Reading reflection 2

I'm responding to Principle 2.4 in Artful Design: take advantage of physicality. The book describes how in the design of Ocarina, care was taken to ensure that the app "responds" to user input in a way which recalls the physical world, such as for example the buttons "flattening" when pressed and the user's breath propagating a green "wave". I think this idea is fascinating because I feel in a way that I've understood this intuitively for a while -- I like to draw and I like statistics and computer science, and because of these things many friends and colleagues have encouraged me to explore the realm of algorithmic art. I've given it my best shot multiple times, but there's something irreplaceable about a physical drawing you can touch and smudge. No matter how hard I've tried I just can't get into purely digital art -- the constraints and reactions of the physical world are too familiar to me to eschew. As such, I very deeply understand the need for some sort of reference to the physical world when designing virtual interfaces.

I've actually noticed this sort of principle in all sorts of places -- for example the way that when you close a window on a Mac it whisks itself back into its icon like a genie in a bottle so you know what to click (the icon) if you want to get the window back later. In my brief forays into web development, I've also noticed that Google's Material Design principles also frequently recall the physical world (buttons are "pressed" when clicked by altering the drop shadow to convey depth, etc.).

I think it's interesting to think of this balance, in artfully designing software tools, between referencing the physical world whilst also maintaining the magic of a virtual world where the constraints of the physical world don't apply. After all, one of the reasons we're interested in software tools to begin with is that in the virtual space we are able to subvert and escape the confines of physical reality. I think it's hard to have a concrete rule for what sort of balance to strike here, other than to try things out and see what feels good and what doesn't. I think it's fun that in the virtual world we get to pick and choose when physics applies and when it doesn't, and that we can use this balance to convey different feelings about the world we are building.