Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel, Ph.D. works as an independent scholar and consultant. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker and an academic. She is also a board member of several companies and organizations. She was founder and chair of the Graduate Design Program at California College of the Arts. and of the Media Design graduate program at Art Center College of Design. She has worked for Atari, co-founded the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDesigner
CountryUnited States of America
Brenda Laurel quotes about
I think interactive television is doomed. It's a dead end.
When artists and philosophers talk only amongst themselves, they ignore the potential of popular culture to become a variety of dialogues with and between everyday people. Its discourse may be productive of desire and pleasure, but popular culture is also a language in which people discuss politics, religion, ethics, and action.
Every intelligent being enjoys complexity.
Culture and technology exist in a dynamic reciprocal relationship. Culture comprehends technology through the means of narratives or myths, and those narratives influence the future shape and purposes of technology. The culture-technology circuit is at the heart of cultural evolution.
You don't have to please everyone-you have to please the user.
I fervently believe in research as a necessity for good design, and I teach it that way.
A design isn't finished until someone is using it.
When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves.
When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket.
I learned in the computer game business early on that all senses are not equal. The best example is, you're listening to a radio play and you're driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven't seen the road in five minutes. It's because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically.
I don't understand computers. I've been unable to construct a working mental model of how they do what they do. I can break software by looking at it. I can blow anything up. Without trying. It's sort of like being a dowser. And this extreme elaborate clumsiness on my part is actually something people will pay me for. It's quite wonderful.
Reality has always been too small for the human imagination. We're always trying to transcend.