Book Reading #31 - Coming of Age in Samoa



Book Author: Margaret Mead

Chapter 10: The Experience and Individuality of the Average Girl  

Summary

In this chapter, Mead talks about the experience and individuality of the average girl. Mead begins by discussing how at a young age, children are exposed to various experiences (like death) that elders seem to consider as normal. There is at a very young age a transformation of individuality relative to one's experience. Mead then talks about multiple girls and their respective stories.

Discussion

  

This chapter was not particularly interesting to read for me. Perhaps I'm having a hard time relating this to our subject. However, as always, Mead does not fail in providing verbose detail about her interaction with the Samoan girls.

Book Reading #30 - Emotional Design

 Book Author: Donald Norman

Chapter 3: Three Levels of Design: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective
Summary

This is the last chapter Dr. Hammond has asked us to read. In this chapter, 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

I understand why Dr. Hammond decided to make the class stop reading the book at chapter 3. Beginnning at chapter 3 we start to see recurring themes. When I read the name of the chapter, I was a bit confused because I thought I had already read, and blogged about this in my previous blog post. Nevertheless, the ideas presented are interesting, and once again he does a good job of illustrating his claims.

Paper Reading #13: SemFeel: a user interface with semantic tactile feedback for mobile touch-screen devices

picture from paper

Comments
Cindy Skach
Angel Narvaez

Reference Information
Title: SemFeel: a user interface with semantic tactile feedback for mobile touch-screen devices

Authors: Koji Yatani University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

              Khai Nhut Truong University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Presentation Venue: UIST 2009: 22nd annual ACM  symposium on User interface software and technology; Date: 2009;
Location: New York, NY, USA

Summary

This paper, presents a prototype for a new kind of vibration system for touch-screen devices. The purpose is to improve on current tactile feedback solutions that implement vibration with either one actuator on the whole phone, or in one specific location by varying intensity and frequency. This paper introduces Semfeel which is a system that implements “motion vibration". The idea is to have five strategically placed vibrators that enables users to distinguish between different patterns. With current touch-screen keyboards that don’t have any vibration feedback, it can be hard to tell what you’re typing without looking at the screen. SemFeel is designed to allow a user to use their device without looking at the screen.

As mentioned before, SemFeel uses 5 different vibrators that can be tuned to 3 different vibration strengths to produce different patterns, such as top to bottom, or in a clockwise circular fashion. The picture below shows the eleven types of patterns. The researchers, after an extensive user study test, found that 83.3 – 93.3% of the time, users can distinguish between the different patterns. The applications the authors suggest for Semfeel range from enabling the Blind to read Braille on touch screens, to improving response time when typing on a touch-screen keyboard.

picture from paper



Discussion

I found this research paper really interesting and appreciated the part where it gave a brief overview of the history behind tactile feedback and the researchers responsible for finding out that tactile feedback could be used to convey rich information content. I also like the whole idea of adding more vibration motors to the phone to give feedback for gestures.  

Book Reading #29 - Opening Skinner's Box



Book Author: Lauren Slater  

Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall

Summary
Lauren Slater relates the story of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus' work has mainly dealt with memory recall, and the idea that memories can be implanted into a person's mind. Slater talks about Loftus' experiments in which she would show movies and then ask subjects questions by suggesting the possibility of an occurrence An example would be asking a person ""Did you recall that man had a beard?". And often the person would agree when in fact it was false.

One event that has shaped Loftus' work is her testimony in the 1990 George Franklin case in which a father was accused by his daughter of murdering her friend twenty years later. Loftus was convinced the daughter could not possibly recall such events twenty years later so vividly. However the jury did not believe her and the man was found guilty. This lead to her publishing in 1993 her findings on the "Lost in the mall" experiments in which she found that 25% of her subjects would recount false events  after they had been implanted into their minds. 25% to her mind, was enough to validate her theory.

Loftus' next focus has been on the idea of repressed memory. This is the idea that someone can completely forget a trauma, store in their  "RAM", and then call it back up on cue years later. She has received criticism from other researchers who believe repressed memory is possible. 

 

 

Discussion

This chapter was interesting and poses important questions about the validity of people's testimonies in court.

When is  a person telling the truth or not. At the end of this chapter I felt the same way as Slater. I agree that something must have happened in Loftus' life that makes her obsessed  with defending people who are wrongly accused. She also has an aversion for  recalled memory.

Book Reading #27 - Emotional Design

 Book Author: Donald Norman

Chapter 2: The Multiple Faces of Emotion and Design

Summary
In this second chapter, 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. here 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 the audience. 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.

Discussion

I though Normans's analysis was interesting and I liked the part where he discussed souvenirs and photographs that aid us in remembering events. I have travelled a lot and don't remember all my trips but images definitely aid me in remembering the event. The idea of incorporating sound into photographs is also an interesting concept.