week 3

So my 1st choice would be to usability expert (that's the title according to chap. 11 in last week's reading, but the "expert" part is a little premature in my case). I am buried in usability books right now, reading Nielson's 2006 Prioritizing Web Usability (which is the book I'll review for our book review), and also Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, Nielson's seminal 1999 Designing Web Usability and our class text, Web Redesign 2.0. For good measure, I'm also reading Digital Media: An Introduction, which I'm considering using as a text in a new Survey of Digital Media class suggested by our advisory committee which I'm developing for my program. It was cool to open this last one to a digital media timeline that discusses some of the thinkers, inventions, and organizations we met last quarter in COM546, including Vannevar Bush, ENIAC, ARPANet, and others. I learned that the term "computer graphics" was coined by a Boeing Engineer in 1960! It's amazing to look at the timeline and see how many technological innovations sit for 10 or 20 years before they become "overnight" sensations.

Given our team size, it's unlikely that I could choose something so narrow in scope as a usability expert, so I'm also willing to write, project manage, assist technically with graphic & image creation/optimizing. What I'd like not to do is be the Dreamweaver/HTML person. I don't think I have time to adequately get up to speed in the timeframe we have, given my other responsibilities. I just learned that my colleague & I will be presenting a prototype of our faculty development class on Effective Online Teaching at a statewide conference on May 1.

I'd like to talk more with my team about our goals before posting URLS of sites, as I don't know what type of site we're interested in creating.

Standards and adoption re: last Tuesday--it was difficult in the timeframe to figure out a common IM tool. In fact, I have AIM only because that's what my kids use and as I mentioned before they're the reason I took up IMing, only to find I much prefer email or cell phone and my college sons we not too interested in IMing their mother. None of my teammates were using AIM, so during Tuesday's class I learned that my Hotmail account has IM. I set it up, but am reluctant to use it because of my experience with irritating AIM popups, automatic launch, and annoying messages about who's online. I have a pretty high technology filter in that I juggle so many things that I don't like distractions, and IMing's negatives outweighed the positives for me. I will say this for the standards and interoperability issues tho: Blackboard, the learning management software I use for my online and face-to-face classes, has a chatroom which obviates the need for students to find a common provider. I haven't used it but can see now how it would be useful for enabling synchronous discussion.

On to the reading Notes on Design Practice article: the "messy, indeterminate" world of design is familiar to me, although I haven't heard it described that way before. The communications underpinning is key to teaching aspiring designers: no matter how beautiful their design, if they are not designing with the client's message and target audience in mind, they are unlikely to be successful. Likewise, the discussion of the social process of design gets a lot of attention in our program--we constantly remind students they will often be working in a team. His use of the term design artifacts I find a bit puzzling, as an artifact strikes me as almost a byproduct. In industry we use the term "digital assets" to describe pieces which are assembled to create a graphic communication, whether they be images, words, artwork, or video. I like his reference to stories, as I see the design world evolving this way. My colleagues who teach video production and animation are acutely aware that the story is the foundation of what their students are trying to create. Perhaps we don't think so much in terms of a website telling a story, but in some sense it defines who an organization is, and therefore it does tell one.

As for the Shedroff piece, I've been (subconsciously) interested in information design ever since my days in technical publications many moons ago. Which reminds me: I'm also reading Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence. This book is truly beautifully designed and written, and one I'll refer to often in my own evolution as an information designer. Shedroff laments that meaningful interaction is rarely taught, and I concur. One of the keys to teaching online successfully is to interact with students in a way which engages them and inspires them to think, develop, dream, and create. In the rare moment when this connection happens optimally, teaching feels like a privilege, and that's what keeps me in the field. Regarding sensorial design, in both teaching theory and design theory we encounter the need to engage all the senses to hit multiple learning styles and provide rich content. Thinking about tactile sensations, here's a link to a clip which took the design world by storm about six months ago (my Apple-computer-centric colleague was all over this when it came out). Now Apple has included some multi-touch features in the new, and pricey, iPhone.

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
click on the "demo reel" on the right side to see the video