Some interrupts in daily life:
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- The urge to drink water
- The sunset – indicates it’s time to go home
- A notification on your phone (quite literally an interrupt)
- Gas light in your car – tells you it’s time to fill up
Thoughts on Make it So:
The reading talks a lot about how science fiction and design are symbiotic in nature because of the way that they both influence each other. I thought this cat and mouse description of the way designers and science fiction writers interact was interesting because they are in competition to push the future to customers but it’s not necessarily clear whether the fiction or the design comes first. I also liked the way they explained how design frequently follows science fiction because it is a way of determining what products will succeed. If a work of fiction does well, i.e. Star Trek, then maybe products from that universe will also do well. I think the idea of using what already exists is a powerful tool because I feel like as an engineer myself I often get caught up in trying to design a solution from end to end (which is quite inefficient and not very successful) instead of leveraging what has already created to actually make something new.
I also liked the note about feedback and time delay when they talk about minimizing the time between a users action and the systems reaction. The field of haptics relies on this minimization of interaction and system reaction in order to convey realism from electromechanical systems so it makes sense that the same rule applies in visual mediums as well.