1,920 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2016
  2. Aug 2016
    1. there is always an aspect of coercion to design

      The word "coercion" has historically been a negative word to me - to be coerced is to go against one's will. Many negative examples are presented here - what are positive examples of coercion in design? I lived in Portland, OR for many years and volunteered with the City Repair project whose mission is to "place make". Here are examples of PDX intersections "repairs": http://www.cityrepair.org/intersection-repair-examples/

    2. Today, we have since become so habituated to public lighting that our primary association with street lights is that they deter criminal activity and make us feel safe.

      Is that really a false assumption? I'm totally on board with the overall argument here--big Mike Davis fan!--but feel this goes a step too far.

      Austin's moon towers were supposedly a response to a late-nineteenth century serial killer), but have not prevented youth from gathering, indeed they have occasioned such gatherings:

    3. Designs that are unpleasant to some are put into place to make things more pleasant for others, and that latter category might just include you.

      I'm really excited to see how we turn the argument of this essay toward the design of learning technologies and courses, specifically in how we might locate tacit power relations in seemingly innocuous (sometimes "unpleasant") interfaces...

    1. Perhaps they need not even be infrastructure in the traditional, utilitarian sense, but efforts to create lasting human works that can provide keystones of cultural continuity for centuries to come — works I believe capitalism has proven nearly incapable of building, or in some cases even maintaining.

      This is the tie-in with Transition design!

    1. it’s this pattern of a work reacting to itself and its environment that gives it the spark of life.

      I look forward to this new frame to my design work allowing one to capture this precious moment when a design pattern reacts to itself... or perhaps it is too elusive to in fact "capture"?

    2. work on architecture,

      Seems like architecture will be a valuable metaphor for our conversation about instructional design.

      Interestingly, Alan Levine opens a recent blog on Domain of One's Own with a nice architectural metaphor for that great project:

      Like a small stubborn, unique, old fashioned house surrounded by modern monolithic mega modern glass and steel structures, the Domain of Ones Own project started at the University of Mary Washington stands out as one hope amongst Educational Technology’s adoration of mega scale, management, analytics, automation, and tall tall towers of data, data, data.

    1. Having just finished a year working at an educational technology company, I’ve also seen from that side how learners become quantities on a spreadsheet, numbers on an infographic. I worry that researching learners and learning is not the same as knowing learners and learning

      Especially coming out of the (shared) biographical context here, I'm interested in further discussing this idea...

    1. we should make space for things that don’t fit into our tidy conceptions about education.

      Here's perhaps an interesting take on this issue form someone working on the tech side of edtech, trying to build tech for teachers and students, and help them leverage that tech for teaching and learning:

      As I say above, it's obviously hard to market this kind of "untidiness." When people are "shopping" for technology for the classroom, most don't want things that half work or might work or try it and let us know what works/doesn't. That only goes so far.

      Don't get me wrong, the early adopters of both products I've worked on were just the kind of people who wanted to be part of that kind of experiment and by collaborating closely with them, I believe I've been able to direct product development in both projects towards a more authentic pedagogical value. But that process doesn't, at least I don't think it can, "scale"--a term I realize has it's own problematic ideology.

      But I also get frustrated with this lack of tidiness because I want to offer a good product/service/experience to my educational users. I don't want to disrupt the teaching and learning process that should be the focus of everyone's energy in a classroom by my own tool's buginess. I don't want to suggest that a tool can be invisible, but I also don't want a tool to be the focus.

      Despite my hesitancy about "untidiness"--no doubt further entrenched by my own anal retentiveness--I'm really interested in how edtech, or perhaps indie edtech, might actually incorporate this kind of philosophy. As long as centers for teaching and learning, and teachers and learners themselves, are on board, I don't see why it can't work.

  3. Jul 2016
    1. adget design is a pretty well-known boys’ club, a field where male engineers design products with other men in mind, rarely considering the way the needs, anatomy, or lived experience of women might change the way a product should work. It’s not uncommon to hear stories of how male engineers forgot to factor in the smaller size of women’s hands and wrists, or the way female fashion doesn’t always include a pocket.
  4. Jun 2016
    1. In a 1992 paper in Organizational Science titled “The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,” Wanda Orlikowski applied the structuration theory of sociologist Anthony Giddens to technology use and reached a similar conclusion. Giddens argued that human agency is constrained by the structures around us—technology and sociocultural conventions—and that we in turn shape those structures. Software, malleable and capable of representing rules, is especially conducive to such analysis.

      Love this paper!!!

    1. Most studies of extrinsic incentives and intrinsic motivation, including those men- tioned earlier, used as controls subjects who received no rewards or feedback, apparently on the assumption that un- der these conditions original levels of intrinsic motivation would be maintained.

      make an interesting point that most studies assume that no-feedback is a status quo.

