Thanks to Maria for letting me know about a fantastic paper by Casey Alt from Stanford University, on Alias|Wavefront’s Maya software and how artists & designers interact with it. In “The Materialities of Maya: Making Sense of Object-Orientation”, Alt discusses the ways in which the software interface and object-oriented information structure of Maya forces artists to rethink their own work processes, approach their ideas from unexpected angles, and learn a new kind of ‘making’ process. His thoughts on this subject are very relevent to my studies, particularly the following quote-
As a result of all these interface constraints, Maya does not easily lend itself to the immediate expression of the artist’s creativity: rather, the artist must gradually learn to think Maya and move through Maya just as a modern endoscopic surgeon must learn to successfully manipulate and navigate current media technologies in performing each surgery. The resultant graphical effect or image must therefore be considered as a tightly structured process of collaboration between the designer and the application, rather than as an unlimited, freehand expression of the imagination of the artist. In order to successfully use Maya, users must crawl inside, navigate, and inhabit the logic of the application’s complex interactive space. To do so, they must gradually adapt their usual habits of interaction to accommodate Maya’s unconventional interface- a process that effectively reorganizes perception and cognition into a new field of relations.pp 21-22, The Materialities of Maya, Casey Alt
He says that while software and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are usually designed to conform as much as possible to common and ‘real world’ paradigms of use and logic, high-end software like Maya uses a frequently counter-intuitive and specialised interface that must be consciously learned by the user, one small piece at a time. The full text can be read at the Project Muse website.
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