Occupying Time
Design, Technology and the Form of Interaction

Occupying Time: Design, Technology and the Form of Interaction by Ramia Maze (Paperback) (ISBN: 9789197664417)

As technology pervades our everyday life and material culture, new possibilities and problematics are raised for design. Attention in contemporary design discourse is shifting 'beyond the object', to the qualities of processes and experiences. The boxes and screens typically the 'object' of interaction and interface design are miniaturizing, even disappearing, as computation is integrated into familiar materials and ordinary objects. This opens possibilities - for example, as computer and materials science converge with fashion and architecture in smart textiles and intelligent environments even as it turns us back, in new ways, to traditional design disciplines and practices.

Located at an intersection between emerging technologies and design traditions, interaction design is approached in Occupying Time through diverse disciplinary frames and scales of consideration. If focus in interaction design is typically on proximate 'Use', here, a discussion of 'Materials' scales down to reconsider the more basic spatial and temporal composition of form, and 'Change' scales up to examine large-scale and long-term effects. To anchor these themes in established discourse and practice, architecture is a primary frame of reference throughout. Accounts of 'event', 'vernacular', and 'non-design', and concepts of 'becoming', 'in the making', and 'futurity', as treated in architecture, extend a theoretical and practical basis for approaching time in (interaction) design discourse.