You are currently browsing Dasen's articles.
When we look into the design of these portable video game consoles, we can easily identify their similarities. Take the most two popular at present handheld game consoles – Nintendo DS Lite and Sony PSP for example. They both constructed in a brick-like shape, with LCD screen in the middle, direction keys (D-pad) on the left and other buttons on the right. They also have two shoulder buttons on the top of the console. Why they both look like this? It has to be the reason of the first modern game-pad – the controller of Nintendo’s Famicom. If we take a look at the Famicom’s controller, we can see there are the cross-shaped D-Pad on the left and the ‘B’, ‘A’ button on the right side.
Famicom controllers
Sony PSP-1000
The layout design of such game-pad was possibly come with the experience of the way a person holds and reads a book. Book is a kind of traditional things people will carry around and read. When people read books, they will open the book with both hands and give pressure on both thumbs to against the force from the spine of the book. In the meanwhile they will also use their other 8 fingers to support the book against the gravity. In a game pad, you will use you’re your thumbs to press the D-pad and buttons, and use other fingers to hold the pad. The thumb is giving pressure to the pad and the other fingers are fighting with the gravity from the weight of the pad.
How about shoulder keys? When you read a book, sometime you will insert your forefingers in between previous pages to “mark” that particular page so that you can go back and forth anytime without remembering the pervious page number. That is also very similar to what you will do when you use the forefingers to hit the shoulder keys in a game controller.
The text of the book is in-between your two thumbs while you are holding your book and reading. Same thing happens while you are holding a modern handheld portable game console. You see contents through the LCD screen in the middle of your two thumbs.
To sum up, the interaction of a Game pad has a lot of similarities with the interaction of a traditional paper book. It is highly possible that the idea of the game pad layout design was come from the experience of a person reading a book.
During today’s class we had a pretty nice debate and “vote” about who the “user” is when we are conducting a User Research. Surprisingly the result was pretty close. I originally voted for Recipient, but after I re-think this question, I may have been mixing the concept of User Research and User Testing.
So now my point change to: When we do User Research, we try to find addressees. When we do User Testing, the subjects are Recipients.
When we talk about Recipient, we mean a person in the reality that uses the stuff. On the other hand, Addressee means the certain group of people whom the designer intended to design the stuff for.
When we do User Research, our goal is to define our user(addressee) profile and needs, and use the result to guide our design. Therefore, we would like to look for addressees that match our intentional user profile and study them. Though the people we study is still a real people in reality and he/she may or may not used the product before, we couldn’t say he/she is recipient because we call them up in the premise(or intention) of defining our addressee.
However when we do User Testing, we would like to look for the real users and gather the information of how they think of the product. In this case since the users are from reality and there is no guarantee of whether they match our addressee or not, I would like to name these users Recipients. Sometimes it would be even better if these Recipients don’t fully match our intentional addressee because then we can study what causes the differences and we may refine our addressees.
Well, no matter how I separated the User Research and User Testing above, the reality is these two processes are no longer have clear borders to each other. We often mix these two processes into one and do them repeatedly during the whole design period. Maybe the mixing of Recipient and Addressee in Design will be more and more acceptable?
Light Novel is a new word that has been introduced into the traditional ACG (Anime, Comic and Game) culture in Japan. It is the novel with Anime- or Manga-style illustrations, and it is becoming very popular in Japan, China, and over the East-Asian countries.
Light Novel is a good example of combining two different “languages” and it breaks a normal syntagm of traditional ACG culture. No matter Anime, Comic or Game, they are all in the visual language. Though they may contain text, the major perception of the audience is still going through graphics and images. People don’t need to read text to understand what’s going on. They can just get the meaning by static or moving images. However, Light Novel is different. It is a novel that mainly written in text. So why can this new kind of text-majority media be successfully introduced to the visual-constructed world of ACG?
