This week’s reading continued the trend these readings have had of furthering my ideas, thoughts, and beliefs about facets of art and design. In a lot of ways, the reading takes me back to our previous reading on interactivity, and our class discussions regarding the same. The author quips in an initial section of the reading, about how engineers who believe that being logical is enough may say that it is the fault of a device’s user for not understanding how to use it properly. Having an engineering background, I feel that this statement may as well have been personally directed to a version of me from a few years back. Even if my code (for say an app) was intricate, complex and highly functional – this would never actually end up being used because of bad design choices that made it harder to navigate for a user -leading me to say things the author says an engineer would say.
The following sections of the reading discusses affordances and signifiers amongst other attributes of human-centered design. This made me immediately think of direct relations to technology-based experiences. A simple example of this would be images in a website. Often people wouldn’t click on them, so it wouldn’t make sense to make them hyperlinks. There would be the need for some other signifier if we indeed wanted to do so (and had reason to do so). The author goes on to discuss a similar example of an app later.
Finally, the author’s ending notes on the paradox of technology is one I have actually thought of several times previously. The technology sector seems to have a fascination with smaller and smaller form factors to squeeze better and more complex technology into. The primary reason for this seems obvious: increased portability. But as the author states, the more complex the technology gets (presumably to improve our lives if used adequately), also complicates life. We have even seen technological juggernauts fail to take this into account – and fail hard as a consequence. The ‘Google Glass’ seems like a great example for this, and the Meta’s ‘Metaverse’ may be moving in a similar direction. Nonetheless, as the author claims, if all disciplines work together, and more attention is paid to design in a human-centric sense, it should be possible to have technology which is both better and more functional. Like the author, I too believe that this dream is possible.