Emotional Design II

"To the practitioner of human-centered design, serving customers means relieving them of frustration, of confusion, of a sense of helplessness. Make them feel in control and empowered. To the clever salesperson, just the reverse is true. If people don't really know what they want, then what is the best way to satisfy their needs? In the case of human-centered design, it is to provide them with the tools to explore by themselves, to try this and that, to empower themselves to success. To the sales staff, this is an opportunity to present themselves as rescuers 'in-shining-armor'"

I like this passage, because it explores the idea of purpose driven design, and of examining what you wish to accomplish as you design a product, this makes the case that "diesel" is not badly designed, simply that it accomplishes something different than what you think it should.

I think that of the three terms Norman uses, only 'Behavioral' could really be improved upon. Behavioral is somewhat cryptic, and as a result, 'interactive' might be a better term, but otherwise, Norman's terms make perfect sense once you understand them.

When a designer sets out to create a product, he should, ideally, begin with behavioral design, because the use of a product will largely dictate the importance of the other two factors. A watch for instance can be many things, and fall squarely into any of the three types of design, but the same watch is unlikely to fulfill all three adequately, in fact the designer of a watch will likely have a very good idea which of the three is paramount before they even begin the meat of the design process; the designer of the Casio G-Shock, for example, should have no uncertainty as to the fact that his product will have virtually no visceral or reflective value, and that it will be purchased solely for it's behavioral ability.

Emotional Design

1) What do you feel were the author's key points in this chapter?

Design and engineering are not interchangeable ideas, the job 0f a designer encompasses
far more than that of an engineer. This is because an engineer simply attempts to solve a problem,
whereas a designer is attempting to hit a moving target, appeal to a constantly fluxuating
demographic, while creating a product that still accomplishes the aforementioned task, as the real
ultimate goal of any product is to sell itself.

2)How does this chapter compare to the earlier writing (The Design of Everyday Things) by the same author?

Where The Design of Everyday Things was very logistic, and followed the shortest possible
path to a completed product, Emotional Design gets into all the funny bits that make design more
a one dimensional skill; in many ways, Emotional Design is about creating products that we love,
and The Design of everyday things is about creating products that do what they are supposed to
do.

3)Give examples, from your own experience, of 1)something that succeeds as Visceral Design, 2) something that succeeds as Behavioral Design, and 3)a Reflective Design success? What do you thing makes each thing successful?

In many ways, I feel that the iPod succeeds here in many ways, yet i feel compelled not to
mention it for fear of being struck down by the mighty hand of the rest of the class, as a result, i will instead invoke the Ford GT of about 4 years ago, the first time I saw the car was during a
Super Bowl ad, and the involuntary reaction I experienced was akin to lust. I recently bought a
very ugly sweatshirt, this sweatshirt alternates red and black squares in a checkerboard pattern,
kind of, the point is the sweatshirt is terribly ugly, but I love it anyway, as the entire inside is lined with inch and a half long faux fur, that is my entire story. I work at a ski shop, but we dont really think of ourselves as a normal ski shop. We think of ourselves as something better than the average ski buying experience. The way we sell skis is the way that Diesel sells Jeans, only we don't have to make you disoriented, as unless you are an expert, the ski industry is disorienting enough on its own. A lot of ski shops have little blurbs next to every single ski to tell you an utterly useless pittance of information about the particular ski, we don't. We want you to talk to us, and we want to put you on the right skis, in fact it's virtually impossible to get skis from us without talking to us about who you are as a skier, where you ski, what your best ski day ever was; we don't sell skis, we sell the future experience of using the right skis on a powder day (I should mention, I was a long time customer before I was an employee).

Fri sep 25

1) Select a breif passage from Chapter 1 of The Design of Everyday Things and post it, also explain why it is interesting.

"(On the affordances of different train shelter materials,) Glass is for seeing through, and for breaking. Wood is normally used for solidity, opacity, support, or carving. Flat, porous, smooth surfaces are for writing on. So wood is also for writing on." I find this passage interesting, as it addresses, in a very analytical way the psychology of interactions with materials, something that to me, seems so obvious that it seems novel not to have thought of it before.

2)Norman's book was first published in 1988 and it still influences designers today. Why do you think this book continues to be influential 20 years later?

The influence of this book is tied, not to the objects that it talks about, but to the ideas that they embody; ideas that have no expiration date. If a concept is as relevant and as ill understood as it was years ago, then it stands to reason that an answer will we equally as well valued as it was years ago.

3) Based on this chapter, what factors would you include on a checklist for evaluating the design of a product?

