The Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman

I really enjoyed this reading, and especially found the examples of badly designed objects quite amusing. Bad design choices are everywhere and can be really frustrating, such as the automatic door in front of D2. I agree with Norman that engineering has to consider human responses and not the ones of an ideal, rationally acting user. As I reflected more upon this, I began to realize there are endless factors that affect human responses, such as experience with particular technologies, cultural background, gender, or even time of the day and mood. How can human centered design account for all these things? Perhaps an all-considerate design is not possible, because  no matter how good it is, it is in human nature to be different from each other and to interact in different ways. A possible resolution could be to have different designs which are differentiated by consumer groups. Just hypothetically, I am imagining something like a piano that has adapted key sizes for humans with different sized hands (it is more difficult for children to play on the piano because the keys are so far apart compared to their hand size).

The Art of Interactive Design Chris Crawford

I found this reading to be highly thought provoking. I have never thought deeply about how interactivity is defined, even as an IM minor. I find the listen, think, speak metaphor that Crawford described very fitting, because interaction always involves multiple sides that act in response to each other. It is interesting that he mentions the example of books and movies being very low on the interactivity scale, and I agree that they are usually not. However, there are some exceptions which show that it is not the medium in itself but the way one decides to use the medium that determines its level of interactivity. The medium limits the possible actions one can take, but one can find creative ways of bypassing these. An example would be “choose your own adventure” type books, where the reader chooses the path of the story by selecting between different page numbers. In that case, the book can “listen” to the reader’s choice and respond to that choice by “speaking” different storylines. Even some movies nowadays are truly interactive, such as Bandersnatch on Netflix. As new technologies emerge, this might open up more possibilities for media that are traditionally non-interactive to become more so. I wonder how this might happen to paintings, music, etc. While I cannot imagine how this could be implemented, I am sure that it is somehow possible.