Emotional Design

Comments
Devin McKaskle

Description
Yet another book by Don Norman is Emotional Design. In this book Norman almost renounces everything he has said about design and tries to explain to us that emotions are a crucial part of the design of things. How objects make us feel reflects on how we feel about them. This is somewhat a reflection on The Media Equation. Norman describes certain rules of design and gives great examples showing his beliefs. Later in the book, Norman discusses robots with emotion and how they will be necessary in the future. Finally in Norman style he jumps into a wild creative spree at the end discusses rules presented by Isaac Asimov to prevent robots from rising up and destroying humanity.

I enjoyed this book just as much as every other Norman book, perhaps a little more than The Design of Everyday Things because the examples is presents are more timeless. I enjoyed his discussion human emotions and the division of emotional design into visceral, behavioral, and reflexive design. The part about the emotional robots was very fun to read.

The Man Who Shocked the World

Commments
Ben Carsten
Brian Salato
Devin McKaskle


Description
This book is a biography of Stanley Milgram written by Thomas Blass. Stanley Milgram is the popular social psychologist who performed several experiments on human obedience and created the "six degrees of separation" theory. The book follows his entire life and describes his schooling, experiments, movie work, and interactions with colleagues in detail.

I had heard of the "Milgram Experiments" and the six degrees of separation theory before but never learned about them in detail. I enjoyed learning about the way these experiments came to be and liked the description of his interactions with his teachers and, later, students. I think Milgram would have been an interesting person to talk to, although slightly intimidating because he would be surely thinking about every little action you make.

Game Over Learning by Dying

This post is about an article called "Game Over: Learning by Dying" by Dimitris Grammenos from the Foundation for Research and Technology. In this paper Grammenos presents a game that breaks all fundamentals of video game design in order to teach (entertainingly) designers what to do in order to make their games available to all players. Each level of Grammenos's game breaks only a single rule of video game design, leading to horrible gameplay. This single rule-breaking scheme allows the player to fully understand what is wrong with the system. Grammenos uses a derivation of Space Invaders as his game model. He chose this game for its simplicity and easily defined goal.

While I found the exaggeration of the design mistakes entertaining and the premise behind the creation of the game useful, I feel that the research behind the presentation is shallow. It presents the game as a somewhat viable learning tool but not extraordinarily great and there is no significant result.