Thursday, March 4, 2010

Soket & Plug

I writing this because of Meiling requested me to do so, in order to make GouLou deep thinking "lock and keys" to has a 2nd n 3rd version.

The great invention of light bulbs has created many others one of those is SOCKET N PLUG which i, myself tot that it has a great connection between relationship in every person's life. As socket=Female Plug=Male, all of us one day will has our partner which socket and plug are attach together n gives connection to each other, socket provides electricity, to life up an device. As the 1 whose important to u will be the energy and motivation urself to accomplish certain task. let's say a rice cooker without plugged in to the socket it wont able to be a rice cooker that cook a wonderful rice which is its task.

In other case... relationship sometimes will has some problem. People argue, problem happen either u hv to find a better plug or socket.. or u can fix it!! there is a fius in every plug replace it and everythings will be jus fine... Sometimes a good looking socket will have a lot of plug heading to it. that's the time when rice cooker suffer alot, 3rd person comes into a relationship... 3rd person = 3head extension which i very dangerous. many accident happen because over use of it. it attract more plug to plug in and still only 1 socket is supplying energy.. rice cooker being less energetic, because sharing socket with toaster and boiler. they fight each other to get their own supplement. That's OLD and dangerous which these day profession is avoiding use the 3head extension!!

To be able to find the solution!! USE the extension which has own Socket, the long shape which 4 or 6 Socket. that's the solution it's save & convenient. Without unplug u can switch on or off on each! so rice cooker, toaster, boiler. lives happily ever after, unplug is not more necessary they married to the the socket. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING??? Find ur own plug or socket!!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Designing Pleasurable Product

Design... does design just simply creating a object aesthetically? or its solving problems? this is a really subjective question but how a product being design for impress people and pleasure it's user? Answer is fulfill user requirement and beyond usability. Pleasurable Design is divided four categories; Physio-Pleasure, Psycho-Pleasure, Socio-Pleasure, and Ideo-Pleasure.

Physio-Pleasure
Human has 5 senses; see, hear, taste, smell, touch senses. This is the most basic interaction that ones product interact with its user. A product that visually looks good will attract a person, but a particular design it only attract certain people, that group of user which has been magnified by the aesthetic value of and product will most probably explore it. whilst user hold the product, the feels of touching happen right now following by another senses.

Psycho-Pleasure
This relates to peoples cognitive and emotion reactions to products, while older people using the brand new Iphone, most of them facing the problem of using it since it is not design for older people. the touch screen the interface, it will drive them frustration. A good product should work by the expectation of user, designer should consider user knowledge, ability and disability. Psycho-pleasure can be simply relief user stress or helps they perform their task more efficiently.

TO BE CONTINUE...

Fun Design Project : Design Makes Happy



I have recently decided what i gonna to do for my Final Design Project, something different, something that I've never did. It's Design Emotion! This is kinda complex and i am personally passion about it, it evoke my curiosity. How a product itself gonna impress people? how products interact with its user? how how how and how???

“Design and Emotions Have a Key Role in the Next Generation of Goods and Services”. This is a statement given by Miguel Tito Malone, who has done a research on design and emotion. Emotional design is potentially to be a new design movement in this new decade, design is everywhere, and it is obviously become more important than ever. Nowadays people buy things not merely because of its function but also how its looks like. Besides, Emotion is also everywhere; you can see a group of people laughing, a person suffering depression hiding somewhere in the corner and many others.
In this busy world, people live in the stressful environment; most of them are emotionally unstable, worrying about yesterday and tomorrow. Having a bad emotion brings a lot of bad things, it leads to unhealthy life, it will make everything goes bad, make failure, couldn’t concentrate, being problematic, and it easily become depression. That is why I believe that, being emotional positive is extremely important because it could affect people daily performance and you will have a happier life. What I trying to say is Negativity attracts more negativity just as positivity attracts more positivity.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Social Interaction Design

