RACHEL WALKER (she/her)
design sophomore / des 3515 design research studio 1
This research project started with the prompt of “play”. The word play reminded me of the play button and the action of pressing a play button. To start the research, I started asking questions about the play button like: Where did it come from? How is it used? Why is it still being used? Those questions led me to investigate the buttons themselves and the transfer from a physical button to digital button. Much of the research focused on the psychology of why we press buttons and how we interact and process them.
The learned process of interacting with buttons starts with us pressing the button, then we receive feedback, or a response. Overtime, repeating this action leads to us having the ability to know the results of pressing a button. For example, think about the urge to press the big red button that says do not press. In thinking about our mind’s ability to understand a digital button (e.g., apps, widgets, etc.), I started to research ways in which design tactics are used to make digital buttons mimic real ones. Principles like skeuomorphism and affordances have allowed us the ability to have the same relationship to a screen as that of a button. In the beginning of smartphones, they used a lot of skeuomorphic design. Now we are in an era of flat design, but because they began with mimicking real buttons, we are still able to use and understand the digital buttons, even without an image. Flat design led to the introduction of haptic design which allows a user to press nothing specific but still receive a response through sounds and vibrations.
Through this research I have begun to think a lot about our relationship to simple things like buttons that can be easily overlooked. The play button, for example, I probably interact with one ten or more times a day, on my phone, laptop, car, etc., but I have never really thought about it. The play button has an interesting and unknown past. It was originally introduced on tape recorders in the 60’s to show the direction of the tape. Now I think it is more used as a button that starts a sequence of some sort. There is an opportunity to study further our relationship to physical buttons versus digital ones and how they affect our mindset and understanding of events.
