After attending class this week and being introduced to design in both implementation and theory, it completely changed my perspective on the subject. I always assumed that design was much more a personal creation from the standpoint of the designer instead its more so a process of creation revolving around the consumer. Design I now realize takes the skills and ingenuity of the designer to create something that is the wants and needs of the consumer. And the wants and needs of the consumer are primarily ease oriented meaning the product is of ease of use. From what I learned in class typically the design process requires three steps; understanding, exploring and then materializing. The first part requires me to gather information on the consumer. In this case the consumer is my partner in class. I try to understand my partner on a personal level and gather information regarding what sort of person my partner is. This will help me establish what is important to my partner. After acquiring personal information I then want to define what my partner wants. And in this case it is how he uses his wallet on a day to day basis. By understanding his use of the product now I can design a new product that will be designed to function how he likes to use it. This first part of designing reminded me of a quote from Roger Whitehouse where he says, “Not only do our individual perceptual differences distinguish us from
one another, but all three components of perception-sensory mechanisms,
interpretation, and meaning-also change, often dramatically, over
the normal course of our lives”. By getting a personal connection to the consumer I can know what they want now and design catering to the current “want”. People change over time so it is important to establish a connection to the person at the time of design. Knowing this, I clarify who I am as a person and what I want out of the product to the person trying to understand my needs. Doing so allows for ease of design for the designer and also allows for a product better created to my needs.
Hashtags for Each Post
Reflection to Sociotechnical System of Use:
#sociotechnical
#tech2represent
Analyzing Two Examples from Weapons of Math Destruction Using the DIKW Framework:
#DIKW
#mathkills
Visuals: A Response to Two Examples of a Visual Representation of Data:
#visualdata
#numberart
What I Do Online.:
#webfootprint
#myhistory
The Medium is the Message:
#mediumisthemessage
#twitternews
I Can Do It Too: DIY Music:
#soundcloud
#selfmade
Three Funny Memes:
#lol
#memes
Abstract for Major Project #2:
#whoami
#personality
My Dublin Core Elements:
#humanmetadata
#dublincoreelements
My Dublin Core Elements
Title: Oliver Waldo
Creator: Tyson Waldo and Liu Feng Tsui
Subject: Being of the Human Race
Description: Asian American Human Male
Publisher: Life on Planet Earth
Contributor: All Elements Experienced in the Life of Oliver Waldo
Date: September 7th, 1999
Type: Human
Format: The Physical Body Being Alive
Identifier: The Human Race
Language: Life on Planet Earth
Relation: All Human Males
Coverage: Anything That Can Be Required of a Human
Rights: All Human Rights Which Are To Be Respected in the USA
Abstract for Major Project #2
After taking the personality test, I received INTP-T as my result. Each letter means a certain thing about my personality. INTP-T stands for, introverted, intuitive, thinking, prospecting and turbulent. The test declared I had the personality of a logician. My supposed strengths are my abilities in analyzation, abstract thinking and open-mindedness among others. My weaknesses include my tendency to be private and withdrawn, my insensitivity, being of an absent mind as well as being condescending towards others. I don’t know if this personality test actually applies to me as the test itself is a little to generalized for me to provide any super accurate answers about myself. And the test results themselves don’t really apply to me as a person and I would even go as far as to say they are in fact inaccurate. For the second major project required of us this semester, my intended audience for my presentation is my close friends. Since we are required to use social media as a source of information in our presentations to provide context to our personality, my friends would understand the reasoning behind why I post most of the things I post. My presentation will be primarily built media from both my twitter and my Instagram and also there will be some information about how I behave on either of these sites and what it has to do with my personality test results
Three Funny Memes
I Can Do It Too: DIY Music
The ease of DIY music production and the ability to share and distribute my music virtually for free has been the biggest change in belief recently in my life. I always assumed that to create and share quality music required large investments into a marketing/ publication team as well as a quality studio to record my music. After following emerging SoundCloud artists and seeing how they were breaking into the mainstream with little more than a genuine story to share and talent, I realized that it was something that I could do as well. Many of the artists I listen to create music out of their bedrooms with low quality USB mics and recording software costing little over a couple hundred dollars. They learned the technical aspects of recording music all on their own and they developed their own original sound through creativity and ingenuity. Take Lil Peep as an example. He created Hellboy a mixtape which in my opinion is one of the most revolutionary pieces of music that has come out in a very long time. He blended rock, emo and rap into a completely new genre that is now dubbed emo rap. He did it all in his own bedroom. He did it all with a shitty mic. He did it all as an independent artist. The opportunity is there for a person to turn themselves into an artist. Then why don’t more people do it? The answer to that question is, people either don’t have the drive or enough interesting material in their lives to turn that into a genuine enticing story. Lil Peep did not grow up in any “hood” and he doesn’t rap about it. The pain of chronic depression and coping of that depression with the use of drugs is what makes up most of his music. People are drawn to this as it is a similar situation many people find themselves in. One of those people is me. I had addiction problems and I couldn’t say were caused by the gripping hands of depression. Simply put, I partied too hard, associated myself with a certain group of people and my constant search for something new to cure my boredom put me into the hands of hard drugs. This brought depression into my life that I never thought I would have. But at the end of it all, I had something to talk about. Something I wanted to share with others. Something that others could relate too and find comfort in. So I began recording music. I spent 200$ on recording equipment and pirated 500$ worth of recording software. I recorded music when no one was in my house cause I didn’t want my parents listening to my poems as they were all songs written about long nights I had spent consuming substances that you would never want your child even seeing. Even with my cheap set-up, I made a song that everyone loved. Rocked Up by lil kunai shawty was a hit in my hometown. Now it has racked up over 10k plays. (Which to say isn’t a lot but to a aspiring recording artist, it’s a milestone.) I had the opportunity to perform at local parties and dances and everyone knew the words to my music. It was bliss and it was beautiful. These opportunities only opened up because I changed my mindset. Instead of believing that money was the only way that I could record music I believed that I could do it with a cheap set-up. I had a story. I turned that story into one of my happiest creations that allowed for some of the happiest times of my life.
