Communication Design is not a new area, it has its origins in the very earliest methods of mass communication: the Printing Press. It is a also an area of design that is on a constant cycle of change, as new technology or ideas arrive designers have had to adapt. They adapt to the new challenges each new technology brings, from printed works, to the World Wide Web and beyond.
This weeks lecture was a guide to this module: IXD 102 An Introduction to Communication Design. The lecture started by looking into the future and then working backwards through the key points in the history of communication design. All the way back to Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press.
I was most fascinated by the possibilities offered by the future having some experience using and creating for Virtual Reality experiences. However, I do believe Augmented Reality may be the real game changer in this field, with major companies such as Apple and Meta investing huge sums in the technology. It is definitely heralded as the next big thing, with glasses that can display directions in real time as we walk, and provide us with the information we require, right in our field of view.
Something that I hadn’t considered as much was how much the way we interact with technology is changing. With a move away from physical interaction and much more towards gesture and voice control. With voice control already in mainstream use with technologies such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, and gesture control being incorporated into car infotainment systems
Researching the latest gesture control devices I found the HiiDii glasses these are able to detect the eye blinking and turn these blinks into a way to control your Smartphone, or other smart devices. The possibilities these offer seem endless and one of the most interesting is they could offer access to technology to people with severe physical disabilities. Allowing them to use technology that they have not been able to before.
Source (https://thegadgetflow.com/blog/gesture-control-devices/) Last Accessed 04/10/2022
Another fascinating piece of technology using gesture control is the Tap Strap 2 peripheral controller. These devices which look like rings on each finger allow users to turn any surface into a standard keyboard. As long as you know your basic keyboard layout you are good to go, but these go further as you don’t have to touch anything at all as you can type in mid air and the device will track these movements and generate the keystrokes, I am interested to know how accurate these devices are, and how easy they would be to get used to but the concept is certainly new and interesting.
Source (https://thegadgetflow.com/blog/gesture-control-devices/) Last Accessed 04/10/2022
Another part of the lecture which I found particularly interesting was finding out how long grid systems had been used in design. I have used grids myself when creating wireframes or mock-ups for websites and had assumed that they had came to the fore when designing digital content became the primary design focus.
However, researching grids further, it is clear as long a humans have been creating manuscripts they have also been using a structure to help lay them out. It is believed early scribes such as those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, would have used “helper lines” to aid them in laying out the text in the manuscript.
Using structure and differing styles of grids then became more important with the invention of the printing press, and continued in the printing of newspapers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Within design though it was the application of grids ushered in by the Bauhaus movement and the “Swiss Style”. A major designer in this era Josef Muller Brockmann created a book called “Grid Systems in Graphic Design” which is seen as an invaluable text for designers today and likely much further into the future.
Source (https://uxplanet.org/grids-in-graphic-design-a-quick-history-and-5-top-tips-29c8c0650d18)