3: Some Non-Conclusions

Face the Interface

Murray is right: digital, interactive media need to be engaged on their own terms.

The word will not be still, and like comics and other anomalous older forms, interactive media ask us to think about margins, boundaries and transgression as elements of form.

Space, the Designer's Frontier

Interactive work demands articulation, complex geometries, and other sorts of things that might pass for depth.

Traditional, print-oriented graphic design is important but not sufficient: we must be able to think about dynamic and spatial possibilities. This is not a page.

An Invisible Art (McCloud)

Information design -- the disposition of hierarchies, networks, file structures, logics of interaction -- matters as much as visible design elements.

John Maeda of MIT suggests that all artists must become programmers; one may not need to be quite so radical, but clearly interactive designers must be comfortable with logics, objects, procedures, and protocols.

The Last Word?

As Sean Cohen has discovered, digital design moves inexorably toward excess: if it does not overrun its external boundaries, then it overloads its interior.

We who are on the road of excess may want a code that we can live by, but to ask for "principles that do not change" seems pointless.

All rules are imperative. All imperatives are debatable.