First, Light Novel is not a pure novel because it contains illustrations of the characters and some event scenes in the novel. While reading the Light Novels, reader can easily draw pictures in their head about what is happening in the story. They can understand the characters more because of the illustrations in front of the book and in between of pages. It is more lively than the traditional novel and it is also more interesting to the readers.
Second, it is written in the language that people in ACG culture know well with. Here the word “language” is referring to the real text language. The language that used in Light Novel is fairly easy to understand and it is in an “anime” or “manga” style. Sometimes the language in the light novel can be directly transformed into screen scripts. And that makes readers feel like they are watching an animation or comic book.
Third, text has its own advantage compare to graphics and images. Text leaves the room of imagination as well as can be used to describe details that image cannot. For example, text can describe how a person looks and how he thinks in mind. But Animes cannot always tell how and what the character thinks on the screen.
Light Novel has risen a very large group of young audience in Japan who disliked text and novel in the past. It is a perfect organic combination of Comic/Anime and Novel. In the past most Animes were originally from Comics. But now more and more Animes are coming from Light Novels. It definitely opened a new era called ACGN.
Here are some reflections (and little conclusion) after reading the reply from Jeff on my post “How can a subjective criticism be persuasive?“.
Opinion- mostly non-structured and non-self-critical. It’s a personal expression based on our real-time reactions. Why can’t most of the Amazon reviews be critique? Because they are just opinions.
Subjective – opposite to objective, not rely on external data.
Judgement – a personal point of view but is “reflective, self-critical, experienced, systematic, and grounded in experience”. Make senses of personal experience.
Interaction Design – is a field that the complexity cannot be modeled, and data itself is not sufficient for decision-making.
Critique- can include objective approach outcomes, but not determine by them. It is the interpretation from substantial experience practicing judgment.
Some thoughts:
- By mentioning about the food in baseball park and fashion design examples, were you suggesting that BECAUSE the situation is becoming too complex THAT we start to use a non-objective way?
- When we do critique, we refer to (or base on) our own experience and compare the object to other similar objects in our knowledge or experience, and make our judgement.
- We can still use objective approach for our decision-making. But that is only a supplemental approach. The process and result will finally transform into our experience and provide support for our future decision-making.
- It was right that we are not born with the skill of critique and judgement. I used to only love to listen what else say and to be too lazy to generate my own point of view. But now i know that we have to build up our own minds, practice the critique skill and our judgement skill, in order to make better decision when we are doing design in the future.
In the guide line sent out yesterday, it mentioned we should NOT try to “Decode” but should try to “Interpret”. By “decode” it means something like what market researcher do, which is objective and containing other people’s point of view. And by “Interpret” it means something that is our opinion, our personal point of view. It is subjective. So here comes the question: How can a criticism be persuasive if it is subjective?
The reason why I came out this question is because I believe if we want to make some point persuasive, we have to be objective. If you make a claim, you need to provide evidence. But where is the evidence from if you only talk about your opinion? Otherwise, you have to tell other people what made you think like that – your grew up experience? Your education? You have to tell other people what set up the stage of whatever you are now. Does that need to be talked about in our criticism?
I also talked with Qian yesterday and we both agreed that if a subjective criticism looks persuasive, it may be at least written by someone that has a very high reputation, or has something that other people will have the same feeling with or “the agreement” when they are reading. Well, we don’t have that much reputation. Making other people feel the same looks like ”objective”. What should we do?
Besides that, the other question is “Should I only pick something that I am familiar with?” For example, I am thinking of writing the criticism of the interaction of Dental Restoration Sculpting Software. But I am not in the field of dental technology, and I haven’t use that software to do daily tasks as the dental technicians do. How can I write a criticism about it from something “subjective”? If I try to observe how technicians using this software to do tasks, as well as interview them, I believe I can claim something that is persuasive. But I guess that is the approach of “decoding”.
I am stuck at this point and I hope I can get some help from Jeff and you.
In last lecture, Jeff talked about that Breakdown is not actually a bad thing. I continued to think about it, and now I believe that the Breakdown is not only a “not bad” thing, but it is actually very important for culture/technology development and it is the start of human cognition!
