

Article 1657 of comp.cog-eng:
Path: [email-masked]
>From: [email-masked] (Steve Sanderson)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: >aesthetics of the interface (RE)
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 May 90 23:25:19 GMT
References: <[email-masked]>
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In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Margot Lagendijk)
writes:
...
> I think that artist (in any form possible) should not be held back will they
> are creating things. With computer interfaces you must keep the user and the
> way (s)he works in mind. That will limit the artist too much in his/her work.
...

I read the above as implying that the creative act of an artist is
uni-directional, i.e. that the artist produces the art but is not affected
by the cultural context in which it is produced, and that feedback to the
artist would limit the artists creativity.

My experience with artists leads me to believe that their act of creation
keeps many considerations in mind, except that they are not "kept in mind"
rather they are kept somewhere deeper, at a more intuitive level.  I see
artists, as with any other member of a (cultural) system, as being
intimately interconnected and influenced by the system.
This interconnection is not usually stated as explicitly as it is in
the engineering field, as in a software requirements document.

Given the above, it seems that to utilize an artist in the design of
human-machine interfaces would require that the artists be a member
of the community of users and developers.  I believe that this would
result in the artist being influenced at an intuitive level by the
cultural context, which could result in aesthetically pleasing and
functional interfaces.

Steve Sanderson

Tandem Computers
[email-masked]