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.

The Design of Future Things

Summary:
This post is about The Design of Future Things by Don Norman. This book shares some ideas with Norman's earlier book The Design of Everyday Things but focuses on how things should be created in the future when machines have intelligence. An example that Norman highlights in his book is the realm of autonomous automobiles. This has long been a topic of science fiction societies and is beginning to show itself in today's technology. Norman discusses the issues concerning the half-autonomous vehicles that we have today and the issues of deploying imperfect intelligence into machines. Norman sets out a list of rules that machines should follow to interact with humans without confusion. These rules are:
1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals.
2. Be predictable.
3. Provide a good conceptual model.
4. Make the output understandable.
5. Provide continual awareness, without annoyance.
6. Exploit natural mappings to make interaction understandable and effective.

Discussion:
The future that Norman sees amazing at times, scary at others. With greater automation brings less human control around their surroundings, and I, for one, surely like to be in control of my belongings. I would enjoy my refrigerator informing me of what I have, but not ordering me what to eat. The more automation in the world, the more time this frees up in humans for other activities. This could be leisure, or work related, but either way less brain power is used on tasks that impede on a person's goals. When this automation goes too far, I can only imagine a society similar to Wall-E, where people no longer do anything for themselves. I think that this future is inherently flawed however because, even today, people respect the aesthetic nature of something made by human hands. A machine may stitch a quilt perfectly, or produce a chicken breast cooked to the correct temperature to the tenth of a degree, but people enjoy the imperfections and natural skill of a task performed well by human hands.

Re-Framing the Desktop Around the Activites of Knowledge Work

Summary:

As computers become more integrated with society and with each other, their importance in everyday life has grown substantially. The standard computer desktop model tries to emulate a physical desk and as such can get just as cluttered. A research project by Steven Voida of the University of Calgary and Elizabeth Mynatt and Keith Edwards of the Georgia Institute of Technology attempts to change the desktop model around specific activities.

Their model allows users to have as many virtual desktops as they currently have "activities". and they can easily switch between them. When they switch activities their desktop clears and is replaced with icons representing files associated with that project, their contact list changes to only show the contacts whom are working with the user on a project and the shared files section of the desktop shows files that are shared among all contacts.

Traditional models of multitasking look something like this:

In Windows, the taskbar gets cluttered with windows from obviously disparate tasks, while in Linux (Ubuntu shown) most distrubtions have virtual desktops that a user can switch between to organize windows. The model propsed by these researchers however brings this level of abstraction to new heights.

Discussion:

This focused desktop environment is highly effective at organizing the ever increasing number of tasks that people are working with every day. The seamless integration of their models of organization with the operating system is also very important in producing and well formed desktop experience. I think that this technology will continue to evolve and will be eventually absorbed as an option in mainstream operating systems very soon. While casual, home users may benefit from the standard desktop model, the workplace environment is where this interface will shine.

Conclusion:

I want it.

Starbucks Ethography

Commented:
Sarah


I chose to perform an ethnography on people who go to Starbucks. More specifically, why people go, and stay, at Starbucks. During my reseach time I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be looking for. I noted how many people entered, how old they were, if they stayed or not, how long they stayed, and what they did while they stayed. I also noted what kind of atmosphere the location had. The environment, I concluded was a main factor in why people stayed at Starbucks. The comfort of the chairs, usefulness of the tables, color of the walls, and the smell of coffee created an ambiance that these people enjoyed.
My observation notes were very different than the notes that must have been collected from the ethnography I chose to read (Never In Anger). I did not interact with the people in my study, but I would have liked to interview people to ask them why they enjoy staying at Starbucks to enjoy their coffee. I also wanted to interview the manager to learn how they interpret the environment they offer and what they do to foster an environment people want to stay in.

Never In Anger

This post is about a book called Never In Anger by Jean L. Briggs. It is an ethnography about Jean's 17 month stay with a group of Eskimos called the Utkuhikhalingmiut (Utku). She spent time with several of the families in the group but focused on a single family that she became an adopted daughter of. She began her quest to discover more abou the Utku's pagan past, but her study revealed something altogether different. She learned a lot about family life, skills in the Artic, and how the Utku act socially and treat family members.


This ethnography was very different than other similar cultural studies that I've read. In a study of the Yanomamo of Brazil by Napoleon Chagnon, Chagnon does participate in trade with the Yanomamo for modern goods, but lives for the most part outside of Yanomamo society. Briggs's unique status as a member of the family strongly changes the atmosphere of Utku family life. She repeatedly states how, because she is an inept Eskimo, she burdens her family. Although her position in society removes some of the ability to collect a pure idea of Utku life, I believe is does offer a vastly different, important insight into Utku psychology and is an enjoyable look at the human experience from a new perspective.