Since the democratization of computer technologies in the 1980s, the desktop metaphor has become one of the main incubators for the developing paradigm of graphical user interfaces. Retrospectively, we can observe the transition between various models, such as Skeuomorphism or Flat Design that, although based on different graphic concepts, share the objective of corresponding the expectations and needs of the user. Referring to a diversity of aspects, such as usability or attractiveness, user interface design is concerned with the surface and appearance of the interface, as a major component of the interaction with computational devices and of the overall use experience.
Thus, interface design is also a way of conceptualizing the user; a way of imagining users in their plurality and reduce them to a pattern. As Olia Lialina says, “Users are the figment of the imagination. As a result of their fictive construction, they continued to be re-imagined and re-invented through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the new millennium”.
Designing Experiences: Imagining Users seeks to illustrate changes in user interface design paradigms. The website is developed around an allusion to the desktop metaphor, associated with personal productivity and the ‘work environment’. The user navigates the web page and observes changes in the graphical interface that, gradually, opens up to an increasing level of personalization. With this experience, the project seeks to evoke how the characteristics of the interface are indicative of the way the user is conceptualized, as someone busy, intelligent, naive, initiated, specialized, among other attributes frequently mentioned in a, openly, user-centered design process.
#INTERFACE DESIGN
Not Art&Tech, Olia Lialina, 2015
Understand the importance of technologies and how it "behaves" in our society and how we deal or should deal with it.
How is Technology Addressing Us?, Mercedes Bunz, 2019
To understand the importance of technologies in our society and to understand also a little about Flat Design and its origins.
#SKEUOMORPHISM
Skeuomorphism is dead, long live skeuomorphism, Interaction Design
Foundation, 2020
Understand what skeuomorphism is, an approach that precedes and contradicts to flat design. Understand why it is better or worse than flat design and in situations it applies.
Skeuomorphic design: a beginner’s guide, UXPlanet, 2018
Description of what the principles of skeuomorphism are and how it is used and its advantages. It also discusses a little of what its path has been in the history of design.
#FLAT DESIGN
Flat Design – An Introduction, Interaction Design Foundation, 2020
Understand what Flat Design is and what its origins and concepts are.
School Will Never End: On Infantilization in Digital Environments –
Amplifying Empowerment or Propagating Stupidity?, Mercedes Bunz, 2015 (In: Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, Chapter 15, Edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter)
Understand what flat design is, its history and concepts.
#OPEN DESIGN
Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive, Bas van Abel,
2011
Understand what Open Design is and what concepts it presents. Understand what the objectives of Open Design are and in which other areas it is intended to be inserted.