Design Exercise: Agency in an Interactive Model

Choose one of the interactive models below or another of your choosing, and play  through multiple turns. If possible, replay it with different settings. Post an illustrative image and short description of how well or badly the model creates the experience of agency.

When you approach the model do you  have specific expectations of the kinds of outcomes it can have and the kinds of decisions you will be able to make? If so, where did these come from? Does the model draw on these expectations? How does the model communicate to you what actions you can take? How does it communicate the connection between your actions and the outcomes the systems produces?  Are there other ways the same system could be modeled? How would the interaction be structured in a model that reflected a different interpretation of the same real world system?

Note that agency does not mean ease of accomplishing a particular goal within the scenario.  Making some outcomes difficult or even impossible to achieve can create the experience of agency if the obstacle represents a meaningful interpretation of the system being modelled.

Examples:

Lemonade Stand  or any other version of it or any similar  “Tycoon” game

Fatworld

Kabul Kaboom

Sim City

Design Exercise: Labeling for Navigation

From any website of a large and complex organization or information space, such as a news site or a university website, choose an example of particularly good or bad labeling within the main menu system and justify your choice. Are the words chosen for the labels meaningful? Are they at the same level of abstraction? Are they distinct from one another? Is there a hierarchy, and if so is it coherent — can you predict and remember which labels are under which top-level category? How many of the labels are there at any one level? Can you tell where you are in the hierarchy when you are several levels down? Can you reach across the structure easily?  Does the navigation system also serve as a page title?

Design Exercise: Legacy Conventions

Good or Bad Use of Legacy Conventions

For any digital artifact (e.g. a website, a digital camera, a digital cell phone), chose a particularly good or bad example of the use of one or more media conventions  (e.g. headlines, screen overlays, video control icons, keyboard layout) adapted from a legacy media form (e.g. print, movies, an analog camera, a hard-wired
analog phone). Make an image that focuses on the adapted legacy conventions and justify your choice as a particularly good or bad design example. What function does the convention serve that is common across media? How does its use change when it is moved from the legacy format to the digital medium?

How to Use the Design Exercises on this Site

The Design Exercises on this site, like the Design Explorations in the book, are appropriate thought exercises for designers which should help them to think outside their disciplinary training and focus on the collective process of inventing the medium.

For students, these Design Exercises are appropriate for short weekly assignments to develop the habit of critiquing design with carefully chosen words and specific examples. A good way to organize this assignment is to have students submit a 50-200 word text and an image with link to an online video, app,  or live website as appropriate, and to have them look at one another’s submissions by posting them to a shared page, like a wiki or a page generated by php from a shared folder. They are a good complement to courses that also include substantial hands-on project development.

The Design Explorations in the book can also be used in the same way but they tend to be more open-ended and time-intensive group activities, suitable for an in-class design lab or longer-term student project development.

Design Exercise: Visual Overviews

Using one of the sites below, or any site of your own choosing that offers visual access to  a complex information space, evaluate whether and how  it affords  Overview, Zoom, Filtering,  and Details on Demand (Ben Shneiderman’s design values).  Are  size, color, proximity, used semantically?  Does the user navigate up and down a hierarchy? across a network? Can the user rearrange the elements? Is there a choice of multiple granularities? What is an example of a specific task that the site supports particularly well or particularly badly?

Smartmoney Map of the Market

Gapminder World

external link: http://www.wefeelfine.org/wefeelfine_pc.html

http://worrydream.com/

http://feltron.com/

Design Exercise: Affordance Grid

For an area of interest – perhaps one that you are thinking of as the focus for a larger project — place at least 3 existing digital artifacts on the grid diagram according to their use of the digital affordances described in chapters 2 and 3 of ITM. What affordances or combinations of affordances have been under-exploited

For example, if skateboarding is your focus, you might put a Google map of local skateboard stores in the Spatial quadrant and a skateboarding blog and a skateboarding Twitter feed in the Participatory quadrant. You might then see missed opportunities, such as an encyclopedic archive of skateboard designs or an interactive model of a skateboard park or an augmented reality overlay of skateboarding tricks visible in a particular park. 

Why I am considering returning my new Nook

It seems that understanding what a computer (Amazon’s strength)  may be more important than Barnes & Noble’s long experience with book-selling when it comes to creating satisfying searches on the encyclopedic digital resource of an online bookstore. This is a  followup to my  earlier post about ordering a Nook to replace my lost Kindle.

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Why I am ordering a Nook

I have long been a pretty happy customer of Amazon.com. In fact I’ve often said that I could never have left the bookstores of Cambridge MA if it hadn’t been for the advent of Amazon.  I use their credit card, subscribe to their “prime” service, and I even allowing myself to get suckered into buying their ill-designed Fire tablet. Although I have many reservations about the limited functionality of eReaders,   I’ve taken my vanilla Kindle on every trip, and really enjoyed the instant gratification of having my literary and relaxation reading arrive instantly .(I stick to paper for scholarly works since the Kindle is still far too clumsy for taking notes.) But last month I lost my Kindle in the pocket of an airplane. and after a few weeks of using my iPad as a very poor substitute (too BRIGHT!) I have decided to order a new … NOOK.

Here’s why:

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What do non-programming designers have to know?

There is a  continuing controversy over whether or not digital media designers  should know how to program.  As someone who learned to program a long time ago but does not actively program, I have taken the position that if everyone only designed what they could personally program we would have much lamer artifacts. For one thing we would not have anything designed by Steve Jobs who worked with the most skilled computer wizards but did not feel the need to code himself. Continue reading

Dick Clark and the 45 rpm Record Format

When Dick Clark died earlier this week, he was best known  as a “New Year’s Eve Icon” from his hosting the annual televising of the Times Square celebration, but he came to prominence earlier as the host of two ground-breaking TV shows, American Bandstand, which aired weekday afternoons and introduced baby boomer teenagers to new records by showing Philadelphia teenagers dancing to the latest releases, and the New York-based Dick Clark Show, which put rock ‘n’ roll performers in front of screaming teenagers for half an hour every Saturday night.

Associated Press Image of Dick Clark with 45 RPM RecordsDick Clark’s success rested upon a change in music distribution platform around 1958  to a new technical standard: the mass-produced 45 rpm vinyl record, smaller and cheaper than the 78 rpm singles that were the previous market standard. Continue reading