Category: Spring 2019

Attractive things work better
    Norman discusses the aesthetics of things and the nicer it is the better it works. The author is very right about the that attractive things work better, but not literally, of course. It works better to present it, to sell but most of the times (from my experience personally) aesthetics of the item can make the item not work properly (i.e. the pressure pads from my midterm project attached to the wooden brick broke fast). But Norman is definitely right about that the aesthetics of an object can provide easy usage. For example a simple game pad is and aesthetically designed object. You can just use buttons not attached together and that will be a mess and hard to use.

 

I had never really thought about this before, but it seems really logical after reading about it.

More Attractive Product –> User Feels Good –> User Can Think Creativly

Being able to go through the three different levels of the brain and showing how they work on an individual and collaborative scale. An interesting distinction that the reading made was that the visceral processing analyzes a situation and responds to it, but behavioral processing analyzes the situation and adapts the behavior accordingly. This distinction is very slight, but it’s important for understanding the applications of these different levels.

One part I really resonated with was when the reading outlined the musical aspect of behavioral and reflective processing and how reflective may often drop out while behavioral remains. I don’t know how many times I’ll play guitar and mess up as soon as I start thinking about what my next move is. This behavior, everyday/fixed routine sort of processing is what allows for muscle memory to form and it seems that reflective processing, while it does have its place, has to be supplemental to that muscle memory.

An example that I clearly remember is one day, my flute instructor played an entire song while I listed off what I did over my weekend. Once he was done playing, he repeated back to me everything that I had done over the weekend. This, I believe, is an example of behavioral processing helping him to keep playing while his reflective processing takes over the weekend plans.

I’m interested in how I can implement these processing levels in my future designs, now that we’ve read about how they truly impact the user experience.

Now it makes sense why they wrote a hit musical about Hamilton! Although it seems like they strayed a bit from Margaret’s story…

Seriously, though, Hamilton’s stories is just incredible to read about. It’s inspiring to hear the story of a woman with such talent working in a field that was so dominated by men at the time. And not only that, but being a working mother in the 1960’s! Damn girl!

It reminds me of that Hidden Figures movie they made about Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Jonson who also worked at NASA and were the brains behind an operation. I wonder if Hamilton was also hidden, just as the three women in the film were. It’s funny. In the article, Hamilton says she feared that if she made a mistake, the press would point back to her and blame it all on her. Which is true, if she had made a mistake that cost the mission, she would have been ridiculed and shamed by the entire community, but throughout all of her success, how much recognition did she get? How many other people like Hamilton have we hidden away?

As an artist, I liked this text because design, aesthetics, and the arts as a whole are a lot of times not appreciated and their value isn’t recognized as much as should be. In product design, the appealing look of the product can be almost as important as the product functionality. The Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective levels of processing and their effect on our feelings and emotions was interesting to read about. The appearance of a product, as shown in the text, affects the customers’ choice, as well as their experience. In my projects I always tried to make the product look appealing, as I think that’s always very important.

Her Code Got Humans On the Moon – and Invented Software

I enjoyed reading this article as it informed me about a piece of history I wasn’t aware of. It was interesting how the passion of one woman was a major driver behind the Apollo 8 mission. It also demonstrated and emphasized the importance of thinking ahead and taking into account all the mistakes that could occur during a certain interaction, and taking the necessary precautions. In the case of Hamilton, she was able to predict an error that was presumably unlikely to happen, and went against the requests of her superiors to install the software needed to prevent the error from occurring. This provides us with a great example of the diligence necessary to foresee possible problems that could result during the interactions that we design for our projects.

Attractive Things Work Better

Norman examines how the aesthetics of an object or experience affect the user’s perception regarding its ease of use. Norman also delves into the importance of accounting for the emotions of the user when designing an interaction, and explain in simple terms that when people feel better about themselves they tend to become “better at brainstorming” and “examining multiple alternatives”. The reading made me question our reliance on aesthetically pleasing processes and how we favor those over less visually stimulating ones – even if it functions the same or even provides a more adequate performance. This made me more inclined to forgo aesthetically appealing choices in the projects I intend to make in the future, in order to challenge the notion of functionality in relation to form. The reading also sheds light on the cognitive processes behind the choices humans make, and the importance of design to the process of learning. Norman eloquently describes that the designer should preferably be in a positive state, since it could invariably affect their curiosity and creative processes, as well as how appealing their design is to the visceral, behavioral and reflective levels of users.

