Reading Response & Notes: Design Research

Designing for Interaction: Design Research

Design research is pulled from many disciplines and has many methods. It is the act of investigating the prospective audience in their natural environment to gather details that the designer may have not known before. Insight from research can help shape a project, making it more useful to the user as well as preventing costly mistakes due to lack of knowledge about the audience. Designers are often working with cultures that are unfamiliar and not only is research helpful in collecting insight, careful analysis can help spark new ideas.

Design Research by Ed. Brenda Laurel, p 22-23, 30-33, 36-37

+ The "mass market" mentality is in the U.S. is changing, we are moving towards diversity
+ People have learned to choose how they spend their time and money on individual beliefs
+ Qualitative design research is learning about the people by listening to them, watching them or experiencing their lives first hand.

+ Anthropology is the study of human behavior: how people experience and make sense of what they themselves and others do
+ The practice, artifacts, sensibilities and ideas that constitute and inform our everyday lives
+ We don't realize how and to what extent we are participating in and therefore shaping culture
+ Situatedness means the multiple ways people consume and integrate designed artifacts into their lives through interaction
+ Ethnography involves the study of a small group of people in their own environment
          - attempt to get a detailed understanding of the life and circumstances of fewer people
          - significance in detail in the relatively narrow scope

+ An alliance with sociologists and designers will help to reshaping consumer culture in unexpected and positive ways
+ Conducting field research can help to delight people
+ Equation as opposed to the production side

Visual Communication by Jonathan Baldwin, p 74-77, 96-97
+ Culture according to Raymond Williams
          - The process of a society's intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development
          - The particular way of life of a people, period or group
          - The works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity
+ Popular culture
          - Phenomenon evolving out of the consumerist
          - it's products are accessible and mass-produced
          - Work deliberately setting out to win favor with the masses or specific communities
          - Culture produced by industry and consumed and popularized by word of mouth and the media
+ Subcultures refers to any minority group with a shared set of beliefs, values, or lifestyle that resists the dominant culture
+ Subcultures are a spontaneous reaction to something in the dominant culture
          - Expresses itself by appropriating and reinterpreting the symbol of that culture
+ Analysis of subcultures are problematic
          - They tend to be selective
          - They tend to be overly romanticized
          - The spontaneous aspect of subcultures might become loss in the articulation of the their signs
+ Subcultures include a respect for an internal group hierarchy and the use of rituals

Reading Response: What I Learned About the Web in 2011

If you ignore the redundancy and irrelevant details, overall, the article brings up very good points in the scope of the project. Here are the general concepts I felt the article was getting at: audience, content,  context, flexibility, interaction, and experience.

INTERACTION
While I agree with Jeff Croft's statement on how Apps have helped redefine the web, I feel he may have jumped the gun a bit. The introduction of touchscreen based devices has allowed for a new language of interacting with content. More and more I see web sites that are inspired or even speak in the same language as iPhone and iPad interactivity. If this trend continues, we may no longer see a need for Apps.

EXPERIENCE
The web is moving beyond reproductions of physical pages. Many of the newspapers we examined in class have mostly just translated their magazines with splashes of new media.  Croft uses Wired Magazine as an example of this "evolution" in web design in regards to their magazine app. What makes Wired Magazine a great example is that they've thoughtfully layered and embedded the new media with the content therefore creating a richer experience from it's print counterpart. It seems most of the online newspapers consider the different types of media separately creating a disconnect in the experience.

FLEXIBILITY + CONTENT + CONTEXT + AUDIENCE
I decided to discuss these concepts together because they relate a bit more directly in my reasoning. Anyways, there's a lot of talk about responsive layouts in this article, but they kind of failed in explaining why. There are multiple reasons to create a responsive site that is flexible in more than one sense.

Firstly, the internet contains an enormous amount of content that's somewhat continuously growing and changing like a small child. I believe we're moving away from this idea of pages and into a more organic space of related content  (I'm not sure if this makes sense) so we should consider its shifting boundaries.

Secondly, which the article focuses more on is the flexibility for multiple platforms. More people access the internet from smart phones and other non-desktop devices. Content shouldn't be sacrificed due to the context of a different device. The interface should be flexible enough to retain the content and visual look and feel in a different space.

Lastly (more like firstly), your audience. According to Aarron Walter emotion shapes behavior and by better understanding  emotion we can gain better insight into the user's behavior. He believes this knowledge will help us in designing better user interfaces. As I mentioned previously, the web has moved passed just a translation of print content, it's alive and interactive. Essentially, we should be thinking about how we can create an interface that caters to multiple users each with their own wants and needs. Whether it is allowing the user to add their own content or simply allowing the user to choose what is important.


Article Source: What I Learned About the Web in 2011

Reading Response: Web Design is 95% Typography

I agree with Oliver Reichenstein, typography does plays a large role in web design. The internet is a pre-mature concept compared to how long typography has been around. Maybe we're still high on the sensationalism and stuck in the same gimmicky getups of early web design, because we had no idea what would become of the internet if we took a couple of steps. I think we've grown up so it's time to trade in those kiddie shoes for some loafers and get to the point. According to Reichenstein, web design is about information and communication so designers should firstly design with regards to the message just as typographers had in print design back in the days. I believe the importance of typographic hierarchy in web design will only prove to be more necessary as the amount of content continues to grow and complexity of information increases. As for the critics in Reichenstein's response to the reactions, I feel many of the negative opinions overlook the ultimate message Reichenstein was trying to get across, which is exactly that, communicating the message.

Article Sources: Web Design is 95% Typography, Reactions to 95% Typography