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Design Thinking... City image, narrative and interaction design
Design - of the City
|
Kevin Lynchs'
book, The Image
of the City, written in 1960,
discussed the elements that make a city dweller's
environment understandable and navigable. It seems to me the ideas that spring from this are paralleled in hypermedia interaction design, and there is a relationship with narrative also. This is a living site. I intend, later, to illustrate some of the ideas from existing websites, and develop this site to incorporate more of the ideas. |
First some background |
I am John Cato, a practising designer. I look for practical
ideas that may help with design strategies of an
interactive system. Anything that can give me models for
design that work in a commercial or industrial
environment must be useful. For some years now, since 1989, I have been exploring the idea that Lynch's book, "The Image of the City", may be used as a source of inspiration and a model for a design thinking strategy for interactive multimedia systems. Since then, I have been presenting Lynch's frameworks at conferences and design workshops I run, sowing seeds in the audience's mind and also in mine. For me, the original seed idea came from a conversation with Bill Verplank. This text was first presented at a workshop on Narrative and Hypermedia in Brighton, 1997. |
Hypermedia interaction design |
Hypermedia
applications are typically used for marketing,
communication, point of sale, education and self
expression. We have to consider how to give them character, make them conversationally interactive and create emotional responses rather than simply informing. So, perhaps the first level of conversation takes place in the mind; interactivity is increased by generating emotion in the user. We can try to design a character and a tempo by flowing and weaving around the main aspects of what emotions we are attempting to invoke and convey, such as comfort and tension, interest, involvement, intimacy, professionalism, humour, excitement and fear. This creates an environment which has a feel of its own, one that speaks to the user in its own distinct way with its content and appropriate image and develop a stylistic unity. |
About this paper |
This essay suggests we can
improve the quality of that interaction by learning from
Lynch's frameworks and being creative in how we apply
them to our own design problems. I describe components of Lynchs' framework, with an introduction and the give a brief discussion from 3 perspectives:
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