Interactive Spaces: Week 2 Reading Response

Yi Fu Tuan has put forth a well-researched article looking at how humans perceive the world. The basic ideas presented are not new — having been explored by architects since at least 2500 BC – but it is helpful for experiential designers to define the basic principles of height, orientation, and perception which they work with. These ideas are especially relevant at a time when virtual reality has successfully broken into the consumer technology market. Where interactive works were once limited by budget and/or screen space, designers are now empowered to play with the full range of human visual perception.
If I have one criticism of the article, it is that it presents the “right” direction as sacred and the “left” as profane. This is a distinction which I believe is cultural and not necessarily ingrained in the human psyche. For instance, many non-Western cultures traditionally scribe books starting from the rightmost page and ending on the left. Even today, Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left, as are East Asian scripts on some occasions. It would be more accurate for the author to say that “right” and “left” have complex meanings, which have sometimes translated to “sacred” and “profane” in linguistics, but not always.

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Chin Kee Yong

hello i play video games and also sometimes make video games

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