Design: April 2004 Archive Page

Discuss William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. In-class activity: find a partner. Inspect what he or she is wearing or carrying, and write down every brand name you can spot. We will collate the results and vote on what is, or isn't "cool."

Brand Name	Cool rating?
VICTORIA SECRET	14+
Advil	14
Hanes	13
Adidas	12
Smackers	12
Eclipse	11
Twix	11
Blistex	11
Bath & Body	11
nike	10
Old Navy	10
Wal Mart	10
Bic	9
Listerine	9
Nickelodian	9
Orbits	9
SHU	9
Visa	9
Skechers	9
Big Red	8
Express	8
Giant Eagle Ad Car	8
Jansport	8
Juicy Fruit	8
Maybelline	8
Panasonic	8
roxy	8
Steve Madden	8
Verizon	8
Kohls	8
American Eagle	7
CoverGirl	7
Dino's	7
ETNIES	7
Extra	7
FOSSIL	7
MUDD	7
Nine West	7
Aquafina	6
Lerner	6
Ralph Lauren	6
Relic	6
Trident	6
Wrigleys	6
Extra	6
Altoids	5
Emily the strange	5
No Boundaries	5
BASIC	4
Paper Mate	4
PB	4
TIMBERLAND	4
Kay Jewelers	4
Aeropostale	3
Fashion Bug	3
George	3
Hillfiger	3
HURLEY	3
Jerzee	3
National City	3
Nokia	3
Tachikara	3
Tilt	3
Vaseline	3
Bad cat	2
clairs	2
J. JILL	2
Jeffrey Bean	2
Nextel	2
ROSE ART	2
Kyocera	2
Legend	2
K-mart	2
EB TEK	1
License	1
Micron	1
Northwest Territory	1
OPI	1
Pilot	1
Swerve	1
ULTRA BLEND	1
Unisoly	1
Virgin mobile	1
Athletic Works	0
Atlantic	0
Jerz	0
C.E. George	0
Canyon River Blues	0
East Port	0
Ed White Basics	0
Jostens	0
Modern Book	0
Motorola	0
Shop n Save	0
Uniball	0
wccc	0
Maxell	0
Cartier	-1

Cool Hunting at Seton Hill UniversityJerz's Literacy Weblog)

In the final weeks of term, it's not surprising that a headache pain reliever rates so highly. I was surprised at how highly various brands of gum and other oral products rated. Victoria's Secret actually got cheers, with some people, both men and women, putting up both hands. Hanes seems, by contrast, very boring to me, but hey, it's underwear, so I guess that was good enough for this class.

though Limbaugh is wrong to decide that video games are entirely like other games, his comparison opens up interesting possibilities for anyone wanting to develop a theory of video games as a medium because it suggests that any such theory ought to deal with both sides of video gaming's cultural history. Though many readers in English departments will be more comfortable with the expressive aspects of games that essentially resemble those of more familiar forms like film or literature (even as they may be suspicious of the right of any popular medium to claim for itself the relevance of those forms), the present seems an opportune time for expanding the range of what literary and cultural study might do with new media. --Hayot and Wesp --Reading Game/Text: EverQuest, Alienation, and Digital Communities  (Postmodern Culture)

Via TerraNova.

On Instructional Technology and Face-to-Face InteractionJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I recently spent four hours in a training session, during which this was all I could see of the instructor without straining my neck. The classroom that I prefer has monitors embedded beneath glass-topped tables.

Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads.

"This is what happens when the game's off, basically," said Mike `Burnie' Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue's creators. "They're chatting away, spending their idle time like the rest of us do, just passing the day away."

And so they do -- gossiping, arguing, strategizing and generally wondering what the heck they're doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, fighting blue guys or red guys for no apparent reason. The comedy, absurdist, military, and oddly bureaucratic, was compared by one critic to the plays of Samuel Beckett. --Spielbergs with a joystick (Toronto Star)

Tonight I'll be discussing LPattern Recognition with my literature class... that book centers around the underground cult phenomenon of a strange film being released on the Internet as anonymous clips.

This article also includes a reference to "My Trip to Liberty City," by new media artist Jim Munroe.

A lot of designers think that a work is part of a person, that it has come from some mysterious place inside. How it will sell depends on who we are as individuals. But an interesting thing for me is that I think we ourselves change from time to time. I may be Tung Chiang, but I can also be somebody else in order to see things differently.--Tung Chiang
--Uni Chair (Metropolis Mag)

Via join-the-dots: "The Uni Chair, created by Tung Chiang for Philadelphia-based Bozart, is amazing—twenty-four arms radiating out of a central sphere to form a forty-eight-inch diameter inflatable seat."

This looks like something a hectopus would use.

Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator of their progress. The earliest uses of weblogs thus far have been as replacements for writing journals. Despite difficulties, there are several advantages to the use of weblogs in this setting, especially in that they provide a more immediate and social environment for writing (Kajder & Bull, 2003), which when combined with the improvements to student writing that seem to accrue simply by moving to a computerized form of journals (Goldberg, Russel, & Cook, 2004), represents an obvious area for experimentation.

