I am putting together a paper detailing the interconnectivity between visual studies and interaction design. This relationship is something that I deal with all the time as a visual artist and an interaction designer. But I am realizing that it is not very well covered. In class this past Wednesday I was asked to explain the connection to my fellow students and I choked. For me it was like talking about the relationship between chewing, and eating food and the mouth. I was totally stumped as to how and where to begin.

Thank god I am in school with some brilliant people. Yesterday in critical theory class with Anne Marie Oliver, we were discussing Visual Studies summed up nicely by Wikipedia:

Visual culture is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this often overlaps with film studies, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television; it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component. Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the “visual” is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. It also may overlap with another emerging field, that of “Performance Studies.” “Visual Culture” goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.

What stuck me as very obvious was difficult for other people to see. And of course, it was way harder to explain in a simple way then I realized. This is really interesting! And so it falls on me to figure out a way to connect these together.

Back in September I started cataloging all of the work I was doing for the whole year in school- this document has become my bible, it explains what I am doing and why. In about two weeks I need to present this work and a statement on the connection between interaction design and visual studies to the chair of my department, the dean of the school and my mentor. WOW.

I have posted versions of it here on the blog a couple of times- I am going to tie this document in with my essay- somehow I hope. There was another essay I wrote on QR codes and physical hyperlinks- that was not so hot, but really helped me understand the bigger picture of what it is I am fascinated by-

• The rate of adoption of new technologies through play and social interaction
• The beginning of the era of physical computing through mobile phones
• The way mobile devices are changing- New Tech New Ties FTW
• The evolution of physical hyperlinks becoming a normalized, ordinary everyday experience

This looks like it will be the meat of the essay- extracting the concept of physical hyperlinks, the critical analysis of visual studies, the formulation of the design of the interaction.

Visual studies PLUS physical hyperlinks PLUS interaction design

Seems pretty cyclical to me. Please email me with any and all suggestions for research.

“All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.”

Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: The New Version, p.5.