Full Blog: Living With Complexity

Discussion


Norman provides a lot of good examples throughout all the chapters. This is true about all his books. His books are always insightful, and detailed, however I did get bored when reading the chapters.in this particular book.  Perhaps I don't appreciate the material enough. Design of Everyday Things was by far my favourite amongst the Norman books.

I do have to take my hat off to him because his analysis is thorough all the time, and he really went out of his way to explain what complexity was, its causes, and the different types of complexity you have.

Full Blog: Why We Make Mistakes

Discussion

In the conclusion of his book, Hallinan gives some advice on how the readers can apply the ideas presented in his book to their lives. Some of the things he recommends we keep in mind are:

1. Think small
2. Calibration can be taught
3. Creating a written record helps a person fend off the rose-colored-glasses of hindsight bias
4. In some cases it will be important to look for and even expect failure
5. Don’t be set in your ways
6. Slow down
7. Be aware of the anecdote (he references NutriSystem here)
8. Get plenty of sleep
9. Be happy

Hallinan concludes by discussing how money does not eliminate mistakes and is not the currency of life.

I have to say that I enjoyed this book. It was a good change from reading the other Norman books. In particular, I like how the author illustrates all his claims with interesting examples. I especially liked the Conclusion, because Hallinan does a great job of summarizing his ideas.I personally think this book will be beneficial in helping us better understand mistakes we make in our respective fields.

Full Blog: Media Equation

Discussion


Part 3 was also interesting as it discussed a computer’s perceived personality which was a novel idea to me. It was neat to read about how even a simple trait like dominance and submission could have such a profound impact on the user. As the researchers note, these findings also back the findings described in the other two papers about how people respond socially to a computer. Part 1 was quite fun to read. In particular about how people would give intimate comments about computers.  I really enjoyed reading about the studies described and how weird we can sometimes be when presented in front of a computers.

I thought the paper in Part 2 was a good paper to read after the one in part 1.It went in further detail and explored the studies of part 1. Doing this validated what we read in the first part. In hindsight, it is simple to interact with a computer the way we do with people. However, some people can get carried away while interacting with their computers, and in that case I believe that person is exagerating.

Full Blog: Things that Make Us Smart

Discussion

This was another assignment on a Norman book. I thought I was going to find the same recurring themes as in Design of Everyday Things, however I did find some interesting points developped in this book. Thanks to Norman, I feel I have learned some more useful tools that I'll definetely be trying out the next I have to work on some design project.

Full Blog: Coming of Age in Samoa



Author: Margaret Mead

Book: Coming of Age in Samoa

Summary

In this book, the author starts by giving us the historical and sociological context of her work. She then states the general state of the american youth in the United States in the post first World War era. She evokes the overall sense of unease, and the difficulty of youth in their transition through adolescence. Attempting to understand the origins of the problems, she offeres us her anthropological background, and the anthropological method which is the study of another less complex civilization to extrapolate an explanation. The civilization she decides to study are the Samoan people. In  particular the samoan adolescent girl.

She proposes to explore two main questions:

• Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization?
• Under differenct conditions does adolescence present a different  picture?

From then, she gives a detailed description, about her experience in Samoa, and what conclusions she draws from that experience.
The summaries of the chapters of the book can be found in my previous blog entries.  At end, she answers the questions she posed at the beginning, and we can draw from her answers, that adolescence does differ based on location, culture, and morals.

Discussion

I felt this was good exposure to an ethnographic work. When reading Mead's book, one clearly sees that she put a lot of thought into her methodology, and study approach. This reflects in the amount of detail that can be found in the book when it comes to the Samoan people. I admit I'm usually for less description with books, but given that it's part of an ethnography, I can understand the need to do a thorough study. The only thing I did not appreciate, nor understand, was the need to go into details with Samoan sex practices. That's a little invasive in my opinion. Apart from that, I'm not sure why this book invited a lot of criticism. In the context of HCI, the only thing I think Mead teaches us, is that as program designers, we sometimes need to take a step back and consider another perspective in order to understand the way we do things.

Full Blog: Emotional Design

Book Author: Donald Norman

Summary:

In chapter 1, Norman discusses why attractive things are more efficient. Emotions help a person make decisions and when that person is happy, it increases thought processes and encourages creative thinking. He then goes on to explain how attractive design allows for a more enjoyable experience and helps people figure things out.

Norman also discusses the three levels of processing:

• visceral (the automatic layer),
•  behavioral (everyday behavior layer)
• reflective (contemplative layer).

