Author: Ziying Wang

To demonstrate his fondness for enchanted objects, David Rose says that he loves the ordinary things to be featured with extraordinary functions. He mentions that he doesn’t like apps, instead, he wants the objects that apps work on to obtain these functions within itself so that the user doesn’t need to check apps for them.

In my opinion, this perspective towards apps is a bit narrow. Sometimes it’s actually a more effective way to check on information. For example, when your grandma asks you is it going to rain today, you don’t need to hop to the front door and check out the umbrella’s LED. Also, the mobile phone is an assembly of apps, we can effectively gather the pieces of information we want. About the bus stop project he is working on for San Francisco, it is indeed effective for people to check out bus location at the bus stop, but we cannot ignore the update of this information on our cellphones, lots of users count on that to plan their time effectively.

That’s why I think we should still embrace the terminal world where the screen is a major part of our lives, but also adding enchanted objects to our lives.

Power socket in NYU Shanghai study room:

I enjoy NYU Shanghai’s study rooms but their power sockets are never in a good state. The socket is so loose that whenever you plug your power pug in, it falls out immediately. Therefore, I make use of the garbage bin inside each study room, along with my folder, to create a surface where I can hold my power plug and it can eventually charge my devices.

Tape phone holder to film me cooking (triangular shape):

During this year’s Spring Festival, I decided to vlog the whole process. After filming everyone else’s cooking, I realized that I cannot film myself prepping my course since I forgot to bring my stabilizer back to home, therefore, I took some tape and taped out a triangular phone stabilizer on the cupboard door above my head when I’m prepping my salad, I photoshopped this model to demonstrate the phone stand I designed. It holds the phone steadily without blocking the buttons or lens. I, therefore, obtained clip shots like this:

Plugboard inside the dorm:

This is the plugboard I use in the dorm, my bed is a bunk design with a desk underneath the bed, the only power sockets are on the same level with my desk so I can’t charge my devices when I’m using them on the bed. Therefore I tied a rope through a plugboard and fixed it to the pillar of my bed. With this, I can charge my devices on the bed and those on the desk at the same time.

The article “Thoughtless Act” brings up an idea I’ve always been ignoring in the past ———observation. Before we design anything, we should observe the scenario, observe the environment our design will be functioning in, observe how people would interact with our design and observe the original prototype. I’m attracted to the idea Jane Fulton Suri brings up about pictures and captions. We are too used to analyze pictures by reading their captions, and when they are without captions, just like what this article is presenting us with, people start to give them more thoughts, this blank caption triggers imagination simply through observing the image. This is just like real life where nothing is captioned, Jane is suggesting that we should observe more in real life and get inspired.

In Affordances, Conventions and Design, Donald A. Norman tries to clarify real affordance and perceived affordance. The former is from a designer or a professional’s perspective, whether this design actually possesses the function. The latter is how the user perceives this design, whether they can sense the functions designers add to the product. What really matters to a product is always the perceived affordance, which is also linked to the design cycle’s user experiences. Instead of focusing on technological and professional range, nowadays’ designs are more user-focused and the designers are considering in what way their designs can improve the users’ daily lives. That’s why considering perceived affordances is rather important.

Design is defined as an intentional process of creating new things and methods. But through the reading, I realized that not all design requires specific planning for the design thinking process, instead, we are doing it naturally for some intentions. For example, when holding a cup of hot water, we try to use only two fingers to pinch the top of the cup instead of using two hands to cup the cup. Therefore, I regard design as something included in everyone’s life, not just creations by artists.

Wicked problems are difficult and impossible to solve because of the incompleteness, contradictory and changing requirements are often difficult to identify. There is never a final design model for every creation, phones are always evolving and customers are always longing for the latest model. This is because a design can never satisfy all our needs at the same time, that’s also why there isn’t a fixed model for the design cycle as it changes regarding the purpose it serves.

In the reading, Liz Sanders suggests that nowadays the focus on the mind map is on the user-centered design zone while in the past design was something professional and only focusing on technology. This indicates that designs are becoming human-need focused.