Don Norman's The Design of Future Things

Brad

Adam

Josh

This book is another in the infinite list of Don Norman's "The Design of..." series. He basically talks about what people would want to be able to have in the future, things like automated cars and robots. And how these things could be good or bad and what we have to do to make sure the systems don't fail and the world doesn't explode.

I thought this book was definitely better than the other one of his books we have read so far, "The Design of Everyday Things." And I thought he brought up some interesting ideas, like the car swarm and your kitchen telling you what you should eat. He references Minority Report, which has some of those things that he talks about in it, like automated cars. But some of the stuff just doesn't seem feasible. At least I don't see a car swarm working on the roads we have today, I think there would have to be brand new special roads built that work with the cars. I believe I saw this idea once somewhere before where the road would have like some junk inside it that would help automated cars along the road with traffic and things like that. Almost like it was running on a track, but it seemed more like it was just sensors or something that relayed messages about the other cars on the road. 

Overall, it was a pretty interesting read only to become disturbing at the end when he eats shrooms and talks to the Machine Archiver. Where apparently he gets inside the head of a sentient machine and tries to figure out how machines would design things for humans.

UIST papers: "Annotating Gigapixel Images" and "Foldable Interactive Displays"

ben

tyler

adam

Annotating Gigapixel Images:

This paper is basically about a group that has devised a way to go 

about and label these gigapixel images, which are extremely large 

images commonly used for geographic photos of the earth, label 

them with text or sound. The labels can denote regions, cities, 

or even something as small as a person and label that. Then it 

goes on to discuss how these labels should be displayed on the 

screen when panning and zooming. It details these equations for 

the different renderings in the paper.

Foldable Interactive Displays:

This paper was about a research team trying to come up with a way to
have cost effective and small space consuming displays. Essentially,
foldable projection screens that can move around. The title of the paper
is a little deceiving, you think it would be a kind of screen that you 

could fold up into your pocket and then take it out and use it anywhere. 

But this is just a projection screen that can fold up, you have to have 

a projector to put the images on it. Basically, the have 4 different types 

of foldable screens: a fan, an umbrella, a newspaper, and a scroll. And 

they put Rf emitters into these so that a projector could track where the 

screen was as you carry it around. You can also do things like flipping 

over your screen and the display acts accordingly by flipping your 

"paper" that your reading over. Also you can resize the screen, for 

instance, on the newspaper you can fold it up some and the display 

resizes accordingly. By adding additional LEDs into the display input 

devices can be used like a stylus to track user operations. Overall, this 

paper underwhelmed me because its seems very impractical to have 

projectors everywhere, and that's what it needs for this to even be 

useful. So the research seems pointless to me.

Ethnography

My ethnography was about trying to find a pattern in the purchasing of food at a food court based on ethnicity. I went to the Post Oak Mall food court here in College Station and watched where people ordered food from and recorded what ethnicity I believed them to be. There was four restauraunts: a japanese food place, a chinese food place, a pizza place, and Sonic. When I was finished I discovered that about twice as many white folk ordered from Sonic, the Hispanic and African American demograhics were about even across the restaurants in terms of ordering, and that Asians only ate the Asian food. So from this I concluded that maybe Asians only want to eat there own kind of food when given the option. And maybe that all the white folk going to Sonic may be because they like "all-american" food. So there is at least some semblance of a buying pattern among ethnic groups.

The Mole People

Patrick

Adam

Brian

This book is basically about a women who infiltrated the undground homeless scene in order to try and better understand the circumtances of them living there and to just see what their lives were like and the communities they built down there. 

I thought this book was a semi-interesting read. It didn't really strike me as having much to do with this class, but I did like the parts that were written kind of like a novel would be. There were some suspenseful moments and that's probably what i'm going to remember most about it, as well as, the last chapter were some emotion comes into play. Overall it was a decent read and I guess you could apply it to computer science by seeing that she kind of put herself into the shoes of the homeless and we should do that with our users.

The Media Equation

Comments:

Adam

Brad

Patrick


The Media Equation is about trying to relate how we interact with computers and media to how we interact with human beings. So several studies were done to try and prove this, like using computers that were polite or had a voice that had a dominant tone or submissive tone and how people reacted to those kinds of things. And it turned out they reacted similarly to how they would to real things.

I thought this book was very interesting, I can see how some of the things they talked about really happen when we use computers and how media affects us. The way pictures and motion are presented in a movie bring about some of the same emotions we would feel in real life if those things were happening. And ultimately understanding how these things affect us can help us to better design future products. Be it a robot that has manners or a movie that fully immerses you in it's universe.Some of the faults of this work are that the details of the experiments are laid out in the same way over and over again int he book so the start becoming tedious to read, because it's like you already read it before. But overall the book was enjoyable.