According to Jonas Löwgren, Fluency is “the degree in which your able to move between media streams”. I think it’s a pretty useful quality that all designers should consider in their process. The idea of moving between streams is valueable if you think of the contemporary lifestyles and of the everyday filtering we do to select and organise the huge amount of information we receive.
“Media streams are around us all time” even if we do not spend much time on them. That’s true and well-known by everyone: we’re living a phase in which media are almost everywhere an, hopefully, they will becoming more and more invisible. A media is invisible when it becomes totally integrated with what we already have.
There’s an interesting book by Don Norman where he writes about this issue raising a dualism between two way of being: it’s better if we have a multifunctional multiprocessor multiuseful computer that can solve all kind of problems through different tasks or maybe we would prefer something simpler that can do one thing but in the best way.
It is a really good question because in the first case we’re gonna have a sort of monster (and in some sense we already have it…the computer!) because of its multifunctionality.
Anyway, Fluency is a quality of use (refer to Jonas Löwgren) and it is related to the amount of attention we give to media streams. Being fluent means working without asking so much attention. It is like a background working that let the person live. A fluent device or a fluent interaction is not invasive and “works elengantly in my everydaylife”:
“When the phone starts ringing it asks for my attention like a three years old baby, it can’t wait: full attention here, not attention to what’s happening around me” (J.L.)
We are now working on fluency and trying to come out with a project about it.