The Medium is the Message
Currently I am enrolled in COM 101 Media and Society. In this class we reviewed an idea where the medium is the message. This is the idea that in itself the message’s content can be affected by the medium of which it is transmitted. I think what Maria Popova has to say embodies this idea. When she talks about text and how as a medium conveying information, it is linked to the essence of what the text is conveying. If you think about it all forms of media have an effect on the information they are conveying. For example, let’s compare a newspaper to a television broadcast of the news. Typically a newspaper contains long articles going into depth about what the “news” is. As you sit down and read you glean a lot of the information regarding the event. A television broadcast on the other hand is very fast paced and often gives the viewer a quick report of what the news is. Both may cover the same story but what a reader/viewer takes away from either is different. As Maria Popova was talking about Twitter, it was important she mentioned that the medium is the message. Nowadays, most of the news I get is from Twitter. This is just the era we live in. Twitter’s capability of being instantaneous is a huge advantage over other news sources. But at the same time both reliability and lack of information regarding the information is present as well. Because of this receiving news from Twitter is very different from receiving news from other forms of news distribution. Hence the fact that the message is the medium.
What I Do Online.
After reading the article it has become clear to me that my browsing history is not my private information. It is most likely being collected by data mining agencies and distributed to companies. I’ve noticed this before. If I ever wanted something that I was going to order online, most of the time I thoroughly researched the product to make sure that it was a good purchase. However, even after purchasing the product, I would see advertisements on websites for products similar to those that I have purchased being advertised. This includes video games, clothes, disc golf equipment and soccer equipment just to name a few. I often will leisurely browse through amazon looking for products that I need. For example, I was looking at LED light strips to put in my room for decoration. That following week, on completely unrelated websites, I would see advertisements for LED light strips and other related lighting products. I am not surprised Amazon collects user browsing history. By doing so would prove to be very profitable to them as their entire business model is online purchasing. If they can increase traffic through their website then they will make more money. A very easy way to increase traffic through their website is to list advertisements of products on their site that they believe the user will want based on the user’s browsing history. I believe that browsing data will become more and more valuable and be collected more and more as our society develops further into this digital age. However, with this development what we consider to be our privacy becomes less and less apparent.
Visuals: A Response to Two Examples of a Visual Representation of Data
In this post I look at visual media and how information and data is conveyed through these diagrams. This topic was very interesting and informative. I always believed that data and information was to be represented through stereotypical graphs and charts. After browsing and looking at numerous diagrams, I realized that this was not the case. The visuals I looked at were an almost perfect combination of creativity, visual appeal and information. Here are the two that stood out to me the most.
To be one hundred percent honest this visual stood out to me due to its elegant shapes and popping colors. I wanted to know what information the creator of this visual wished to share with the viewer. I was surprised to learn that the work was actually a visual representation of Ikigai, a self development concept from Japan. The direct translation of Ikigai is “the happiness of being busy”.
