Reading Response Week 4

One of the aspects that piqued my interest in the reading was the paradox of technology. It is without a doubt that things tend to get replaced as newer and better technology emerges. As the complexity increases alongside it, I believe there is certain fragility that comes with as well. In the case of watches, as it evolves to maximize efficiency there could be certain capabilities that are sacrificed in order to achieve that. These sacrifices are what causes these fragilities. This leads to the question of whether there should be balance between them, as this could lead to lower efficiency. I think that there are many examples of products that is made with this in mind, but they are not particularly regarded as better in this society’s standards.

In regards to design, I often noticed that when something has a good design, it is rarely notices, but if it has a bad design, the annoyances are highlighted much easily. When the design is good, there seems to be a certain smoothness within the system, but if the design is bad, certain redundancy or annoyances are to be found. With a good conceptual model, the communication between the design and the user becomes less confusing. With complex operating systems like Microsoft, it contains numerous manuals but when there are certain errors, troubleshooting it becomes more and more vague in some cases therefore requiring additional help, which I believe is large but inevitable design flaw.

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