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    1. In summary, our main goal was to examine how students' achievement goals are related to changes in self-efficacy, preference to avoid challenge, and intrin sic value in the face of evaluation. Early in the semester, we assessed students' achievement goals, self-efficacy, desire to avoid challenge, and intrinsic value. We assessed students' self-efficacy, desire to avoid challenge, and intrinsic value again immediately after they received their grades on their first major exam or paper. This design allowed us to examine the role of goals in the change in mo tivational constructs associated with performance feedback. Our main hypothe ses were (a) a mastery goal will be associated with enhanced motivation around receipt of grades (i.e., increased efficacy and value and lower preference for chal lenge avoidance); (b) a performance-avoidance goal will be associated with di minished motivation around receipt of grades (i.e., decreased efficacy and value and increased preference for challenge avoidance); and (c) the effects of a per formance-approach goal on changes in motivation will be moderated by grades. When students encounter low grades, a performance-approach goal will be relat ed to diminished motivation. When students receive high grades, a performance approach goal will be unrelated to changes in motivation.

      The method. Should see if I could replicate this.

    1. the only real problem remaining is the user experience that entices teachers to contribute content

      Sounds a bit restrictive. Though there are hairy UX problems making it even more difficult for teachers to contribute content, many other issues are likely to remain, preventing contributions, even if the User Experience were optimal for every single potential contributor. In other words, it’s one thing to set “the problem to be solved” in a manageable way. It’s another to grasp the complexity of the situation.

  5. May 2016
    1. Wiggins and McTighe’s solutions—backward design, sharing detailed rubrics with students, etc.—are certainly the right way to do teacher-centered, standards-driven education based on measurable outcomes.

      I've been wondering for a long time about ID, UbD and the like as they fit in with open educational practices and open pedagogy. It seems like they're closed in a way, in that the the goals, the way they're defined and the means to getting there are all defined for the learner. But if we really want to help people grow and be all they can be, we have to cede control to the learners, so they can start to define their own goals, and find out how to set their own paths.

  6. Apr 2016
    1. “We designed every desk, chair, wall, workstation, and table so it can be moved by no more than two [hypothetical] people who are each five feet tall and weigh 80 pounds.”
    1. Each class that derives from UObject has a singleton UClass created for it that contains all of the meta data about the class instance. UObject and UClass together are at the root of everything that a gameplay object does during its lifetime. The best way to think of the difference between a UClass and a UObject is that the UClass describes what an instance of a UObject will look like, what properties are available for serialization, networking, etc. Most gameplay development does not involve directly deriving from UObjects, but instead from AActor and UActorComponent. You do not need to know the details of how UClass/UObject works in order to write gameplay code, but it is good to know that these systems exist.
  7. Mar 2016
    1. What kinds of objects and subjects do interaction design practices make, and how do those practices produce them?

      The question could also be re-framed as what experiences of our lives do the objects of interaction design encapsulate?

    1. Great example of a forum which will cause burnout (for both student and professor). I like the idea for using Twitter as explained below. Students are probably already using the tool, it can be used as a back channel, and it has a more normal flow of conversation with potential guest speakers.

  8. Feb 2016
    1. Don Norman at Apple in 1993 (referenced by Peter Merholz[10]Peter Merholz. "Whither "User Experience"?". peterme.com. (1998): [http://www.peterme.com/index112498.html] ):“I invented the term [User Experience]

      Apple invented the concept of "user experience." Makes sense.

    1. Graham Chivers @deepgreendesign Let's enable all 2 flourish ~ Disruptive #Green Mechatronics #Design ~ #Freedom #Water #Food #Climate #HumanRights #Science #STEM #Math & amateur #Feminist Toronto, Canada, #iEarth1st grahamsgreendesign.com/blogs/

      This is me on twitter :)

    1. n Saul Carliner’s LessonsLearned from Museum Exhibit Design, exhibit design is broken into three main stages(2003). The “idea generator,” “exhibit designer, and “idea implementer,”leads each phase respectively (Carliner, 2003). The idea generator determines the main concepts or themes and chooses the content of the exhibit. Then, the exhibit designer takes the concept to prepare physical designs for the new gallery, creating display cases and deciding wall and floor coverings for the overall ambiance. Lastly, the idea implementer brings together everything to create the exhibit. The implementer collects any missing pieces for the gallery, ensures conservation of displayed pieces, and oversees all parts of the assembly(Carliner, 2003)

      Types of museum visitors outlined: idea generators, exhibit designers, idea implementers. Next paragraph introduces that an aspect of exhibit design missing is 'audience targeting' - reaching out to a specific clientele intentionally with an exhibition's design.

  9. Jan 2016
    1. If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening. Teacher quality matters. Too many in the profession are quick to awfulize students in poverty to rationalize poor results. Better teaching inspires students and gets better results. Better teaching engages students and keeps them in classrooms, rather than the streets. Better teaching is the one thing we never really talk about. Better teaching is the only mechanism we have left.

      What are some ways to significantly improve teaching in these communities? The teaching doesn't happen in a vacuum and we need a plan to counteract the systemic forces at work that maintain the status quo.

    1. After some classroom experimentation, a more specific list of smart technology use criteria emerged

      As we transform the "HOW" of what we do to support schools, encouraging safe fail experimentation will be important. The design process supports this and iteration consists of success and failure.

  10. Dec 2015
    1. Clojure Design Patterns

      Intro Episode 1. Command Episode 2. Strategy Episode 3. State Episode 4. Visitor Episode 5. Template Method Episode 6. Iterator Episode 7. Memento Episode 8. Prototype Episode 9. Mediator Episode 10. Observer Episode 11. Interpreter Episode 12. Flyweight Episode 13. Builder Episode 14. Facade Episode 15. Singleton Episode 16. Chain of Responsibility Episode 17. Composite Episode 18. Factory Method Episode 19. Abstract Factory Episode 20. Adapter Episode 21. Decorator Episode 22. Proxy Episode 23. Bridge

    1. Eames – outside of the world of design scholarship and commercial licenses – has become a word applied to alchemise junk shop remnants. A word whose prefix-polish transforms the value of the object to which it has been attached, a kind of culturally magic Brasso intended to bring out particular qualities in an object, even if those qualities aren't there in the first place.
  11. gridlex.devlint.fr gridlex.devlint.fr
  12. Nov 2015
    1. Most apps had detailed stats to help improve performance. However, to a friend who is not a runner, that info is much less exciting. They would probably much rather see that it was equal to 5 donuts, and give you a thumbs up.
    1. The onboarding flow can be designed in many other ways that might be more useful to your users. Slack, for instance, uses the first screen to create some context. They simply introduce themselves, focusing on benefits instead of screens and features.
    2. That’s why now all the big players are shifting from hamburger menus towards making the most relevant navigation options always visible.

      Interesting example of YouTube switching away from the hamburger menu.

    1. There is a lot of evidence that quite subtle changes to user interfaces can have dramatic effects on how the interfaces are used. For example, the size of a search box or the text that accompanies it can considerably influence the queries that people submit.

      -- David Elsweller

    2. The whole gendered usage of hearts seems to have escaped Twitter. So does the fact that people fave (with stars) in complex ways - they are bookmarks, they are likes, they are nods of the head. But they are not indicators of love. I feel very weird loving tweets by random men I've only just started a conversation with. Not that there's anything wrong with feminine. But women - and men, in their own ways - are well-aware of how feminized visual signals get read by others, and in an identity space like Twitter, I suspect that will really minimize usage. Or at least until we all get used to it.

      -- Bonnie Stewart

    1. There is a very significant differentiation between user-design and User-centered design

      User-design is like "peer-production": the users are given the tool to do the job; while

      User-centered design is a way of "participants' consultation".

  13. Oct 2015
  14. Sep 2015
    1. digital systems and displays oftenundermine mutual availability and visibility. Removing the visibility ofthe scene of action from the view of others not only undermines co-participation and collaboration at the exhibit itself, but removes thepossibility of others seeing and making relevant sense of what people aredoing elsewhere within the scene. The relevant ecology of action is largelydenied to those who happen to be within the same space. In contrast, it isworth adding that even those who design for fairgrounds and similar venueshave long recognized the importance of making their displays visible to a‘gathering’, allowing others to participate in various ways in the scene ofaction

      In our world of constant digitization, it is important to be aware of how technology creates individual and group experiences. If, in order to appreciate the work, you have to participate (i.e. run the controls), you are turning what could have been a group experience into an individual one.

      This also reminds me a lot of Marshal McLuhan's ideas on hot and cold media.

  15. Aug 2015
    1. we try to not make a specific interface. Instead, we always use the content as the interface. This is how we always design. In Cargo, there’s no design, there’s just content. You click on a thumbnail, but the thumbnail is just a smaller representation of the project. Essentially the browser is the canvas—it is the design—whereas, with a lot of web design, you see people making designs inside the browser, like a box inside a box, and then shading here, adding a bar there. But we don’t do that. We try to disappear.
  16. Jun 2015
    1. Gilbert, Tafarodi and Malone's paper was entitled "You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read". This suggests —to say the very least—that we should be more careful when we expose ourselves to unreliable information, especially if we're doing something else at the time. Be careful when you glance at that newspaper in the supermarket.

