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| Ulf Harr is a freelance designer working in the grey area of visual, conceptual and interaction design. After completing his Design and New Media studies at the FH Schwaebisch Gmuend School of Design in Germany in 1999, Ulf Harr worked as an Art Director at Nofrontiere Design, Vienna until 2001. During this time, he was involved in projects such as the "Sigmund Freud - Archaeology of the Unconscious" CD-ROM. As a freelance designer, Harr continues to work mostly on web based commercial and cultural projects for Austrian and European companies and entities. He's also involved in superficiel.org. Contribution: Digital Drawing Pins — Notes on the quest for self-explanatory interfaces In the case of a computer we are talking about a machine that lacks an initial specific purpose that can only be understood as a tool or as a simulation of various tools and their functions through applications. Functions are more a matter of the software than the hardware in these cases. However, a tool that lacks corporeal characteristics does not have any form that conveys information on its purpose or handling. A possible approach to explaining the often complex functions of such interfaces is the use of metaphors. Familiar everyday life objects used as representative symbols attempt to constitute a formal analogy of objects. Within an interface, such symbols always stand for a functional association. Thus they can not only be read, but also experienced in a manner similar to that of real objects. In other terms this means: product-semantical functions are introduced in the simulation in varying degrees of abstraction via graphical user interfaces in order to represent action possibilities. However, user interfaces are still mostly only discussed in terms of graphical criteria. For media designers, the increasing virtualisation of action processes is posing the following problem ever more frequently: The facts to be visualized have no corresponding equivalent in the "real" world. Generally understood matters require a common basis. This is why it is difficult to invent new self-explanatory symbols. On the other hand, our known visual repertoire and our everyday experiences have not been solely couched in our representational world for quite some time. Then of corse the question remains: what is Visual Design supposed to be without being visual? |
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