What Norman does in this reading is to emphasise the last line (like I mentioned in my previous response) of chapter 1 in The Design of Everyday Things, that clever design can minimise the paradox of technology.
What I find useful in this reading is that he goes back to look at the idea of aesthetic and how that relates to usability. Though in the last reading a lot of mention of the aesthetic side of design seemed to be considered to be bad or harmful to the utility of the object, here, Norman describes the opposite.
Perhaps controversially, I agree with both of his assertions for I believe that it really depends on the object that you are making and who is using it and for what purpose the object will serve. In this reading, he asserts that “good design means that beauty and usability are in balance”. Okay, but some objects don’t require the beauty aspect. But then again, there are other ones that require both beauty and usability for consumers to purchase them. I guess Norman, from the readings, gives us two perspectives on the design of objects, in which he recognises that psychology, whether of the inventor or for the user, plays a large role in dictating how effective the design of the object is.
This reading reminded me largely of some of the feedback that Aaron gave in class on our first assignments. He asked a lot of us in the class what the purposes of our projects were, and if there are any practical uses for them. As well (including during the feedback session for the second assignment), he also commented on the usefulness and how easy it was for the user to use that creation.
What the author of the text, Norman, does really well is in explaining why some designs, though may be aesthetically pleasing, do not work well. The author points to the ideas of visibility, affordance, conceptual and mental models, and mapping to explain the paradox of technology – which is the idea that “the same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn and harder to use”. What I found interesting, in addition, was the author’s assertion that the paradox of technology “should never be used as an excuse for poor design”.
For me, the last line of the chapter, “added complexity and difficulty cannot be avoided when functions are added, but with clever design, they can be minimised”, is the essential takeaway from this reading. From Aaron’s feedback, I have already started to think about all my projects in the sense that they could provide a practical use (in such a way that a product could actually be developed, produced, and sold). The reading emphasised this mindset and consolidated the idea that there is a need for good designs.
To expand on my switch from the previous assignment, I decided to use one of the more basic codes that we learned in class. Wednesday, in class, was the first time that I have ever coded. After the class ended, I become pretty overwhelmed with all the new content I was learning and couldn’t really wrap my head around how each line of code was working. I asked my friend if he could go over the code with me again so that I made sure how each line worked and how they interacted with one another. The code I have used is, therefore, more simple than the one we inputted in class because I wanted to understand the really simple codes before getting into the more advanced codes (e.g. I didn’t use “bool”, only “int”).
I decided to run probably the most basic lines of code, which is to let the LEDs blink, i.e. one LED would be on initially and when the pedal was pressed, the other would light up but the initial LED would not. When let go, the newly lit LED would go off and the initial LED would light back up.
I connected my wires and LEDs in the way shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Arrangement of the Wires on the BreadBoard and Red Board
The improvement and the lines of code are simple, but in terms of its relation to the use of the foot pedal, if the second LED were to be another colour (like in the video above) and were brighter, playing the drums could become almost like a light show. Creating a light show that follows the beat of the drums could be pretty fun! Music festival-worthy, perhaps!
Perhaps because Interactive Media is still a relatively new programme at NYUAD, a lot of professors and even students are unaware of what IM is – me included. “What exactly is this IM that you are taking?”, asked my ‘Future of Medicine’ professor. “Well, I guess you could say…it’s like…computer science but more hardware?”, I replied. I myself, a current student taking an intro to IM class, did not even know how to explain the subject that I was/am studying. (That’s obviously a fail on my part, so sorry professors if I downplay your subject/discipline, I’m still learning!!) The reading inspired me to create my own definition of IM and right now as it stands, reads: “that sort of media that has digital interactions with people which is basically like when the media interacts with humans by listening, processing and then responding to what was listened and yea…” I’ll need to improve my definition I know, but Crawford told me to make my own definition and that’s mine for now. From now on, I shall work on my explanation of what IM is and hopefully by the end of the semester my definition can improve.
Everything about the reading was going well for me until I reached the part on page 266 where it says that there is “the need for error correction”. The text points to the idea that without the presence of error-correction, all knowledge creation is necessarily bounded. I think I spiraled down into a philosophical rabbit hole after reading this – I thought that it was the opposite. If we don’t have the creation of such thing as right and wrong, shouldn’t our knowledge not be bounded then as there are infinite opportunities to think in any way possible? Wouldn’t error correction be something like manipulating DNA and creating superhumans?!!?