I think this question is more complicated than it initially lets on, as I brought up in class on Wendsday, not all products/objects are interacted with in quite the same way, some products are active ones in which you often interact with the object in such a way that intelegently designed supplementary actions can be a boon, but most objects are interacted with in a far more passive way, the door handle for example, is not an object that you would often spend a period of time learning, you simply expect it to work in an obvious way. I think the differentiation between these two classes of objects is relevant not because it changes the checklist of what is important in a product, but for how it changes what is most important in a product. Both classes of objects can be seen in a typical car, the steering wheel, accelerator and brakes all are very active controls, and not necessarily intuitive unless you have driven a car before, but because they are all very simple to interact with, at least in a very rudimentary sense, they are very easy to learn. You would not be particularly happy, however, if the air conditioning control or stereo in your car were similarly obtuse initially. These are both instances of passive controls, the user simply wants them to do what they ought to, and as a result, there is much greater pressure on the designer to take visibility, mapping and natural design into account as they design the air conditioning control. The steering wheel however, need not necessarily have good mapping or visibility, as the designer can expect that the user will spend a reasonable amount of time learning the basic controls of the automobile.

The Design of Everyday Things

1) What do you think the author's key points in this chapter were?

In the opening chapter of The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman explores the idea that objects should not just be easy to use, but obvious to use, and that they should give the operator subtle hints as to how to interact with the object. This idea is expressed eloquently in the example of the German charter bus, and the way that the driver describes the layout of the controls, "Everything is exactly where it ought to be."

2)Think of a specific object that you have had difficulty using. How did design contribute to making it difficult to use? Does the usability problem arise from one of the principles that Norman discusses in this chapter?

My first Mp3 player was a Panasonic Shockwave, and it was the embodiment of everything that a computer device shouldn't be, it was relatively large for the amount of storage it had, lacking in ergonomics, and above all difficult to navigate. The device was not designed so much as a purpose-built computer, but as a CD Walkman only with a small flash drive in place of an optical disk drive. Even with a capacity of only 256mb, this still made for an incredibly unwieldy system, having exactly the same control panel as a CD player, an extremely rudimentary options menu, and no song directory at all, forcing the user to select songs by panning through them individually, which was only slightly annoying until you realized that that meant waiting for the songs to load individually, meaning that after hopping through about 2.5 albums worth of songs to get to the one you were looking for, the AA batteries that you had just inserted, would die of the exertion caused by looking for your music. Suffice it to say, I was unhappy with my hundred and thirty dollar piece of plastic junk.

3) How did the designers of the iPod address the principle that Norman discusses here?

By contrast, the iPod was built with a flair for minimalism, and yet the iPod managed to be simple to use as well, because the interface allowed for the selection of songs as opposed to the incremental skipping of songs, and because the controls were not meant to be learned, so mush as simply understood. The "Click Wheel" is the ultimate example of this, nowhere does the click wheel say go this way for down, and this way for up, it simply entreats the user to turn it, because that is the obvious thing to do with it, and upon turning the wheel, the operator comes to find that it works in exactly the way that one would expect it to, in fact, i many ways the operator knows before they even touch the device what it will do.

The perfect thing

1) What elements of the design process does this article illustrate?

This article displays the way that an idea progresses from simply a vague concept, to a usable product, through Styrofoam and non functional models, to individual component models, to prototype usable models.

2)What factors would you use to evaluate a perfect thing?

Simplicity of design, of use, and of purpose. To say that anything is "perfect" is somewhat naive, but the ipod was the distillation of everything that a digital music player could be, and nothing more, the genius of the ipod is the simple lack of multifunctionality, it accomplishes a task in the most elementary way possible, Occam's Razor at it's finest.

3) Whether you own an iPod or not, you probably have some opinions of the is product. What do you feel are its strengths and weaknesses?

The iPod is, in many ways the exact oppisite of the iPhone. The genius of the iPod was the fact that it was a digital music player that fit into your life in an appropriate way and did it's job effectively and innocuously, in a smooth, clean package. The iPhone on the otherhand is essetially an electronic swiss army knife, and as a result fails to make obvious why exactly it is a must own product, as opposed to simply an expansion upon the cell phone as we know it.

Hello out there

I frankly could not be more excited to be here at K.

I have been a Hardcore Cross coutry for the last four years, as well as a band geek; in college however, I will simply be a hardcore recreational runner, and still a band geek.

I was drawn to the Design Intelegence seminar simply because it seemed interesting, and unlike anything I had ever studied before. My hope for the class, is simply to learn something new, about something that we constanly overlook.