The craft of movement in interaction design

ABSTRACT

Interaction designers don't often discuss the aesthetics of movement in digital media. There is no vocabulary nor method---as there is for color and typography---to use in the generation or evaluation of digital compositions. Dewey offers us a philosophical aesthetic towards the communicative experience of art. His abstract theory provides the inspiration to create a practical method for designers of interactive media in a realistic design context. To build the bridge from abstraction to application I have turned to literature that analyzes the aesthetics of movement in visual arts, particularly for vocabularies of both formal and expressive movement qualities. Both vocabularies explore how we map our 3-D kinetic experience to make sense of 2-D qualities in artifacts. Isolated sets of kinetic qualities, as single mappings between experience and formal and expressive movement qualities, are identified. Communication design is comprised of large clusters of these mappings. This method of movement analysis provides the designer with a set of tools to control movement through the manipulation of its properties, both formal and expressive, thereby acting as a conduit that generates the link between designer, artifact, and viewer experience. Building blocks needed to create a communicative system and provide a method for practitioners to analyze and apply movement appropriately in digital compositions are presented. I conclude by briefly sketching how integration might be plausibly gauged by applying the vocabularies to examples of both static and kinetic compositions.

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