I was stuck in this rabbit hole for a while but decided to accept the idea that was stated on the paper in front of me and continued to read onwards. I realised that the text does explain more about the phenomenon I had just described and I eventually figured out that I was misinterpreting and misreading the whole idea – I had disregarded the fact that this jump to universality and its error correction was in the context of computers. This realisation assured me a lot more because for a good while I was convinced that the author was basically saying that it’s ethical to manipulate DNA, and other theoretically unethical practices.
Overall, I thought it was really interesting for the author to pick out so many examples of the jump to universality in many fields. This reading connected, in many cases, to my other class’ learning about globalisation and how homogeneity and uniformity are influencing and impacting nations, which leads to universality.
Perhaps one way in which drumming could become more fun is to provide some lights to accompany the beat. That was the intention of my project. I decided to make a foot pedal that would make lights go on when pressed down.
After scavenging in the junk shelf, I started off with gathering some sponges that would allow for not only the compression part during the pressing down of the pedal but also allow for pedal board to bounce back.
Figure 1: Example of How I Arranged the Sponges
I then glued the sponges onto a padding that had a surface that had more grip to allow the structure not to slide during the stepping of the pedal.
Figure 2: The Arrangements of Sponges on the Surface with More Grip
I decided that the easiest way for me to create a pedal that would switch on the lights when pressed on is when, when the pedal is in neutral position, there is nothing there to conduct electricity. I realised that for me to have a surface that had a section that could be an insulator and a larger section that would act as a conductor, I would need to use something like a styrofoam board where I would cover the larger section with a conductor. I marked 1.5 cm off the top of a styrofoam board and covered the larger section with aluminium foil. To make sure it stays and to cover with another layer of conductor, I applied some copper tape on top of the aluminium.
Figure 3: Aluminium Foil and Copper Tape on Styrofoam Board
I then stuck the board onto the grip surface like Figure 4 shows below.
Figure 4
For the circuit and the switch to work, I needed to stick a piece of wire to the back of the board of the pedal so that when stepped on, the tip of the wire would connect with the conductive elements of the backboard as seen in figure 3 and 4. Figure 5 below shows this process.
Figure 5: Wire behind the board of the “pedal”
Figure 6 shows the side view after sticking the pedal board onto the grip surface. I made sure to leave some space between the backboard and the pedal board so that when stepped on, the surfaces wouldn’t get stuck as easily.
Figure 6
Figure 7 shows the final result of the pedal. I cut out some more styrofoam boards to fit onto the two sides so that the sponges inside are enclosed and so that the overall look of the pedal is more structured. As well, not pictured here, but one more wire was taped to the back of the backboard so that the circuit is closed.
Figure 7
The finished product is shown in the video below! Now you can have lights to accompany your drum beat!
P.S. Not seen in the pictures but I made sure to measure the dimensions of the styrofoam boards so that they would piece together nicely. The gluing together of the boards and of the sponges were done through the use of a hot glue gun.
As someone who studied physics in high school, this reading is a super enlightening and fun refresher. As Ross mentioned, rather than having a list of facts like most non-fiction textbooks seem to be, Amdahl writes in a more colloquial and easy-to-understand manner that incorporates a lot of simple examples that make understanding the electron theory a lot easier.
This reading reminded me a lot of what my physics teacher used to teach us. He also described current to be “traffic” and voltage similar to “need to party” but rather as the “need to get down the slide” – with the “slide” referring to the circuit. When the need gets bigger, the first “person” is able to be pushed down the slide and the chain reaction continues. The traffic would, therefore, be how many “people” are going down that slide
I think perhaps the most interesting part of this reading was the fact that he seems to dispute the electron theory – “you must smile and agree with them. Don’t confront them, not yet”. The introduction of Greenies, to me, symbolised the idea that “contradictions [don’t stop] any other scientific theor[ies]”, in other words, meaning that there are always new ideas and theories that can introduce the concepts of electricity and magnetism.
Overall, I really enjoyed Amdahl use of humour and analogies to teach a physics concept to a wider audience.