Designing software for human-human interaction, then, is about more than user-friendly interfaces. Does the system encourage or facilitate appropriate behaviors from its users? Does it 'speak' using appropriate cultural language and social gestures? How do its target users want to interact with one another in the first place?
These are not questions that most social software today answers effectively. How many of your friends on Facebook do you actually consider friends? What does it mean to poke someone? Twitter begins with the question "What are you doing?" but most of the worthwhile tweets don't answer it. And why can't I put my Twitter followers into groups? If given the choice I might say one thing to my (true) friends and another to colleagues and coworkers...but the tool forces the lowest common denominator.
At IDEO we've started using the term "social interaction design" to describe the work of creating tools for both human-computer and human-human-interaction. At the very least, that means the work requires designers or design teams that understand as much about ethnographic methods as they do about information architecture and interface design. But merely adding an anthropologist to a design team to tackle a social software problem isn't enough. Though similar in many ways to more traditional forms of interaction design, the work is unique enough that it has forced us to look at many of our own design processes and adapt them for these new challenges. Here are some of the ways social interaction design is different:

From user-centered to users-centered
Human-centered approaches to industrial and interaction design have long focused on studying human behavior to create informed and appropriate designs. In product-centric contexts, human factors specialists pay close attention to human-artifact interaction and look for opportunities for improvement.
With social software, the object of study is less tangible. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules. Who are the stakeholders in the system and what do each of them want or need? How does information flow and where are the friction points? What does it feel like to be a part of this particular culture?
At one level this seems mundane and obvious, but at another it is profound: what the designer or team is doing is conducting their research in the language of interface. This is ethnography without words.Of course, these are the same sorts of questions any ethnographer asks—in that sense they are nothing new. But the intensity required to gain this kind of understanding, both in terms of time and level of immersion, is substantially greater than in the more tangible and direct forms of user study. There's a reason most anthropologists spend months to years in the field producing an ethnography: this is complex, time-consuming stuff. Design projects tasked with creating social software should expect to spend the majority of their time in situ with whatever community or organization the tool is meant to serve.

From design-by-principle to ethnography-by-prototype
Human-centered design often begins with a "human factors" research phase that culminates in synthesized concept frameworks and a set of design principles. This is essentially a compressed form of traditional ethnography where understanding is distilled down to key insights. From this clarified perspective the design team then builds a series of prototypes which may be taken into the field for further feedback.
When designing social software, that process requires some adaptation. Because of the complexities that come with understanding a cultural system, a set of design principles simply can't contain enough information to drive effective design on its own. A comprehensive ethnographic study—the kind that produces a book several inches thick—might make an ideal first step, but in practice no one will ever have the time to conduct one.
The best alternative, we've found, is to blend the human factors and prototyping phases through iterative cycles of creating and evaluating software concepts. As early as possible, the team creates rough concepts of a solution and uses them to guide conversations and explorations of the social system they're trying to serve. Conversations about the concepts highlight weaknesses, the concepts are modified accordingly, and the process is repeated. Again, and again, and again.
At one level this seems mundane and obvious, but at another it is profound: what the designer or team is doing is conducting their research in the language of interface. This is ethnography without words. By creating concepts as early as possible and using them to both express and evaluate their understanding, the design team is taking the most direct route they can toward the construction of a socially effective solution.
In practicality, what this means for the designer is that a combination of traditional anthropological and interaction design skills are essential. Throughout the design process the work requires fluency both in the language of interface and the methods of ethnographic research. Such a combination is rare find in a single designer. When the task is left to the team, they will need to be sure to work closely together, involving both skill sets in every step along the way.

From design engagement to a design dialogue
The iterative prototyping process is always a dialogue between the social interaction designer and the social system for which the software is being designed. This process of refinement doesn't end with the software's launch, however. In fact, the launch of social software is really just part of an ongoing design process.
This is a fact that has become almost a given in the internet age. No longer required to reserve new versions for software boxes, today's developers are free to improve their software constantly.
This agile approach to software development, and design, is especially important for the social variety, however, because the human-human interactions the tool is meant to facilitate are themselves subject to change. Social interactions are inherently dynamic. Organizations and communities evolve over time, and the best tools grow accordingly.
And then there are the effects of the software itself: good social software will facilitate and encourage social interactions that were previously difficult, or indeed impossible. Thus the very act of creating the tools may profoundly alter the system that that tool was meant for. The tool changes the community changes the tool.
Unfortunately, the terms of many design engagements aren't set up to support the ongoing work that is actually needed, and in real life the process is often cut short. This is not only bad news for the designer, but for the organization or community the designer is meant to help as well: without this ongoing, iterative design dialog, the value of even the best solutions will wane dramatically over time. (For a great article about this, check out The Agency Problem by Joshua Porter.)

