Team Disco Ninjas: Michael Perez, Phillip Zak

Title: Static Cloud

Description: Due to the severity of the hurricane that has affected our area we decided to create a map that can be accessed by those affected. We plan on using maps and identifying locations that have offered a service of some kind to those less fortunate. Whether it is a phone charging station to food and clothing banks, we will identify these locations and provide some basic information. We will also add a web chat where users can hop on and talk to each other and put each other into contact because what we need in this time is to stand together.

How can we shrink time when a user interacts with an interface?

We can shrink the time by improving the navigation time used to get to the specific content the user wants. one example is the iPod. You can access your favorite songs with the touch of one button. There is no need to scroll through anything.

What do you think about letting a machine make choices for you?

I have no problem with a machine making choices for me if it only made small choices, or those that I consider to be everyday choices. I would not be able to let a machine make a choice that would affect me on a larger scale, like a life or death decision.

What is one way you’ve figured out how to save time?

One way I feel I save time is by doing something while traveling from one place to another. I feel I get stuff done when I do reading for school while riding the train to and from school.

Now that we have a general Idea of how our program is going to be laid out as well as the flow it will have, we can begin our programing and get a rough working prototype. After that we can Begin to discuss our design ideas such as color, fonts, images, sounds. Then we will add this to our first prototype and see how it mixes with our program. We also want this to be usable by Color blind people (Ahmad)

Group: Disco Ninjas

Members: Michael Perez, Philip Zak, Ahmad Woods

Title of project

Learning Revolution

• A tablet designed to assist children with learning by managing their work and progress, which also plays upon a human’s competitive nature to foster learning.

• To reinvigorate learning. Students don’t interact in the classroom any more and as a result they aren’t engaged or attached to what the teacher is writing on the blackboard. Children these days play a lot of video games and video games are often competitive in nature. People usually play games to unlock every achievement they can and that drives countless hours of gameplay. What if a similar “achievement system” was introduced to the classroom! We hope that this device sparks a thirst for learning by making it more interactive not only through the use of the device but through the competitive functionality it brings among students.

Describe the interaction model- how does it work? What is the interface like? How will people interact with it?

• The device is a tablet 7.60×4.8 with a 7’ pressure sensitive capacitive screen.
• The user can use their fingers or a stylus to interact with the device.
• Stylus attached to the device by a wire. 3’ long and a .25’ wide

What do you think of Maeda’s observations on simplicity and emotion?

What I think the excerpt “emotion” from John Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity is trying to get across is the fact that you can express emotions with just as much diversity as you can when you are talking to someone face to face. The need for human emotional interaction is still present in our world of high speed data transfers, It is only natural that certain things can be done to express on self through text and still make the reader feel the emotion that the writer want to convey. The most simple version of this would be writing out something in CAPS. It shows the recipient that you are trying to come across as unpleasant or screaming at someone.
How can designing for emotion foster engagement?

Like a person that people want to be around because his emotional intelligence, I feel that a product can have the same type of magnetism if built to elicit a specific emotion. If a person buys a product and forms an attachment to it like they would with a person, There is a likelihood that when a new version of a product comes out the attachment to the company not the product necessarily will lead them to buy the new one.
Is there an object or design that you are attached to?

There isn’t a specific product that I have formed an attachment to, its more an attachment to a company and the software it uses. I loved my first Motorola and since then I have continued to buy Motorola products since then. When they began to make smart phones and they used the android O.S. it just made the products they made that much better for me.

The method that I chose from the article by Bill Moggridge, is “look”. In my opinion all projects at one point or another go through a look stage in its development. Most ideas are created to solve an issue that we have. I would use the look method to identify how the issue is currently being handled and what I can do to incorporate these solutions into my project. By using the look method I an get unfiltered/unbiased information about the subject I am researching at the moment. With the nature of this information we can get a design that has not been mucked up by the personal feelings of people, which goes against the ideas of design. We aren’t trying to design something for a few people, the majority of the time the design your aiming for is meant for a broad audience.

One place were the look method can work be used to move along the design of a project is in a video games beta test. At first you would not say that that can be considered a look method, but when a developer inserts himself into the game along with the rest of the beta testers he can observes the actions and record what is going on, or the issues that the testers are running across. Using this method many bugs, can be identified immediately rather than have to wait for a bug report for one of the testers. Its also help get a general feel for the reception of the game if you have someone there able to listen in on the conversations other testers are having about the game. Then using that information they can go back and adjust according to the info they collected.

This article does a good job of showing a common trend in product design, and that trend seems to be that most products are designed with its aesthetics in mind as opposed to its functionality. That is where we run into problems because we wind up with products that have no intuitive flow to it. The average user doesn’t read a products manual and those that do are not reading them anymore because the less intuitive a product is the bigger or longer the manual will be. This causes frustrations for the user and they wind up only really ever using a portion of what a product is capable of.

One product I can relate such an issue with is my friend’s Mercedes Benz. He spent so much money on a car that looks very appealing and has the ability to tune itself for more performance from inside the car itself all it takes is the push of several buttons. The problem is that unlike previous models its no longer just as simple as hitting the sport setting, It now has adjustments for his suspension, His rev limit. This is fine if your going for a track day, but not something you want to deal if you just want to switch it to sport mode real quick as your ridding around town.