What you think you know about data is wrong. Or at least, incomplete. That's what we learned in Seminar today, which started with our professor, Dick Buchanan, tossing a metal wrench onto the table with a loud clang.
What is data? It's the evidence of a relationship between two things. We tend to confuse data with fact. Data alone has no meaning. The number 4683 is an example of data. Without knowing anything else, the data is meaningless. Datas are the simples of existance; simple in that they are uninterpreted.
Fact is the interpretation of data. Or, to put it another way, data in context. Facts have meaning. If data are nouns, facts are whole sentences. Only in interpreting and connecting do we find out what is meaningful.
However, when we think we know what the facts are, we tend to limit our world. "If your eyes are too closed, you'll fail to see the possibilities." We can become trapped. We must avoid this at all costs. We need to be conscious and self-conscious about data.
Different people can look at the same set of data and make different interpretations. Be careful of interpretations: they block what we see. When viewing an object, try not to be sophisticated. This will make you very sophisticated. Data can help us focus on an object.
Dick introduced the concepts of Given and Taken. What is given to us is the infinitely rich field of immediate perception. What is taken is a selection of data from that field.
Physical features are not the only, not even the primary, form of data. Data can come from four "realms:" Cosmos (ideas and approximations of things), Environment (function, how it works and in what context), Personal Persepctive (signs and frames of reference), and Things (materials, physical properties). What you feel matters: it's part of the data! In interaction design, what people feel matters.
