) provide useful concepts to think with. Design examples appropriate for a classroom setting are provided at the end of each chapter. Above all, she is most successful when using applied examples and frameworks to elucidate ways forward for digital as a medium.