Log 7a: Reading Analysis

Reading: Chapter 9 of Designing for Interaction

This is the chapter that begins to scare me. It goes into just how dependent everyone is on technology and just how accessible it always is. Some people live of the internet and for technology, and it’s the job of the designer to make sure it doesn’t go completely crazy.

The Internet has never been more prominent or necessary. And from this point, it is only going to evolve further. As we get more dependent, technology is going to have to start fulfilling our needs and we have more and more to learn about and learn how to use (it still takes a lot for me to hook up a VCR).

In the upcoming years, many types of products and services are going to be around.

There’s going to be more traditional set ups such as blogs, homepages, search engines, etc. The form and the content are mainly provided by the designers and the creators of the sites. As long as the Internet is around, no matter how tradition and boring they may seem, I think these kind of pages will always remain a staple, but they may not be as fun for the user as the next group of products,

There are the less structured desktop like sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Yahoo Groups, that are based on content given by the user. The machine collects the data that you give it. Honestly, most people enjoy that more, at least in our demographic . There’s more satisfaction in supplying the Internet with information, considering how often peopple my age are on Facebook and Twitter.

There’s also going to be applications and data that aren’t attached to a site; they are the loose bits that have to be found by tools on our browsers. This is where the Interaction designer comes in.

I know I would never be online if there weren’t any browsers. I’d be bored staring at constant HTML code, and I have absolutely no idea what any of it means. I may be able to pick out some words, but with a designed browser, the visibility factor is taken care of, and I’ll be able to truly use the affordances of the Internet.

More tools like this are going to have to be made to accomodate all the information and data that will keep arising. The tools determine what we can or can’t do on the Internet, so having them well-crafted is very important.

One kind of tool that becomes an important help are called Intelligent Agents. They reside in devices to do things for the user. It takes away the steps that would either be too difficult or tedious. The agents filter and find information, and monitor the user’s behavior, so that it can customize itself to the person’s needs. While that is cool, this starts going a little into the Robot Revolution, technology is watching me fear that appears so often in this chapter.

Another advanced tool is the Semantic Web. This makes it so that machines can also read the site and make each visit more effective. One example they gave was th ability to find a restaurant based on your current location and make a reservation based on your schedule. It’s pretty impressive. technology like that is already in Apps on the iPhone.

This chapter also talks about robots, pieces of machinery that perform physical tasks. There are cleaning robots like the Roomba, and toy robots to entertain children, and maybe a few adults. Designers need to design robots keeping autonomy (the ability to act on the user’s behalf), and interaction.

However, the issues that often arise are form function and manner of behavior. You could have one that makes a simple beep, or on that could come right out of the Disney Imagineer Lab, memory full of cheerful songs. It is important to keep in mind what the robot needs to do, and who the target audience is, otherwise we’d have a world of pretty useless robots.

Essentially what this chapter is telling us is that designers are very musch needed in designing for the future. People are working with multiple computers these days if you include their laptops, MP3’s, cell phones, etc. Each thing is going to get more advanced, and in this rushed environment people are going to need to know how to use it, and how to use it right now.