Emotional Design

Don Norman strikes again. Yet ANOTHER book about design, this one design that deals with human emotions. What he said in the book made a lot of sense, but directly goes against some of the stuff he said in his previous works: The Design of Everyday Things and The Design of Future Things. He talked about how design plays on emotions, what emotions are good, what are bad, and what are bad that can be used in a good way which I thought was neat. For example, if it frustrates the user, they will become much more aware of what they are doing and working with.

The Man Who Shocked the World

This book bored me, but the results were very interesting. I always wondered how Nazi soldiers were able to torment and kill people, but now it's not surprising when people can shock the heck out of someone just because they get a word wrong. So think of if they have it drilled into their head that Jews, gypsies, etc. are lower life form, and they have no remorse killing these people. The experiments were well-thought out and fun to read, but some of the material was drawn out and unnecessary, such as the stuff about his personal life, his death, getting money for research, etc. I enjoyed hearing what conclusions he came to because it explained a lot about behavior.

I also agreed with it being hard to ask someone to give up a seat. I've never done it before, but asking simple favors from friends such as, "Can I borrow that book?" is hard for me to ask. I can't imagine asking a stranger to give up their seat. And I won't lie... If I found a letter addressed to Liberal Youth, I wouldn't deliver it like I would to the Republican Party. The book was historical and interesting, but had a little fluff. I enjoyed it overall, and found the results very interesting.

Audio/Visual Creations on Mobile Devices

People have always liked doing Audio/Visual work. By this, I mainly mean movies. There are all kinds of hardware to record video and sound and software to edit video and sound. Not only videos recorded, but also animations that are made from scratch and drawing. But these take quite a bit of RAM, and a lot of input controls. But what if we could do these on mobile devices? Cell phones already record video today, why can't we edit video on them? Well, for one, screens are rather small, and input is very limited. There are many input devices that can be used for editing video such as mice, hotkeys, and even drawing pads which show up on a screen.

To solve this, the members of the Nokia research center developed a method of input which should allow for complex editing of media which is possible on mobile devices.

Basically, there are many toolbars and palettes when editing. On a computer, we have a huge screen of upwards of 27 inches which can handle everything including colors, sound, video, etc. On a mobile device, the interface isn't so easy because everything will be much smaller including the animation/video we are editting.
As you can see, basically we will rotate between toolbars, palettes, and the picture on the mobile device. For example, the top left image is our video. Top right is the screen where we can add sound. The bottom left screen is where we have an object added to the video and we can drag it around and such and place it on the video. The bottom right is where we can add in frames. So to handle the smaller screen for the interface, we have many different pages we can scroll through to perform many different actions. This is a great solution to do work on a small screen while at the same time retaining all of the features.