He then discusses how the three levels interact with each other and how they relate to focus and creativity. 

In chapter 2, Norman talks about different levels of viewing a design:

• visceral design is about the initial impact of a product, about its appearance, touch and feel.
• the behavioural level is about use, about experience with a product. As expected if a system is easy to use and effective, the outcome of this experience determines our positive attitude towards it.
• reflective level:  where consciousness and the highest levels of feeling, emotions and cognition reside. This is where the interaction between product and user is important and the most vulnerable to variability.

Defining the interaction between the three levels is complex. Norman maps the levels as follows.

 visceral design-> appearance
behavioral design-> the pleasure and effectiveness of use
reflective design-> self-image, personal satisfaction, memories

He then gives the example of video games and proposes remaking the video game to cater to wider audiences rather than young males. This would increase buyers. He proposes changes such as making the controllers look more feminine, easy to use, and with more useful content. He also thinks the video game could be used in a kitchen as a cooking aid, or in the living room as a reference manual, or for students as a source of simulation, experiments, and useful information.
He then talks about how objects evoke memories, like pictures or souvenirs, and then talks about the feelings of self. Feeling of self is culturally specific and hence difficult to consider in a design. He finally talks abou the personality of products, and the importance of corporations in giving customers a sense of involvement, importance.

In chapter 3, Norman discusses the three levels of design. As mentioned in the previous chapter, we can resume them as the following:

visceral design is about the initial impact of a product, about its appearance, touch and feel.

the behavioural level is about use, about experience with a product. As expected if a system is easy to use and effective, the outcome of this experience determines our positive attitude towards it.

reflective level:  where consciousness and the highest levels of feeling, emotions and cognition reside. here is where the interaction between product and user is important and the most vulnerable to variability.

Norman also talks about the the process of design by committee and the process of design by the individual.

Discussion:

This was the second title by Donald Norman assigned as reading material for the class. Per instruction by Dr. Hammond, we stopped reading the book at chapter 3. The reason being that by that point we could figure the main points he was trying to convey. The rest of the book probably had more examples and illustrations of his concepts.  Through an eagle eye, Norman does a good job explaining to us the challenges a designer faces with respect to emotion. He also does a great job walking us through some of the processes that go on when a person is faced with a product. The ideas presented are interesting, and once again, just like in Design of Everyday Things, Norman is effective in illustrating his claims.

 

Full Blog: Obedience to Authority

Book Author: Stanley Milgram

summary:
In chapter 1, Milgram introduced us to why the issue of obedience was important to study. His conclusion was that a dilemma faces anyone who enters into an agreement to be part of a system. When the system requires them to do something with which they disagree, they must either be loyal to their moral standards or loyal to the system.

In chapter 2, Milgram explained the set up of his study.

In chapter 3,  he asked psychological professionals what they thought a person would do when confronted with his experiment. Most thought that people would not agree to do what he would ask.

In chapter 4 he described the basic series of experiments in which the closeness of the "victim" would be manipulated.

In chapter 5 he gave us detailed information about how particular people behaved in a stressful situation, and the reasons they gave for their behavior. These first 5 chapters are the heart of the book.

Chapters 6, 8, and 9 are additional variations on the study.

Chapter 7 contains more interviews with subjects.

Chapters 10 through 12 contain Milgram's attempt to explain why obedience to authority has such a strong hold on our behavior. He analyzes the cognitive as well as emotional aspect.
These lead to his establishing of the agentic state, the psychological state the obedient subject is in when he or she is obeying authority.

In the  final chapter Milgram relates his findings in comparison to the real world and discusses the Vietnam War. He attempts to correlate obedience in the war to the obedience he observed in the lab.

discussion:

Having read about Milgram's experiment in "Opening Skinner's box" by Lauren Slater, I thought I had a good overall understanding of his experiments. This book taught me that his experiments were quite involved, and that they included  number of quantitative observations. Always surprising to read, though, is the reaction of participants to his experiments. I always felt I knew the outcome of his experiments, but would then be proven wrong. No participant ever questioned the procedure outlined by Milgram, even after he gave them  a chance to ask questions.


After reaching the 75-volt level, they were confronted with their fellow participant's first sign of pain, and 10% of them responded to this experession of discomfort by speaking to the experimenter. By 150 volts, 19 (47.5%) participants had at least checked with the experimenter about the experimental procedure. By 270 volts, all (100%) of the participants had at least checked with the experimenter about the procedure. It was observed of the people that did not comply with the experimenter it was hard to be deviant of the instructions the longer they followed directions.

