“No wonder they call it a circle—it is so round! Notice how the inside comes precisely to the line and not one whit farther. And how the outside can’t possibly get in. No corners is one of the principle things about a circle. An oval has no corners, too, but they are not nearly as no corners as a circle has. Circles are nice because we can go around in them. Hardly anybody ever goes around in squares. Ever single place on the outside of a circle is the same distance from the centre as every other place. You can’t say that about a parallelepiped.” — Colonel Stoopnagle
Fjord, UCL, UCLIC — Rebecca Cottrell on October 25, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I’ve missed a week or two.
Apart from escalators, the course workload has been steadily increasing, and I’ve had to keep up with both that and my internship at Fjord. I’m learning (and reading) a lot.
I’ve had a mental list of things to blog about, but I haven’t got ’round to it. I am, of course, keeping up with Twitter, as 140 characters don’t require much commitment, and it’s perfect for the bite-sized snacks of procrastination between essay points.
If I had more time, and wasn’t merely procrastinating from working on my doors essay, I’d write a nice long post including the points below, crafted into beautiful paragraphs. As it stands, you have to make do with bullet points. I’m sorry.
Did you know doors are responsible for 300,000 injuries per year in the US? I didn’t. They are everywhere in the built environment, yet given hardly any thought — not much attention is paid to them even in the human factors and ergonomics field.
An ergonomist will argue that “walking is a series of controlled falls”.
Field studies, task analysis, physical ergonomics, usability evaluation methods, and the vast number of methods surrounding human-computer interaction design. Some of the things I’m learning about. This perfectly complements the graphic communication background from Reading. I am swinging between being relieved and contented with my design background, and being deeply envious of the cognitive psychologists.
I’m working on a design project with the paraphrased theme: design something to make someone want to take a walk. It is fun. Navigating group dynamics is less fun.
I think I’m going to take the option modules Affective Interaction and Organisational Informatics next term. I’m quite looking forward to Applied Cognitive Science. In a masochistic way.
I don’t know what I’m going to do my MSc thesis on. I really don’t know. I don’t want to get over-excited about a topic that isn’t feasible.
… I’m kinda tempted to do a PhD. (Uh oh.)
If I did, I’d want to do the PhD in the US. Maybe.
I am getting ahead of myself, as usual. But I am really happy.
This term I’m taking three modules: Usability Evaluation Methods, Physical Ergonomics 1, and Design Practice.
I’m finding that they support and feed into each other well. Anthropometry and ergonomics are helping to drive home the point that people are different, and they have different needs which must be met.
User-centred design is about truly understanding what people want, what needs they have, and (really) understanding that your needs are not the same as the needs of others. Then, of course, designing.
Design —> Prototype —> Evaluate (repeat)
UEM is, so far, an interesting look at how usability practitioners evaluate websites.
Design practice is a highly-compressed interaction design module. This morning we were given an overview of interaction design paradigms and their evolution: the command line, Xerox PARC GUI, touch screen interfaces, and an overview of some recent interaction paradigm experiments: Microsoft Surface, LucidTouch, SOAP. MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media group seeks “a seamless coupling of bits and atoms by giving physical form to digital information and computation”. There’s lots of research and experimentation in this area. Exciting.
In the afternoon we looked at field studies and ethnography, and did a practice diary study — from what I can tell so far, a useful method for scoping out a problem space. The aim of a diary study is to identify problems.
For all of this, I have tons and tons of stuff to read. UCL is giving great support with this, with entire books full of papers and lecture slides. I also really like PDFs and ACM Digital Library.