If we define that breakdown is something disturbs us from a flow and after that we will notice that thing and think about it (which we have never done before), what we are doing is actually the re-recognition of that particular thing. We are not knowing it the first time (maybe we do, but not in this case), but we are taking a re-think of that object, and start to ask ourselves questions – “What is it? Why it is here? How can I use it more efficiently?” That is the start of learning process, and that is the start of human thinking. Your study, your thinking – they all start with Breakdowns.
So – what if we don’t have breakdowns? Can we actually live without breakdowns? I don’t think so. If we have no breakdowns in our daily life, we will be just like animals – do whatever our body requires us to do, and stay in the “perfect flow” which is just doing anything without thinking. Can we do that? No. We are human. We not only know how to think, but also have to think. We live in society and there are lots of interaction and stimulations from/to all direction – they are all breakdowns.
Maybe I have defined Breakdown a too broad concept. Maybe we should narrow it down a little bit. But I still believe that we cannot live without breakdowns, which is the motivation of the culture progress. What’s your opinion?
These three words have different meanings. But they are all describing the beautiful and smart things that appear in our daily life. Some of them are delicate, some of them are useful. However, in the language of phenomenology and structuralism, how do we define and separate these three words?
Art is an expression, is the reflection of people’s lives, is created from human senses and received by audience’s senses. Art creation doesn’t need a clear purpose. It’s like the screaming when a person is under pressure, and it is like the tears when a person feels sad. No matter how people review the arts created by the artists, the reason of creating arts is not for accepting other people’s opinion, but is the self expression. Therefore, art is phenomenology.
However, design itself couldn’t be just an expression. Design always has purpose. And design contains much more than just “art”. I used to talk to Alex about the difference between the rational design from user research and the design without research. That’s a different topic but actually both of them couldn’t escape the connotation of design itself – purposes. No matter which of them it still needs user testing. And they are designing for people to use. And they contain the business value. Therefore, design is more like structuralism.
How about invention? Why I separate the invention and design is because invention in most time comes from sparkle ideas. And it is creating something that doesn’t exist in the world before, when design is more like combining ideas. So invention comes from ideas, in this stage, it is phenomenology. Then the invention needs to be implemented. In this stage the invention requires analysis, knowledge, research and mechanism. And that is structuralism. Therefore, we can say the invention is the combination of phenomenology and structuralism.
Of cause we cannot say firmly that design doesn’t have phenomenology or art doesn’t have structuralism. But in general, that’s my idea of how we can tell differences between these ambiguous words.
In today’s class we discussed about the question of “whether a good critic means a good designer” and Jeff gave us the example of Jean-Luc Godard, who starts his film making career from the field of criticism and became very successful. Jeff also pointed out Paul Dourish’s “Implications for design”, which will be a good reference for this topic. Before I go into these resources, I still have a question in my mind. “What is the real-world relationship between criticism and design?”
To simplify this question, I divide people into two groups. First group is an original critic, and the second group is the original designer. Now the critic wants to design something, and the designer wants to be a good critic. I would say the second group will be easier than the first group. Almost everyone born to be a “critic” — it is so easy to point out what’s good or wrong with something even you don’t need to think deep about it or just by looking/hearing/feeling it. But when you need to design something, it becomes very difficult. And it will be worse if you think about what will other people criticise your design afterwards.
Take Amazon reviewsas an example. There are many many people in Amazon write reviews and those reviews can be criticism. People say a lot about what’s good and what’s bad about a product but how many of them can actually design one themselves? On the other side, what should designer learn from those criticism? Jeff said today that some film makers and artists they choose not to listen to the feedback from their audiences. They believed they created the art they wanted. But – when we as a designer build our criticism thinking, should we keep our own mind or should we absorb as many criticism as possible? Should we criticise something by ourselves or should we research what users, what other people criticise about and learn from that?
Recent Comments