I hope this is not my legacy

I listen to songs everyday which evoke swinging emotions, I read books which contain great stories and great wisdom, I listen to people speaking amazing arguments, and I watch films which create all-encompassing atmouspheres which make me want to just stay, as Aerosmith would say, “lost in this moment forever”.

I don’t really get poetry, I’m trying, but school English lessons have thus far ruined it for me. I’m not greatly turned on by “Art”, either paintings or drawings or sculptures or wanky concepts which have no form at all. I have a passing interest in dance, but it’s not something I am passionate about. I enjoy eating great food, but its not a passion for me (I blame my awful sense of smell for this one). But that is fine, I can see the attraction in these things for other people.

Do you remember the feeling you had after seeing the final scenes of Blade Runner for the first time, or during some of the awesome night forest shots in Avatar, or after discovering a song which totally captured your mood at the time, or maybe when out running in the rain and finding energy from no where to sprint across a field with your arms spread wide? (Please insert one of your own epiphany moments here) If I can give that feeling to someone even once, then I will be pretty happy. The question is, how am I going to do that?

The thing which I really enjoy (creatively) is writing software. It occurs to me that there is no reason why software cannot be totally immersive. In fact, since it is intrinsically more interactive than any of the aforementioned activites it may well be easier. I’m not talking specifically about games, although I think they are by far the best example of this to date. I’m not a big gamer so I can’t really give any up-to-date examples, but when playing the original Half-Life I remember being totally immersed with the whole environment- the visuals, sound effects, music, and control system.

Now if one was to apply the same thinking to an application, giving it a very distinctive, stylized UI, atmospheric music, sound effects, an intuitive control system then what would you have? I suppose it would be a very specialized application, and probably very annoying since if using it for extended periods you would want music to fit your mood rather than the preset music or whatever. The trouble with applications is that they are more general purpose than games, they do things which go beyond the original design of the application, they create things. Games on the other hand give you the illusion of being in control whilst navigating along a relatively linear story.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t had a solid idea about this (otherwise I would be doing it!), I’m just playing about with some thoughts. I haven’t been particularly interested in UX/UI design until recently, but I think that there is a huge amount of scope for improvement over the way in which many current applications operate, and that is something that I think I would like to tackle. Of course with the variety of different platforms running applications from phones to desktops, and the way in which web apps have taken over for most simple tasks, there is more and more scope for interesting design, and more tools with which to implement them.