Critical Interfaces Main Menu Introduction Critical Making Origins of Vectors Digital and social engagement Case Studies: Stolen Time Archive and Totality for Kids Scalar Critical Commons Critical Commons + Scalar Conclusion Works cited

Vectors as interface

5470
The journal's first Creative Director, Erik Loyer, was a veteran of experimental interface design using Macromedia Director, which, along with Flash was absorbed by Adobe in 2005. Loyer was responsible for designing the Vectors’ interactive index, which allowed users to "paint" with the content of one project in relation to others in order to find resonances or dialogues among multiple projects contained within a single, theme-based issue of the journal. From the beginning, user interface was conceived as a space for creating intellectual linkages and encouraging a form of discovery that eroded the boundaries between individual projects and even the concept of an "issue" of the journal.
 
A crucial component of the design and development process was the participation of each contributor in a two-week summer workshop attended by all journal contributors for the year, along with the Vectors design and editorial team. In addition to individual design meetings and project demos, all contributors took part in a “making” session at some point during the residency. A typical example of this was a workshop titled Soldering Synthesis, led by Mark Allen, founder of the artist collective and maker space Machine Project in Los Angeles, in which each participant soldered together from a kit the pieces necessary to make a basic audio synthesizer. At the conclusion of the workshop, Allen and his team led participants in a "jam session" during which each maker had the opportunity to play their synthesizer in concert with the entire group. The purpose of this experience may not have been entirely obvious to the humanities scholars and graduate students who took part in the workshop, many of whom had not previously used a soldering iron or taken part in this type of physical making. The conceptual benefit arguably lay not in the acquisition of specific “maker” skills or even in the social bonding associated with working with a group on a project in which all participants begin from a position of shared inexperience, but in a subtle expansion of the conceptual terrain of scholarly practice.

This page has paths:

  1. Critical Interfaces Steve Anderson

This page references: