Fulton’s interview on Thoughtless Acts discusses the idea on how individuals use and design their interaction and experience with the world around them without much conscious thought. Norman’s article talks about affordances and constraints describing affordances as allowing us possibilities and the differences between real and perceived affordances, and affordances and conventions, which are cultural constraints. He also discusses the differences between real, cultural, and logical constraints.
I found Fulton’s interview very interesting. She talks about how we should be designing empathetically, by observing the way we naturally behave and creating design solutions which compliment these actions instead of asking the user what they would like to interact with the world. She discusses the kinds of questions we should be asking such as “Why are the elements in this space and place organized the way they are? How did this situation come to be like that? And what’s the emotion involved?” By thinking about the way we design our reality, we also are learning more about ourselves and our psychology. I think we will be able to learn a lot from how we automatically organize our reality and the kinds of connections we create with physical things, not just with what we think or imagine. The other article also peaked my interest as it made me reflect how we convey our affordances through design and what we want our design to symbolically communicate to the users. It also made me consider how design also communicates our limitations, but also can aid to guide in utilizing objects toward those affordances.