Media Extension and Social Change

It is important to understand how small “media extension” affects “social change” and even the development of human history. Robert Bringhurst said, “Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form”. The greatness of movable type lies in its realization of template based on the original woodblock printing, which makes the dissemination of information have more efficiency and lower cost. (The keyboard today can be said to be another medium extension of movable type.) This made the excellent ancient books popular, people’s ideological realm has been improved, resulting in humanism and Renaissance. Da Vinci is a great engineer and artist born in this background. His anatomy drawings are also a kind of media extension, which not only plays a normative and guiding role in art, but also gradually strengthens the concept of “human” in European culture, which subtly triggered several scientific and technological revolutions in later centuries. In the information era today, designers have unlimited creative ways and possibilities to make human society change again. Interaction design is so close to this topic. AR, VR, XR and other technologies are also new media extensions. If they are popularized, what revolution will they bring to human beings? What new communication media will there be in the future? These are the topics that interaction designers should think about.