In this chapter, Norman begins with an interesting anecdote about a study surrounding “attractive” ATM design by two Japanese researchers, and how people perceived attractively designed ATMs to be easier to use, even though they shared the same functions and buttons as some other, less attractive ATMs. Tracktinsy applied the same experiment to Israelis, thinking that “aesthetic preferences are culturally dependent”, and that the results stemming from Japanese culture would not apply to his experiment on Israelis. However, he was proved wrong and came to find that usability and aesthetics do correlate, contrary to his previous belief- and that to a large extent, they do so on a biological level, rather than a distinct cultural level.

Why do usability and aesthetics correlate, on a seemingly universal level?

Humans possess three levels of processing: visceral, behavioral and reflective. Each of these levels affect our interactions with design, objects and the environment. People are very similar at the visceral level, but it is at the behavioral and reflective levels that people differ and act differently. For one, we are genetically predisposed to have positive experiences with such things as smooth, symmetrical objects or “attractive” people or sensuous feelings, sounds and shapes (pp. 29). These “experiences” have been accumulated due to our evolutionary history, but humans also possess highly reflective abilities that enable us to, in a way, overwrite these biological histories.  Norman suggests that, in design, we need to cater to each of these three levels individually- but this also poses the question:  “How do each of the three levels compare in importance with the others?”. Norman proposes multiple solutions for this, but the solution I agree with the most is, satisfying the largest amount of needs by having a wide variety of products. An example of this which is mentioned in the chapter is magazines. No one tries to produce a magazine that caters to everyone, because it defies the point. Each magazine is special in its style, delivery, and audience.

So, coming back to the question of usability and aesthetics. Pleasurable aesthetics increase the usability of objects, on all three processing levels. Attractive objects trigger positive emotions, which in return enable our mental creativity and make us more tolerant of errors or difficulties in their design.

In addition to the multitude of lessons to be learnt from her brief history, Hamilton’s story is also incredibly inspiring. As a spaceship programmer in the sixties, she was quite literally one of a kind, and she was undoubtedly extraordinary as she completely revolutionized and transformed the potential of technology and software all the while navigating a male-dominated industry. This article made me realize the way technology can immensely improve and become more complex yet at the same time also become more simplified- in the span of a few decades. Back then, during Hamilton’s time, programming a spaceship meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards and threading copper wires through magnetic rings- and the computers processing these “words” or commands could only store and compute at a very limited level and speed. Today, this notion has been completely transformed, and programming has become transformed into a series of more “simplified” languages that a computer can understand, with many more options and larger capacities for data storage and computing speeds. To me, reading about the early stages of programming and software building is fascinating but also wildly incomprehensible. How do you encode data on a spaceship using something as “raw” as hole-punched cards? This may be an oversimplification of the process, but it is a question I often found myself asking. I also thought there was a valuable lesson to be learned about testing and troubleshooting from the Appolo 8 flight, what we may think “would never happen” can very much end up happening, and this can be applied all the way from large ventures such as spaceship flights bringing humans to the moon, to smaller-scale projects like our weekly class assignments.

int faceShapeX, faceShapeY; 

int rectWidth, rectHeight, rectX, rectY;

ArrayList<Polygon> polygons;
PShape[] shapes = new PShape[3];




void setup() {
  
  
  size (1500, 1200);
  faceShapeX = 1000;
  faceShapeY = 480;
  rectWidth = 200;
  rectHeight = 70;
  rectX = 350;
  rectY = 300;
  
    background(255);   
   
}

void draw() {


 if(mousePressed){
   fill(80,30,0);
   ellipse(mouseX, mouseY, 40, 40);
   
 }


  fill(250, 219, 172);
  ellipse(faceShapeX, faceShapeY, 600, 700); // face shape


  fill(250);
  ellipse(858, 389, 80, 50); // left eye
  ellipse(1126, 389, 80, 50); // right eye

  fill(240, 209, 162);
  ellipse(997, 500, 40, 170); // center nose
  ellipse(970, 572, 37, 17); //left nostril
  ellipse(1025, 572, 37, 17); // right nostril

  fill(230, 190, 190);
  ellipse(999, 654, 150, 30); // top lip
  ellipse(999, 684, 150, 30); // bottom lip

  fill(0, 100, 0);
  ellipse(854, 389, 45, 50); // left iris
  ellipse(1125, 389, 45, 50); // right iris
  fill(0);
  ellipse(854, 389, 20, 20); // left pupil
  ellipse(1125, 389, 20, 20); // right pupil


  line(988, 424, 953, 568); // nose line
  line(1007, 424, 1042, 568); // nose line
  
  line(819, 384, 808, 373); // left eyelashes
  line(825, 376, 817, 361);
  line(836, 369, 829, 354);
  
  line(1162, 376, 1171, 366);  //right eyelashes
  line(1150, 369, 1157, 356);
  line(1139, 366, 1142, 348);


  fill(0);
  triangle(930, 331, 825, 299, 816, 328); // left eyebrow
  triangle(1050, 331, 1160, 299, 1169, 328); // right eyebrow
  
  
  fill(200,240,230);
  rect(rectX, rectY, rectWidth, rectHeight);
 
 fill(0);
 textSize(21);
 text("Give Me Hair!", rectX+30, rectY+45); // how do you make this bigger???
 