The creator of the visual realized that the original diagram created by Marc Winn in 2014 was broken, some of the intersections between circles do not make any sense. I assume the diagram not actually being accurate had something to do with the simplicity of it. Meaning that Winn simplified a complex concept to the point where information was both lost and misrepresented. Understanding the failures of the diagram the author of the new diagram created a more elaborate and complex visual. Both diagrams are an overlap of four round shapes. The overlap results in a symmetric and appealing visual. The four circles represent a general description of what one’s purpose is in life. .The four round shapes are labeled “what the world needs”, “what you are good at”, “what you love” and “what earns you money”. When one of the shapes overlaps another a new shape and color is created. Within each new shape that is created a person’s purpose is listed their. The idea is that since the new shapes created could be considered a combination of those two shapes. Thus with each shape comes a purpose in one’s life that is a combination of the general descriptions labeled on the four main shapes. As they all overlap and intersect there is a space in the very middle that is created. That space says “Ikigai: Purpose, Dream Job, True Vocation”. After analyzing the graph I realized that a person’s true Ikigai is achieving a purpose in life that is a logically seamless combination of all the four general descriptions. What stood out to me was the description within each overlap was completely logical. Any person could look at this visual and relate it to their current occupation. The improved visual has a more complex design allowing for more overlaps. With their being more overlaps there was no loss of information unlike the older diagram. Also every overlap in the new diagram makes logical sense. This is unlike the older one where some of the overlaps displayed information that did not logically make sense. I chose this visual for multiple reasons. It brings an element of visual appeal to presenting information. It displays a concept that is useful for many in an easily understood way. The diagram also shows that visual media is changing and constantly evolving. An older representation of the concept Ikigai had its flaws. But the idea in how to represent the concept was there. By noticing mistakes we as designers can fix these mistakes. I suppose the biggest lesson I learned in analyzing the diagram wasn’t necessarily what was interesting about the diagram. Instead it was that as I continue into the world of digital media, with the creation of such media follows refinement and improvement.
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/best-albums-of-2017-the-consensus-infographic/
This is a visual representation of the top albums of 2017. It condenses rating lists from the Rolling Stones magazine and Pitchfork a trusted music review site. It is a well made design combining text with size in a visual representation that displays the more popular albums with the less popular ones. You can clearly see that Damn by Kendrick Lamar and Melodrama by Lorde are both of the top albums due to the size of their names. Less popular albums being Sleep Well Beast by The National or Capacity by Big Thief. All the most popular albums are typically displayed in the middle of the visual. By using relative size of the names to represent popularity the visual piece is both aesthetically pleasing and easily understood. To me the data that is being represented doesn’t need to be complicated by adding numbers. By doing so would unnecessarily complicate the information. Another aspect is the color of the text which adds even more depth to the visual. Near the bottom of the “word cloud” there are different genres written each in a different color. If you look at the word cloud, all the album names are a certain color pertaining to the genre. If you analyze the visual by also bringing color into context and not just focusing on size, you can see that certain genres are more popular than others. That is why this visual stood out to me. If one spends the time to analyze both the color of the text along with size, you can compare the popularity of both the genre as well as the most popular albums of 2017. This visual is simple yet it conveys useful information in a manner that is easily understood. The simplicity of the visual and how effectively it displayed information is what made it stand out to me.
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/best-albums-of-2017-the-consensus-infographic/c/
Analyzing Two Examples from Weapons of Math Destruction Using the DIKW Framework
The DIKW framework is an idea of how we as humans intake data and and act upon using four steps. The idea is that we take in simple data then process it into information then turn it into knowledge and act upon the situation with by using our wisdom. The first example I wish to use is from the introductory chapter in Weapons of Math Destruction. The big story in this chapter is how teachers across the United States are fired based on performance. Their performance is judged through their students performance and if the improvement of standardized test scores of the students puts the teachers in the lower percentages comparative to other teachers then those teachers with low percentages are then fired. If putting this situation into the DIKW framework, the data would be the teachers performance mathematically computed. The information would be the teachers ranking when comparing their scores to other teachers. The knowledge would be that teachers with lower scores are worse as teachers than those with higher scores. The wisdom in this situation would be to fire those with low test scores and keep those with high test scores. In class we discussed how the DIKW framework is not always accurate and how we process the data and eventually turn it into wisdom can change drastically based on the situation. This manner of firing teachers was terrible. There were many situations of great teachers being fired based on their students test scores. Teachers would correct tests to make sure to not get fired and sometimes send students into their next year with higher scores than they deserve. This resulted in honest teachers being fired as they did not seem to improve the test scores of a student. Thus the DIKW framework is not always reliable. Another example is how job applicants take a personality test by Kronos a workforce management company. People can be “red lighted” based on the test and will not receive a job. In this case the data would be the persons test results. The information would be whether or not they are red lighted and determined to be an incompatible addition to the workplace or if they will work well in the workplace. The knowledge is that people with personality issues often will have difficulty cooperating with others when working in the same environment. The wisdom would be to not hire these people. In the case of the book a man named Kyle Behm decided to leave Vanderbilt University to receive treatment for his bipolar disorder. He went to find work at a minimum wage job but was not hired due to being “red lighted”. This raises the question of whether or not people with mental disabilities should receive a pass on this test as they are ultimately destined to fail. The two examples above were failures at successfully processing data, even though when logically analyzed by a DIKW framework.