- Week 4 -
Metaphors, Imaginaries & Design Justice
I truly enjoyed the material this week. The three readings were loaded with valuable insights for me to grow both as a designer and as a developer. Many of the concepts resonated because I’ve used them in my day-to-day work, whether in personal projects or professional ones. The readings gave me a more conscious, structured understanding of why I do these things, and how I can sharpen my ability to generate ideas, develop concepts, and create experiences that people will actually use. That awareness is incredibly valuable.
From William Gaver’s Technology Affordances, I connected a lot with my experience designing and developing VR simulations for education over the past two years. I always keep in mind that many users will be trying VR for the first time, so I look for ways to strike a balance—making interactions exciting enough to showcase the technology, but simple enough that anyone can use them right away. Accessibility is always part of this: people in wheelchairs or people who are deaf should still be able to participate fully. Reading Gaver gave me the language for something I always need to question: will this interaction feel natural for the user? This is both crucial and challenging.
A lot of the logic behind constructing an interaction in VR follows the idea of nested affordances:
pick up a wrench → place it on a bolt → rotate it.
Using visual cues and haptics in the controller, together with familiar real-world actions, makes the trick of an action feel intuitive. Sounds and colors help too, but they are meant only to enrich the experience—it should still be understandable without them, since not everyone can hear well or distinguish colors clearly. But what about when things get more abstract, like in a VR environment pulling up a video from a screen into an exploded 3D view, scrubbing through it, and making the whole interaction feel as natural as possible?
It all comes down to breaking things into day-to-day affordances: abstracting complex ideas into simple, intuitive actions so users can still navigate comfortably. Making sure an object feels grabbable, then once it’s grabbed, providing a nested affordance that gives meaning and gratification for moving it, and then repeating the same logic for scrubbing a video—maybe with a knob or a slider.
Bill Buxton’s Sketching Experiences also felt close to common workflows when designing VR simulations. I start abstract, almost like gathering Lego pieces, then play with different combinations to see what emerges. My “sketching” isn’t always on paper—it can be design documents, sentences describing interactions, reference images, screenshots, or videos from any industry. Maybe an automotive manufacturing video has a good reference for a machine or a robot, maybe a videogame sparks an idea for a user interface or a logic system. At the start, it’s about collecting as much material as possible. I think the first step is to define a broad path to start walking, to start building the essence of your project. Later, as Buxton notes, it’s the ambiguity—the holes in those early sketches—that keeps the process alive. Those holes allow exploration, iteration, and unexpected discoveries. For me, design feels like a funnel: wide at the beginning, full of ideas and possibilities, then narrowing as we refine and commit to details. If you lock into details too early, you risk wasting time, because those are the moments when projects take the biggest turns. The exploration phase is about movement, not perfection.
Finally, Bret Victor’s A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design challenged me in a way I didn’t expect. At first, I was very excited watching the Microsoft Productivity Future Vision video—the devices all interconnected, the automation, the light handhelds. I thought, “Yes, I want this.” But as I kept reading, I realized how much I agreed with Victor’s critique. The line “Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands” really hit me. I linked it to my experience of not liking playing a digital keyboard versus an acoustic piano. On a digital one, you don’t feel the vibrations or the weight of the hammer striking the strings. I would describe the experience as “hollow.” So I totally realized how much we are missing—we’re missing the richness of being alive and using our body. But for me, my biggest issue with today’s technology is that I am so tired of using my mouse, using a keyboard, of having unhealthy postures with my body while using devices. No matter how much you try to correct your posture, it’s impossible not to bring fatigue and unhealthiness to your body. For a while, I’ve actually imagined myself manipulating devices while touching any surface—sliding my fingertip on my own hand, on the couch, a table, my pants—doing it comfortably whether walking, sitting, or lying in bed, without stressing my body by locking into rigid postures. But I guess the richness of touching a more natural object also seems quite fitting with this dreamy idea.
Readings:
- Bill Gaver, Technology Affordances
- Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences
- Bret Victor, A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
Videos:
Microsoft - Productivity Future Vision
Use & Social Practices (NYU Stream, GDrive)
What Can A Body Do by Sarah Hendren
Dr. Dan Lockton’s Guest Lecture (optional) (NYU Stream, GDrive)