Regardless of what we think about Milgram's experiments, it's undeniable that he has made us reconsider what we think we know about human behaviour, free will, and obedience to authority.



Full blog: Opening Skinners Box



Summary

This book, by Lauren Slater, details ten of some of the most important psychological experiments of this past century that have caused us to rethink about how the human mind and human behavior works. She narrates the stories of the researchers in question and their work. The researchers she describes are:

• B. F. Skinner: Skinner experimented with rats and conditioning, and found that the mind is extremely receptive to rewards, which strengthen conditioning, and that the mind is not as receptive to punishment.
• Stanley Milgram: Milgram designed an experiment where the participant was told to shock another participant up until the point where the shock would be "lethal", and found that 65% of participants would continue administering shocks to the other participant despite their better judgement. His experiments served to illustrate human's obedience to authority.
• David Rosenhan: Rosenhan and some helpers admitted themselves into mental hospitals saying that they were hearing a voice that said "thud". They found that even though they were perfectly sane, and said so after being admitted, they still would be kept in the hospital for a long time, and psychologists would swear that they were psychotic. This resulted in the questionning on psychiatric diagnosis' validity .
• John Darley and Bibb Latane: Darley and Latane, through their experiments, found that when a crisis happened and someone needed help, if a bystander perceived there were lots of other people around, would not help. These people would wait a long time, and would never truly decide on whether to help or not. But, when they thought they were the only person there to help, they would feel compelled to help.  
• Leon Festinger: Festinger studied the way that people changed their ideas and beliefs based on their actions, primarily by studying the way that cult members reacted whenever the "day of judgement" and the end of the world did not come as they had predicted.
• Harry Harlow: Harlow studied how infant monkeys came to be attached to a fake "mother" that had soft cloths on it, versus a mother that was hard and metal but provided food. He found that love does not have to do with providing resources and food.
• Bruce Alexander: In order to study the nature of addiction, Alexander placed some rats in a nice, clean environment, and others in a confined environment, and gave each of the rats water laced with morphine, and some regular water. He found that the rats in the bad conditions liked the morphine, while the rats with the nice environment didn't like the morphine, suggesting that addiction is not a physical dependency but instead a result one's environment.
• Elizabeth Loftus: Loftus showed that memories of our past quickly disintegrate and that we can never trust them. She helped participants in her experiments "remember" fake memories of being lost in the mall, and the participants were almost always sure that they had remembered this fake memory.
• Eric Kandel: Kandel showed that memory is strengthened by increasing the strength of connections between neurons, and that a specific substance called CREB helps that strengthening.
• Antonio Moniz: Moniz pioneered the practice of brain surgery, specifically the lobotomy, in order to treat patients that had depression or psychosis. A lot of his techniques are still used today.

Discussion

I really appreciate the author's personal touch and perspective on all of these experiments. It made reading the book that much more interesting. Usually, these types of works are presented in a more formal, detailed, scientific, and boring fashion. Slater makes the experiments easy to understand for the average person.
I also liked that she tried some of the experiments on her own. I don't know if I would have the guts to perform some of the experiments myself like admitting myself in a mental institution and seeing if I would be diagnosed correctly.



Full Blog: Design of Every Day Things

Summary

The Design of Everyday Things was written in 1988 by Donald Norman to point out the many errors in product design of his time, and to offer suggestions on how to eliminate these errors and improve the collective user experience. Most of the book talks about how faulty design is a real problem, and that it is all around us everyday. Through numerous anecdotes - some humorous, others grave - he recounts experiences where good and bad design made a significant impact on the user experience. One of the author's purposes is to train the reader to observe and recognize good and bad design on their own, and to understand that problems they have with everyday products are almost always not their own fault, but rather the fault of the designers of the product. The remainder of the book is dedicated to offering suggestions on how to improve design. Norman proposes a number of design principles such as conceptual models and mapping, feedback, and constraints and affordances that can be worked into the design of everyday objects to make them easier to use.

Discussion

 I liked that the author didn't simply point out product flaws, but rather offered suggestions for improving them. Norman at times appears to assume that people are generally very inept and must be protected from themselves. I think a product's success depends not only on the designer but also on the manufacturer, the seller, and the user. Norman, however, claims that we should all cast the blame at the designer. Admittedly, in many of the cases described in the book, the designer was at fault. And yes, designing by Norman's prescribed principles can very likely lead to better products. But to suggest that the designer is always solely responsible for the success and usability of a product is quite a stretch indeed.