A holistic and ecological approach to interactive media design

Throughout thousands of years of humanity's odyssey on earth, our relationship with media and the tools of technology has been one of the most essential means of making sense of the world and our existence. The rapid advancement and proliferation of interactive digital technologies accelerates a fundamental transformational process, engendering a number of disruptive and destructive alterations at the levels of the body, consciousness, and ecology.This transformation calls for an ethical approach to the design processes relevant to media and technologies. This research adopts a Marshall McLuhan centric media ecological viewpoint to gain a novel perspective on the transformative effects of media, and to counter their divisive and destructive impacts, proposes a holistic approach to interactive media design.The ecological nature of the effects of technology, and the systemic structure of ecology as a scientific discipline, which fully embraces the holistic approach, have led our research to draw on the works in the fields of ecology and environmental studies. The new generation of interactive media design students at Yildiz Technical University (YTU) has been employed to observe the transformational effects of media technologies, and also to test our hypothesis concerning how an ecological approach can be introduced into the design of interactive media.Growing up surrounded by digital technologies, these young students, like all their counterparts around the world, had been the object of such transformations themselves, and as graduates of the interactive media design, they are now its potential subjects. In light of this observation, the graduation projects of the students of Interactive Media Design Department at YTU have constituted the sample space for this research. The department was founded in 1997 and had its first graduates in the academic year of 2002 – 2003. All graduation projects submitted from that date to the present have been included in the sample.Our research has shown that an ecological approach to interactive media design is vital, and a series of ecological design criteria can be integrated into the design process of interactive media projects. Keywords: ecology, holistic approach, design, media, technology, interactive media, media ecology