There has been a move over the last decade toward using portfolios of student materials to improve evaluation and learning. --Alex Halavais --Weblogs as 'replacement' educational technology (Alex Halavais)

Friday afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting through a number of final presentations from graduating English majors. My colleague Mike Arnzen blogged about the online portfolios that some students chose to produce instead of traditional 3-ring binders.

While praising the information management and convenience of the online portfolios, Arnzen also noted a few downsides -- one of which was the fact that an e-portfolio is geared towards serving up the final product, rather than presenting a coherent reflection on progress.

But my freshmen who have been blogging almost since the first week of school will have a tremendous archive of material to consult when they are seniors. Those students who choose to submit electronic portfolios will probably be the ones who have taken plenty of new media journalism courses (and if I'm the instructor, I imagine they'll be blogging). To compensate for the weaknesses of the online portfolio genre, and to help students take fuller advantage of the strengths of the online medium, perhaps we need to rethink the reflective introduction assignment, which currently assumes that the student will write an ordinary prose essay. For those students who choose to submit an online portfolio, perhaps that introductory essay needs to be rethought as a series of individual blog entries, which themselves contain links back to important blog entries from the past. Thus, instead of clicking on items in a table of contents, the evaluation of an online portfolio will be like reading a hyperlinked narrative, written with the full knowledge that the very nature of the WWW means that the reader of an online portfolio will be reading the same way he or she reads any online text -- looking for bold keywords, bulleted lists, subject headings, and links, and slowing down to read in more detail only when the text is particularly interesting.

Link found via KiarosNews.

Better Dialog BoxJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I recently wrote about a survey with a confusing dialog box... while trying to download a Microsoft update, I came across this dialog box, which does a much better job.

Voice recognition systems have come a long way in the last decade and are used in places like call centres, home PCs and even mobile phones.

Dashboards are becoming the hub of the car But over the next 10 years, we could even be holding virtual conversations with the car dashboard. --Richard Taylor --Talking to your car becoming natural (BBC)

Computer games represent one of the fastest-growing, most profitable entertainment businesses. Making movies, by contrast, is getting tougher and more expensive, now costing, with marketing fees, an average of $103 million a film. That is one reason, among others, that those with power in Hollywood are avidly seeking to get into the game business while also reshaping standard movie contracts so they can grab a personal share of game rights.--Laura M. Holson --Out of Hollywood, Rising Fascination With Video Games (NY Times)

If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design school where the idea was ?If you are here, you are so important, the rest of the world doesn't count.? Not a single person from that school that I know of has ever been really successful outside of school. In fact, most are the kind of mid-level management drones and hacks they so despised as students. A suit does not make you a genius. No matter how good your design is, somebody has to construct or manufacture it. Somebody has to insure it. Somebody has to buy it. Respect those people. You need them. Big time. --Michael Beirut --Michael McDonough'sTop Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School (Design Observer)

Thousands of patients in NHS hospitals are being forced to watch television for up to 15 hours a day... Matt Durcan, an IT specialist, said he complained to staff at North Hampshire Hospital after he was unable to turn off the TV set beside his son's bed. --NHS patients 'forced to watch TV' (BBC)

Didn't these guys user test their design at all? What an insultingly stupid "service".

Thanks, Rosemary.

The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files. Middle-class students raised in a high-tech, service-sector economy are several generations removed from the manual labor of factories or farms.

The saga of the discovery of the cave paintings can also show students how history is written and revised. The first cave found, at Altamira in northern Spain, was stumbled on by a hunter and his dog in 1868. The aristocratic estate owner, an amateur archaeologist, surveyed the cave but did not see the animals painted on the ceiling until, on a visit in 1879, his five-year-old daughter looked up and exclaimed at them. Controversy over dating of the paintings was prolonged: critics furiously rejected the hypothesis of their prehistoric origin and attributed them to forgers or Roman-era Celts. The discoveries of other cave paintings in Spain and the Dordogne from the 1890s on were also met with skepticism by the academic establishment. Funding for the early expeditions had to come from Prince Albert of Monaco. The most famous cave of them all, Lascaux, was found in 1940 by four adventurous schoolboys who tipped off their schoolmaster. Thus children, with their curiosity and freedom from preconception, have been instrumental in the revelation of man's primeval past. --Camille Paglia --Magic of Images (Arion)

When Paglia writes and talks, she jumps from one thought to another, sometimes making tiny hops, often making grand and heroic leaps. If she were in my freshman composition class, I'd tell her to drop some of her supporting points in order to explore the others in more depth; I'm not trained in the visual image, so I'd appreciate a little more explication.

This particular text, with the words separated spatially from images they describe, disturbs me -- I have to scroll back and forth between the words and the images. What kind of a web desiner would separate the images and lump together at the end? I'm sure they weren't separated during the original talk that this printed document was based on. A baffling design choice.

Anyway, this is more than the usual "what's the matter with kids today" article that older academics can't resist writing from time to time.

