Category Archives: What is a Medium?

What is a Medium? Shared Focused Attention

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 2 comments

This Friday I will be giving a keynote for the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association of the UK (MeCCSA) exploring the question of what a medium is beyond the discussion in Inventing the Medium.  I will be talking about the four existing models of Media Theory, and about the new model I discuss in ITM and in an earlier article for Popular Communication, which is based on the work of Merlin Donald and Michael Tomasello.

This Hellenistic period terracotta of two women playing the ancient game of knucklebones – a form of dice –  (from an image on the British Museum website) is iconic for me of one way to think about what a medium is.

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Posted in Ch 0 Introduction, What is a Medium?

Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice

Posted on December 14, 2011 | 1 comment

A popular and very useful textbook in Interaction Design defines the field with this diagram: 

As I explain in the Introduction and especially in Chapter 2, Inventing the Medium is not meant to substitute for the body of knowledge mapped above but to complement and recontextualize it, by drawing on disciplinary methods and craft practices that are absent  from the HCI/Interaction Design map of the design process.
Here is how I would express it, using the same diagram: Continue reading →

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Posted in Ch 1 Design in an Evolving Medium, Design of the Unfamiliar, What is a Medium?

What is a Medium? Terror and Magic

Posted on December 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

The premise of Inventing the Medium  is that computation has created a new medium of representation.  How do we know when we have discovered a new medium? One answer might be that we know it by the combination of terror and delight that we experience as pioneering practitioners explore the new affordances for human expression.

For cinema there is mythic moment associated with the birth of film, the Lumière Brothers 1895 showing of a film about the everyday occurance of the arrival of a train.  

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Are Games a Medium?

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

The publication of Ian Bogost’s How to Do Things with Videogames has opened up the question of whether or not games are a medium in themselves or just a part of the larger medium of software systems (as one reviewer suggests) or as I would call it, the digital medium. Continue reading →

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Posted in Ch 13 Game Model, What is a Medium?

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