      I wonder if this accounts for the bad design of pseudoscience publications.

    1. When you hear people talk about Slack they often say it’s “fun”. Using it doesn’t feel like work.

      I'm commenting on my friends (Medium comment) here in Hypothesis because I wanted to see how Hypothesis handles that!

  17. May 2015
    1. That is, the human annotators are likely to assign different relevance labels to a document, depending on the quality of the last document they had judged for the same query. In addi- tion to manually assigned labels, we further show that the implicit relevance labels inferred from click logs can also be affected by an- choring bias. Our experiments over the query logs of a commercial search engine suggested that searchers’ interaction with a document can be highly affected by the documents visited immediately be- forehand.
  18. Apr 2015
    1. What features are included in my Founding Membership? 1 year pre-paid subscription Subscription begins v1 release, late Spring 2015 Life-time subscription rate of $8/month 7 Sites, custom domains OK Pretty much unlimited contributors, storage and bandwidth Commerce engine, due late 2015 Grid NFC Token (limited gold edition)

      Reduced monthly cost for life and 7 sites with customizable domains

      Pretty much unlimited contributors, storage and bandwidth

      I assume this mean you can share your sites with others?

    2. Can I migrate my existing website into The Grid? We will provide tools so that you can migrate your existing website, however, there will be some limitations depending on how your website was built. In addition, third parties can use our APIs to build tools that can add additional functionality for migrating content.

      Site migration is a plus!

    1. Set body copy as justified left, ragged right?

      I'm a huge fan of justified text. I don't know why a typography checklist would encourage "ragged right". I do understand that humans can sometimes make better decisions about stretching character spacing (or not) and breaking words with hyphens at line boundaries, but computers do pretty well and it's so nice.

  19. Mar 2015
    1. Although people weren’t used to scrolling in the mid-nineties, nowadays it’s absolutely natural to scroll. For a continuous and lengthy content, like an article or a tutorial, scrolling provides even better usability than slicing up the text to several separate screens or pages.
  20. Jan 2015
    1. We strongly prefer our own term, knowledge-building community. It suggests continuity with the other knowledge-building communities that exist beyond the schools, and the term building implies that the classroom community works to produce knowledge - a collective product and not merely a summary report of what is in individual minds or a collection of outputs from group work.

      This fits with the open/closed scale for judging learning environments.

    1. We are using the term phygital as a way of emphasizing that these are a class of objects that have not simply had some digital functionality embedded within then but are connected devices whose functionality and operation is designed to exist simultaneously in both virtual and physical space.

      defining "phygital"

    2. this paper is speculating on a future in which creating game objects that link the physical and the digital presents an exciting and practical opportunity for game designers. However, such objects require interaction design approaches that not only utilise understandings from product design and graphical user interface but also how they might effectively be combined dynamically.

      Yep

    3. Dan Saffer suggests hidden affordances may actually be regarded as ‘discoverable’ (Saffer 2013) in recognition that designers may deliberately allow them to be revealed through accidental use or deliberate exploration. This is similar to the practice of game designers leaving hidden elements, or ‘easter eggs’, within their games that are discovered by accident, this practice hints at a possible interesting opportunity yet to be applied to game objects.

      The use of 'easter eggs' inside game design -- purposeful hidden objects and pathways that fall outside the common map of the game - is fascinating. I have students who say they play games in order to find these elements.

    4. the interaction design of phygital objects for games requires games designers to not only fully understand the virtual aspects the affordances they are perhaps used to, but also to extend these to include the affordances we associate with physical objects to ensure their overall game design does not cause confusion for the player.

      agency considerations in design planning

  21. Sep 2014
    1. While the Atom Protocol specifies the formats of the representations that are exchanged and the actions that can be performed on the IRIs embedded in those representations, it does not constrain the form of the URIs that are used. HTTP [RFC2616] specifies that the URI space of each server is controlled by that server, and this protocol imposes no further constraints on that control.
  22. Feb 2014
  23. Jan 2014
    1. Once you abandon entirely the crazy idea that the type of a value has anything whatsoever to do with the storage, it becomes much easier to reason about it. Of course, my point above stands: you don't need to reason about it unless you are writing unsafe code or doing some sort of heavy interoperating with unmanaged code. Let the compiler and the runtime manage the lifetime of your storage locations; that's what its good at.

      Understanding what you should (and should not) reason about in the language you are using is an important part of good programming; and a language that lets you reason (nee worry) about only the things you need to worry about is an important part of a good programming language.

    1. I first encountered empathy as an explicit design principle in the context of design thinking. You can’t design anything truly useful unless you understand the people for whom you’re designing.

      Empathy as a design principle

  24. Nov 2013
    1. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
  25. Oct 2013