From anthropologist to armchair psychologist
Okay, so maybe this is about playing both an anthropologist and an armchair psychologist, but social interaction design requires taking all that learning about a particular community or organization and augmenting it with a sensitivity towards the more general peculiarities of human nature. Perhaps using this as a short-cut to effective systems, social interaction design can rely upon the knowledge that many aspects of human behavior are consistent across cultural settings.
For instance, altruism and anonymity seldom go hand in hand. Social software should either reward individual participation or publicize the non-compliant (we prefer the first option). People tend to resist change, particularly to their own personal habits and workflow, so how can a system minimize change by integrating into what users already do? Where change is mandatory, how can the transition be made as smooth as possible? And good design often leverages the path of least resistance; most users stick with the default choices. How can you use this to the benefit of the user and the social system at the same time? (Recommended reading: Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.)

Computing for older users: Patronising or practical?

What connects Italian vegans, Valerie Singleton, and Linux Mint? Well they're all involved in a firm whose business is bringing computing to older users.

Whether or not Simplicity Computing succeeds will be a big test of two things - the appetite of older people to get online and the attractiveness of open source software as a means of dealing with digital exclusion.

Yesterday we took 80-year-old Betty Parsons for her first encounter with a computer. She climbed the stairs at the home of Nigel Houghton, who's masterminding the Simplicity venture, and sat herself down in front of the machine. When it's switched on for the first time, up pops Valerie Singleton - co-founder of the business launching Simplicity - and starts explaining what to do next, much like Microsoft's talking paperclip.

It's very basic - how to use a mouse, how to navigate your way around the simple front page and so on - but it needs to be. It's instructive watching someone using a mouse for the first time. Betty found it a real struggle - and that must be a big hurdle which some people will not clear.

Simplicity runs on the Linux Mint free operating system, and Liam Proven, who's designed the whole set-up, tracked down a company called Vegan Solutions - yes those Italian vegans - which had already produced a software package aimed at older users. He's worked with the Italians to adapt their Eldy software for British use.




So the home page is deliberately stripped down to essentials: six buttons leading to e-mail, web browsing, chat, documents, your personal profile - and more video tutorials by Val Singleton. There are no long menus with bewildering choices and wherever you are in the system, there's another button marked Square One, which takes you back to... well, you can guess.

Liam Proven told me that he was "platform-agnostic" but had chosen a Linux operating system for three reasons:

"Firstly, it means a fairly big price saving because Linux is free, so £70 to £80 is saved on what is meant to be a low-priced computer. Secondly, it's extremely secure so there's no need for anti-virus, and thirdly it runs very much better and faster than Windows on a more limited machine."
But there's a couple of questions to be asked about Simplicity. It's not all that cheap - systems range from £299 without screen or keyboard to £525 for a complete system. Then there are some people who will undoubtedly feel patronised by the very idea of a computer for older users - one woman got in touch with me this morning to express her annoyance - and others will ask why they shouldn't be taught to use Windows like just about everybody else.

When I visited a UK Online centre the other day, a group of older users of varying degrees of computing skill were using the desktops to surf the web and send e-mails, occasionally asking for help from a volunteer. The computers were all running Windows XP and it set me wondering whether this is still the first operating system most novices see when they come to one of these places.

UK Online pointed out that every centre operates independently, obtaining its funding from various sources and choosing what hardware and software to buy. But yes, it appears they almost exclusively use Windows - and mostly XP. A spokesman said: "Many choose Microsoft as it is the leading system used in the workplace or on PCs bought in retail stores and therefore the one customers often wish to learn."

They are also almost all using Internet Explorer to browse the internet - 86% of the computers are on various versions of IE, with just 10% on Firefox - so if you're learning about computers in a UK Online centre, you'll almost certainly be plunged into a Windows world.

So Simplicity is swimming against the tide, and may find some resistance, not from older customers, but from sons and daughters who'd rather see their parents learn the same system as themselves. But Betty Parsons certainly liked the look of it - though getting to grips with that mouse will still be a challenge - and the company says its stand was besieged by eager customers when it showed off a pilot system at an exhibition recently.

There's no reason - except for inertia - why we should all have to start our computing journey using the same system. Indeed, if Simplicity proves a hit, it may encourage others to look at their software and ask why it is so difficult for a first-time user to grasp. Oh, and one more thing - Val Singleton or a talking paperclip? No contest.