in Reading Response

UX 5 – Chipchase Reading Response, Chapter 4

“You are what you carry.”

When Chipchase advised the reader to take stock of our belongings, I rummaged my wallet to analyze the content. I realized that I take many things with me out of habit, such as The Soup Spoon membership card (which I registered now and find out that it expired in 2015), and secondary school EZlink card. A few Indonesian rupiah notes were also inside, perhaps indicating my cautiousness should I need to go back to Indonesia at a moment’s notice. I feel that

“A place for everything, everything in its place”

Reading the part about the ‘centers of gravity’, I realized that mine, in my room, would be the desk area nearest to the bed, which is spot-on “a cord’s distance of a power supply”. This area allows me to lie on my bed and use my phone which is charging at the same time. At other instances, I may charge my laptop and phone while sitting on the chair at my desk. I notice that when I go home, my hall key fob, wallet, and phone are also always around that area, while my bag is tucked neatly under the desk.

“You are what you upload”

‘The Great Unburdening’ has slowly taken form in my life as well. Whereas a few years ago I still bothered downloading all the music I loved, nowadays I simply go on Spotify and get on-demand music services. It came to a point where I was going out and wanted to play a certain song and realized I did not have Spotify on my phone to play it. Google Drives had also a major impact in the way students present their presentation; they often do not bring a thumb drive but merely logs in and present from Google Slides. These cloud-based technologies relieve us from the hassle of having the soft copy on us at all times, only ‘snapping back’ to us when we need it so.

Question 1:

How do we reconcile the risk of losing all things in one device, versus the convenience of having it all in one device? I feel that the risk is so high such that retrieval methods are very important, as Chipchase had mentioned about his lost iPhone in Shanghai.

Question 2:

The risk of theft when leaving things out of sight in Singapore is considered low. How did the government cultivate this culture and attitude? Alternatively, if the government had not contributed to this, how did this culture came about?