2/22/07 - Right Brain Reading

Observations from this week's reading "A Whole New Mind":
Premium for High Concept Left Brainers:
Pink states that his “offshore” viewpoint doesn’t signal the end of L-Directed thinkers, it just puts a premium on high concept L-Directed thinkers.

I'm not sure I agree with that.

Going by the rules of supply and demand, from Pink's reasoning the demand for L-Directed thinkers is going to reduce, so to make it as one of the dwindling numbers, you will need to have distinguishing characteristics, like high concept thinking.

Is it a premium to have skills that are going to be requisite to be employed?

I wouldn't think so.

Humans performing repetitive factory floor jobs have been taken over by robots. The few human jobs left are for awkward tasks or stages where human observation are required (or cheaper than robots). Are the few factory workers left considered "premium" or "lucky"?

America is the Right Side and Asia is the Left Side?
There has been a lot of discussion in the last decade of outsourcing and how America will deal with it. Pink’s description seems to indicate that America will change itself to be a power-base of creative thinkers that then outsource the execution of their ideas to Asia where they will cheaply be realized.

Where does the average worker fit into that?

I realize that this globalization and outsourcing from America has happened in cycles before (from agriculture to industrial to electronic and conceptual) but can a country be predominately R-Directed thinking?

I suppose the L-Thinkers will move onto the next “Age” as they have always done.

In the “Technology Age” when Japan started to outstrip America in production of electronics, many American’s comforted themselves by saying that America is where the idea’s come from, its ok that someone else is producing them cheaper. And to a certain degree, they were right. We just moved on to the next "age".

The latest “outsourcing” could be seen as a continuation of that cycle.

2/15/07 - Everyday Thing: Book

Object: A Book

Object Example:
“The Design of Everyday Things” - Norman

Design Flaw:
The biggest design flaw that I can think of is the function of the book is very dependent on cultural experience.

• You need to know the language to orient the book up and down


• You need to know the culture to know if the book should be read left to right, front to back


• On the outside there are no clear instructions that you should open the book to read.
  

Why it works:
Affordances:
Paper – The book is constructed of paper whose primary property is to be flexible. Flexible items invite bending, flipping, and “TURNING”.

Visually:

• If the user does know the cultural markers (language/reading model), then the use of the book is very intuitive.


• It follows the standards used by many other items in the culture (all printed material).
  The design of the front cover (large inviting graphics and text) orients the user to begin there.
• In the case of the example “The Design of Everyday Things,” based on the visual weight and hierarchy of the cover design it must be assumed that the importance of the cover design elements are from most to least:
• Title
• Tom Peter’s quote
• 100,000 copies sold
• Author Name
• Author’s previous books


• The Table of Content correctly maps to the use of page numbering.
• The consistent use of font styles orients the user to chapter titles, emphasized words
• Copy correctly notes to diagrams via an easy to understand numbering system.
  

Mappings:

• The Cover tells us pertinent information that maps to content contained inside Story summary Author and author’s previous books
• i.e – Expectations are set at the cover that are fulfilled inside.
  

Constraints:

• The binding on the left hand side forces the user to open the read the book properly (if the book is being held in the proper position)
• The amount of content are large contributors to the size of the book (font size – which is set by legibility standards and page size – set by publishing standards determine the number of pages)

Feedback:
Once user begins to read the copy and then comes to the end of a page, when the user takes the action to “turn the page” the feedback that they have taken the correct action is finding that the copy continues on as expected on the next page.

Summary of 2/1/07

To give the class context into the Web 2.0 project, Dr. Foreman had students from last year's 830 class come in and present thier project summaries.

Jen: Podcasting
She wanted to find out :
Podcast Community
- What content is provided?
- How does the community administer/rate/ spotlight content?

Modularizing Podcasts:
- How does it add cast to the web?

She ended up using her class to related content about how Podcasts are created in the hopes of providing a tool to her fellow instructors.

Azure: Flickr
Her demo movie showed how to:
- Create and account
- Create Contacts
- Link to Blogs
- Link to RSS feeds

Moura: Vblogs
Her website is twopointoh.pbwiki.com

She showed examples of:
Feedburner
You Tube
Blip TV
as avenues to provide video content to the web.

She went over basic interface guidelines on the best way to promote your Vbogs.