Chunk5

The article "7 Principles of Effective Icon Design" written by Sean Hodge gives me lots of thooughts in regard to creating icons that work well together and fit seamlessly within our design.

"If you need to draw several icons, you need to think over images for the whole sets of icons before proceeding with illustrating activities."

When designing a set of icons, designers should consider approaching icon design holistically. Designers should have a rough blueprint of the theme, outlook and style of the set of icons at the beginning of design, ensuring icons can be aesthetically appreciated and work together harmoniously. Usually, designers overly focus on one signle icon, ignoring that the whole set of icons should be consistent in style. Although each icon needs to differ from surrounding ones, the set of icons tend to work as a group so that they must be sonsistent.

"There are times when the aesthetic interest of the icon may be worth loosing some of its iconic impact."

I am wondering where this situation may occur. Decorative icons can be used on children's websites or children's educational software. Children usually have a short span of attention, colorful, lovely icons can let them stay for a longer time. I think children do not need to quickly recognize what the icon is. Sometimes they click on certain icons without knowing what it is and what the destination is, only for the reason that they love those attractive icons. Those icons match children's characteristics and arouse their interest. Under this circumstances, loss of quick recognition of symbols is worth the added decoration.

Chunk4

"Whether or not the world should have diversity, it does."

The world does need diversity. Diversity satisfies individuals' variable tastes. For example, when designing presentations, someone prefer to use PowerPoint while others enjoy prezi. Distinguished features of the two presentation tools match diverse demands of different groups of people. Someone is attraced by the "zoom in and zoom out" function of prezi whereas others love those beautiful templates provided by PowerPoint. Then, diversity promotes development of designs. There are so many related products in one domain. For example, elluminate and wimba are two leading web conferencing systems used in educational context. What is the weapon the designers use to compete and win the market? They should make continual development to improve every aspect of the product.

"and the question remains as to how individual designs come to be distinguished from related designs."

The problem comes out that how can one design be outstanding from other similar designs. We should look hard enough at the imperfections of related designs, avoid those imperfections and make improvements in our new design. For instance, laptops and cell phones can sometime function as part of audience response system. How can those devices outweight the benefits of clickers that are more popularized in ARS? Designers should detect shortcomings, limitations of clickers and investigate whether those imperfections can be avoided or improved with the use of laptops, cell phones.

Reference

Petroski, H. (1992). The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Vintage Books.

Chunk3

"The devices always come with instruction manuals, often big, thick, heavy ones, but these manuals are neither explanatory not intelligible."

The new generation of intelligient devices usually have complex features. People should clearly know how to operate it before actually using it. Instruction manuals of devices meet this demands of first-time users. Unfortunately, most instruction manuals are poorly designed. They are so big, thick and heavy that some people are even unwilling to open it, let alone carefully reading it. Most users prefer to know a brief introduction of a device's funtionality, usability, problems may occur and corresponding solutions rather than profound theory of how a device works. Not everyone wants to become a professional of such devices. Designers should consider offering alternative manuals for users, including small, thin, light ones that contain simple content and can be easily understood.

"Think of the brain as having three levels of processing: visceral, behaviroral and reflective."

Norman mentioned the three things as the levels of design in another book. I wonder whether they can also be applied to present levels of learning. Visceral (It is what nature does): abilities which people are born with. Behaviroal: people learn exsiting knowledge and apply what they learn to solve problems in daily life. Reflective: it is the level of creating new knowledge. It is based on continual practise in the behaviroal level. I am not sure whether I correctly interpret the three levels in this way. 

Reference

Norman, D. (2005). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Perseus Books Group.
Norman, D. (2007). The Design of Future Things. Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books.