 if (mouseX > (rectX)
  && mouseY > (rectY)
  && mouseX < rectX + rectWidth 
  && mouseY < rectY + rectHeight) {
    
 fill(200,240,230);
 rect(rectX, rectY, rectWidth, rectHeight);
 
 fill(0);
 textSize(21);
 text("Beautiful!", rectX+60, rectY+45);
 
}

}

 

The hardest challenge I had to overcome was my hair. How do you program super curly hair??? And I really spent a lot of time trying to figure out some different solutions. I went through the entire “Examples” menu in Processing to see if there was a spring I could use to mimic my hair.

One issue I ran into was that I did this mostly on the airplane while I travelled this spring break. Therefore, I didn’t have wifi access. I couldn’t look up how to do things, but this challenged me to just sit down and figure it out.

My solution, of course, was to just pass the responsibility to someone else.: I’ll just have the interactor draw my hair to complete the self-portrait. There’s probably some deep meaning behind this about like, my own personality being completed by others, but really, I just wanted a more creative way to make my hair!

The text on the side, if you hover over it, changes to say “Beautiful!” ideally, that would happen only after the interactor has drawn hair. I don’t know how to do that so…

void setup () {
 
size(500, 430);
background(500, 500, 500);
 
}
 
void draw() {

noStroke();
fill(61, 49, 16);
ellipse(200, 210, 256, 384);
ellipse(200, 160, 257, 194);
ellipse(200, 190, 272, 170);
ellipse(200, 230, 277, 177);
ellipse(200, 260, 279, 197);
ellipse(200, 308, 283, 167);
ellipse(200, 348, 287, 167);
ellipse(200, 388, 287, 167);


// face ?
fill(240, 222, 195);
stroke(0,0,0);
ellipse(200, 180, 190, 275);

stroke(61, 49, 16);
strokeWeight(20);
line(150,315, 90, 230);
line(239,329, 310, 236);

//hair
noStroke();
fill(61, 49, 16);
//ellipse(240, 75, 65, 95);
arc(265, 44, 90, 150, 70, 190);
arc(275, 75, 60, 130, 60, 140);
arc(250, 35, 90, 130, 60, 170);
arc(215, 20, 50, 90, 60, 170);
arc(305, 130, 70, 110, 70, 190);
arc(179, 73, 90, 80, 160, 360);
arc(130, 95, 60, 60, 130, 330);

// neck ?
fill(227, 212, 191);
ellipse(200, 320, 100, 180);

//shirt
fill(98, 52, 158);
ellipse(200, 448, 350, 210);

//shirt
fill(227, 212, 191);
arc(200, 340, 110, 40, 20, 160);

fill(240, 222, 195);
ellipse(200, 240, 130, 170);

// nose
stroke(153, 141, 131);
strokeWeight(1);
arc(210, 213, 20, 30, 0, 70);
arc(185, 213, 20, 30, 100, 170);
arc(198, 230, 18, 10, 20, 170);

fill(0,0,0);
ellipse(187, 228, 2, 4);
ellipse(210, 228, 2, 4);

//lips
noStroke();
fill(207, 127, 127);
arc(198, 260, 48, 30, 10, 170);
arc(207, 264, 25, 15, 180, 350);
arc(190, 264, 25, 15, 180, 350);

stroke(61, 49, 16);
strokeWeight(2);
line(260,150, 240, 144);
line(135,150, 148, 145);
line(215,145, 240, 144);
line(148,145, 176, 144);

fill(250, 245, 250);
strokeWeight(1);
ellipse(160, 164, 32, 17);
ellipse(234, 164, 32, 17);

fill(107, 83, 68);
ellipse(234, 164, 18, 14);
ellipse(161, 164, 18, 14);

fill(0,0,0);
ellipse(234, 164, 11, 10);
ellipse(161, 164, 11, 10);

 

This reading tells the outstanding story of Margaret Hamilton, who was one of the main software engineers of Mission Apollo during the 60s. My takeaways of this reading are 1) the importance of coding. One of my biggest learning in this class is the power of coding, before this class, I had only taken an introduction to programme classes,  but now that I have realized all the things that I can build and that I can manipulate through I have realized that software and coding is one of the most powerful tools in the world and the with just a few lines of coding I have been able to do things that I never thought I was going to be able to do before I came into this class.