Category: Assignment Week 5

I think the reading gave some good insights on the topic of design, even though it was a broad explanation with the main topic of interaction design mixed up with parts of product design as well, and the common design patterns the two design areas share. I thought of it as the authors wanted to give the reader a insight of what kind tools of traditional design that can be transferred to the problems we meet today with a more digitized area of design. What do we need to consider when our designs are non-physical and exists on digital platforms, where the user won’t interact with a traditional object? The question of democratic design is also touched up on, which I think is interesting. How many of the apps today take in consider people with impaired vision or less effective coordination of movement? Yes, sure, you can change the font size on the phone it self, you can invert the colors on some phones and there is phones designed for people with special needs. But I haven’t seen or found any app that you can customize to your own preferences, for example the size of icons. It might also be hard to keep the original idea of the design if elements has to be sized up and change order to give the user a good experience, even though that this should be the goal.

I think that this is an really interesting question and challenge for interaction design, where the physical apparatus should contain a user friendly interface which should be able to deliver information to anyone in a society who wants to take part of it, and this is in the core really a democratic issue when more and more of the free information is moved to cyber space.

 

This weeks reading was interesting and in many ways a description of the day and age we exist in today. We carry our phones, keys and wallets day in and day out. In a way we live through our phone these days, a lot of what we experience and see is through our phones while transporting ourselves from one place to another, for example on the MRT, a majority of the commuters spend their time on the train with their phone. It might be possible to argue that we have a space that we’ve constructed within our phone that we can bring with us wherever we go, a space we decorated with the apps of our choice and a space that we know and will stay the same wherever we are. I think of this because we can bring a lot of personal stuff that we identify our self with such as music, photos, hobbies and books which would be much harder before when these things had to be worn in physical shapes, like it was before we had the possibility to carry this through the smartphone.

I wonder how this has changed us as humans, in some way it might be easy to see. I thinking of how it has effected our ability to plan and handle unforeseen happenings, while traveling etc. For a while ago a lot of planning and studying had to be made before arriving to a new destination, such as where to go when we get of the bus, where the accommodation is located and so on. Now days we don’t have to study these things upon arrival, this can be studied while traveling to the desired place through our applications on the phone where we can see our location in real time. When I think about traveling how I traveled before the smartphone entered my life I had to do a lot more research on where I was going, how I would take me there and what kind of possible effects, for example, a delay would cause on the trip. Now days we can adapt from one situation to another really quick with the help from our smartphone, but what happens if we don’t have that one life line we so much rely on?

Have our ability to adapt from one situation to another become better or worse with the availability of extreme amount of information?

Do we know more and are able to pick up all this information or do we just feel certain that we can gain any knowledge anytime depending on the situation we are in?

These are just some of the thoughts that come to me while I was reading and writing. Hope it makes sense in some way.