"Electronic is malleable. Print is rigid,"
she told me, then backtracked in characteristic fashion. "I guess I'm never sure that print is truly linear: it's more a simultaneous medium. Designers know a lot about how to control perception, how to present information in some way that helps you find what you need, or what it is they think you nee. Information is only useful when it can be understood."
The primary mission of the VLW is to develop devices and design strategies for manipulating information under constantly changing conditions. Underlying many of these "computationally expressive tools" (to quote the somewhat cumbersome VLW-speak) are the concepts of transparency, adaptability, and blur. Translated into everyday language, these terms imply, respectively, that 1) you can see right through the data, as if it were printed on glass, to sequential layers behind; 2) that if there's a change in back ground color in a dynamic environment, the type "knows" to adjust its own hue so as to remain legible against it; and 3) that fuzzy fields of information come into focus, and therefore become readable, as you approach them.
in aiga.org
