Through the Looking Glass

I like the example Jeff has given about the coke bottle that got dropped on the primitive culture. I was told a couple years ago about a book about an anthropologist who is researching a society. That society had a lot of very strange objects and methodology. As it turns out, the anthropologist is actually analyzing 20th century America, from a futuristic state. I haven’t actually read the book, nor do I recall who wrote it / what its called. (Yes, I’m helpful!) But that concept is something that fascinates me.

We look at the Egyptians and Inca with such wonder at what is left of their civilization, trying to understand through our own point of view what they saw through theirs. I’ve tried to understand and apply this principle in design. Well, more in usability in my designs.

Especially in Marty’s class, I’ve tried to keep everything as simple as possible. That might sound a bit obvious, but its the truth. I want someone who is 60 and not from our culture to be able to pick up a technological device and understand its use based on whats in front of them. For the most part, the users have been able to navigate through my designs. I have a decent grasp on web design and I’ve tried to apply what I know from there into most of the displays. I’m really curious however to see if a further understanding of what we discussed today in class, especially the concept of roles and actors, will make a difference in how I design.

1 Comment

  1. mingxian
    Permalink

    generally speaking, I agree that as for design simple is good for its usability. But is it always true? Maybe not really. I don’t know that if you ever play SUDOKU, the game plays with the nine numbers we all know every well. It is a “simple” game, but it could be as frustrated as other games sometimes. And also when I feel more frustrated during the game, I get more pleasure and accomplishment after I done it.

    I think the simple should be clarified more clearly, such as simple form, simple logic. And also depends on that it is a “black box” or “white box”. I don’t know what I am talking about here, because I don’t know what i am really thinking in my mind now. But I am sure we need to think about “simple” in its complex meaning.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s