Thoughtless Act: explores the concepts that everyone is a designer in their day to day activities and interactions. The professional designer also seeks inspirations from day-to-day activities. From reading this I have understood that every design is made with the aim to make our life easier and better. As we’ve discussed in class our mind can handle a limited amount of cognitive load, and thinking about these seemingly small thoughtless acts only increases that load. Hence we can answer the author’s question “what motivates thoughtless behavior? “, by linking it to human’s nature which favors reducing mental effort in order to create space for other problems and thoughts. I agree that sometimes “simple is better”. Simple objects and simple solutions don’t require time and extra effort to understand, similar to warming hands on a mug doesn’t require processing thoughts. After reading the article I have been thinking about if there’s a relation between daily routines and thoughtless acts.
Affordance Convention and Design: this piece by Donald Norman discussed the relationship between the appearance of a device and clues requires for its operation. Norman argues understanding how to operate a novel device has three dimensions: formulating appropriate conceptual models, constraints and affordances. He also claimes affordance hasn’t been completely understood by the design community. I think the subtle difference between perceived affordance and real affordance is very essential in the design process. Perceived affordance has a priority over real affordances because at the end of the day in designed products what matters more is what the user perceives to be possible. As examples, Norman mentions a display screen that doesn’t have touch-sensitivity but “affords touching” and screens that “affords clicking”. He argues designing a target button on the later screen is a perceived affordance because it only provides a visual aid for users who want to click. Whereas defining “clickable” regions is a real affordance because it allows the designer to increase or decrease the affordance region.
Physical constraints are related to real affordances and logical constraints are valuable in guiding behavior. The final goal of any design should be to make affordances and constraints as visually clear and intuitive as possible.