Document packaging System 2014
Taylor Zanke
The current state of “interaction design” as it relates to the commercial software product is in need of reorientation. The dialogue surrounding the functional and aesthetic decisions within this scope must be reconsidered. More substantial conversation is required regarding these decisions, as they ultimately become theoretical statements unto themselves. The commercial software product occupies a space that has been reduced and oversimplified to the point of non-meaning. The large-scale distribution of these products leads ultimately, by their nature, to small-scale and intimate use-cases. The individual is coerced into participation, by means of cultural and social cues, with these products. The landscape is defined by the banal, moderate, and economized lived experience. This mass integration of the technical has lead the consumer down a path of increasingly granular and personal exposure to the commercial. One does not purchase discounted soap without notifying a social graph. This project hopes to act as a breath of difference in the seductive and would-be-friendly landscape of commercial software products. It has no interest in promoting itself or in your use of it. It proposes a revisionist alternative, a reactionary noncompliance, to the typical cheerfulness of its context. It hopes to stimulate a much needed dialogue surrounding the role of the technical in an age where the technical increasingly defines the dialogue. The commercial software product reaches out from its container, towards the user, towards their lived experience. This product does the opposite. It retreats into its medium.