Week 3 Readings

Designing Gestural Interfaces and Tap is the New Click (video) – Dan Saffer

These are complementary introductions to gestural interfaces, their current uses and the considerations that go into their design. There is a huge amount of information here – lots to think about. I am intrigued by the idea of finding the most natural way to match people’s natural behavior to the technology –enabling gesture. It reminds me a bit of the notion of distributed cognition—how, for example, a calculator functions as an extension of the human brain to offload certain mental tasks and free up mental resources for tasks that cannot be automated. In the same way, gesture might enable technology that would seamlessly enhance and extend physical functioning. The idea of potentially using the entire human body as the tool for enabling technology is so interesting and opens up a huge world of possibility.


What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story – John Sutherland

Oy. I hate games. I have never in my life played a computer game except when I had to play around with Second Life for an ECT assignment. My daughter used to love Sims, and she would sometimes ask me to sit and do it with her, and I just went into a coma I found it so boring. I literally could not make myself pay attention to it. These fantasy worlds, especially the ones featuring kill-or-be-killed scenarios are just immensely boring and irritating to me. They’re for the adolescent boy aged 6-96.

Maybe if a game were something set in the world I live in, I would be interested. I have in mind a Dilbert-inspired game in which the story and all it entails – protagonist, inciting incident, risk, reversal, more risk, more reversal, character-revealing choices, triumphant or disastrous ending—was built around the absurdities of the work world. An “Office”-like game – that would be interesting to me, one in which I would get to plot against an irrational, semi-competent, passive-aggressive boss like the one I actually have. This is actually a good idea – to use a game format to teach people how to deal with workplace situations/conflicts and how different choices lead to different results—questions like “Should I go to HR about this or just ignore it or find a way to deal with it head-on? “ Hmmm…..


The Design of Everyday Things – Norman—Chapter 2

An elaboration of the psychology of people who tend to blame themselves when they have trouble operating machines or devices due to poor design. He reiterates the principles of good design:
• Visibility—the user can easily tell what to do, how to effect a result and where to start
• A good conceptual model – one that is logical, consistent and easy to understand
• Good mappings – strong, logical relationships between actions and results, controls and their effects, the system state and what is visible
• Feedback – the user receives feedback so he knows what the system is doing

The story about the airplane was a sobering reminder of just how high the stakes are in product design.