Lawley is not alone in looking to blogs as a potential escape from the "course as online powerpoint slide" stranglehold of today's commercial course management systems. Charles Lowe of Cyberdash.com recently published an account of his own experience using open source weblogs (PostNuke) to support his online writing class; in a companion piece he compares PostNuke to Blackboard, and finds Blackboard lacking.

And he is not the only one coming to this conclusion. Laura Gibbs, in her blog post "Blackboard, Students and Publishing on the Web," pretty much captured the differences between a blog-based online learning experience and one provided by the traditional vendors when she said "Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students." --John Kruper --Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille's heel?  (The Electric Lyceum)

At Seton Hill, we actually have two different systems -- one for administering grades and course registration, and the other for content management. While I find our CMS cumbersome, next year I will probably use it to let students upload copies of their papers. I don't really have that much of an opinion about our registration/grade reporting tool, since I've used it only a couple times -- just to log on, enter midterm or final grades, and leave. Yes the interface is clunky and stupid, and yes it's insulting that the web-based program expands to take over my whole screen, so that I can't open my spreadsheet gradebook in one window, and copy and paste the grades in another; instead, I have to print out my grades, switch to another window, and type them in from the printed page. Stupid. Annoying. But I so rarely need to use that program that I don't get worked up about it.

While the MoveableType back end is much better designed, because I use it all the time, even the minor annoyances consume far more of my time than the major annoyances in SHU's course registration program.

Another thought... while it's possible to set up a course so that a student must participate in Blackboard forum or post on a blog, the motivation to do is smaller, since the penalties for not doing so (or simply for not doing so today) are infinitesmal compared to the penalty of not getting any courses at all. How frequently do students need to add or drop courses, anyway? Yes, that's important technology to provide, but the tools to let students do that don't have to be perfect, because students have to register for classes if they want to be a student -- just like I have to report the grades, or I'm not doing my job. The interface can be less than beautiful if it gets the job done.

While I can see that the administrators -- who are usually the ones making the decisions regarding the purchase of courseware and registrationware (sorry for the dorky neologism) would think otherwise, I would prefer that my teaching not be leashed to software optimized for the occasional (once-a-semester) administrative needs of registration.

My students can still register for courses using the university's system if I ask them to blog. But Kruper makes a good point -- if my specialty were teaching human anatomy or French verb forms, I wouldn't have nearly the motivation to learn all this technological stuff. There would be other technological solutions that would appear to meet other, more immediate, needs.

Say, how do you feel about ice cream? Fan of the ice cream? Maybe it'll help soften the punch of Quality Inn's video game assortment. You've got three different kinds of ice cream bars to choose from, and they'll only cost you a buck and a half each. Finally, Atlantic City has a stereotypical bargain to match Vegas' gamut of three dollar all-you-can-eat buffets. There's just one little problem...


It's filled with crap, and I know what you're thinking. It's just gooey melted ice cream. Gross, but not too gross. You don't want to touch it, but even if you were unable to keep the ice cream wrapper from touching it, it wouldn't be a dealbreaker.
--The Worst Game-Room Ever! (X-Entertainment)

I'm laughing so hard my eyes are watering. That definitely beats my encounter with poorly-designed signs in a hotel game room.

Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a bicycle with square wheels. It's a weird contraption, but he can ride it perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels roll.

Stan Wagon rides his square-wheeled trike over a special roadway. Courtesy of Stan

--Riding on Square Wheels (Science News)

For those of you who might feel this blog neglects geometry, and the inverted catenary in particular.

Quibble: that looks like a tricycle to me -- there's a basket in between two back wheels.

I am sanitaryware enthusiast (I have no idea why) and have been restoring and supplying antique bathroom fittings for the past fourteen years. I also collect trade catalogues, salesmen'ssamples and even full size W.C.'sand washbasins. --Simon Kirby --Flushed With Pride - The Story of Thomas Crapper (JLDR)

Oh, those eccentric Brits. Much more colorful, and far less likely to commit homicide, than the eccentrics we grow on this side of the Atlantic.

'Click Cancel to Proceed': Pop-Up Dialog Rhetoric

A little while ago, I got an e-mail from a Ph.D. student working on a research project. Would I mind filling out an online form that asked questions about leadership and religion? The form says I can leave certain questions blank. So I do. After I've filled out about 20 items, I realize there's one multiple choice question that doesn't apply to me. I've already ticked a radio button, but there's no way to untick it, and no option for "does not apply to me". Oh, well... I pick an answer at random, since I'm too lazy to hit "Clear" and punch in all the data again just to correct this one item.

When I push "submit", I get the follwing dialog box:

On too many occasions, I've seen a form go blank because I've accidentally hit "Cancel," so I take a lot of time reading this before I choose what to do.

Obviously the researcher wants good data, and gaps in the data are bad... so, while I first read a policy statement that indicated everything I was doing was voluntary and I could stop at any time, the rhetoric of this particular interface which privileges the researcher's perspective, thus working directly against the goals of the document that stresses that my contribution is voluntary. This interface pressures a volunteer to conform, since it presents going back to supply the "missing" data is the only "OK" option. By contrast, my decision to withhold information is associated with the "Cancel" button -- not exactly my favorite button in the world, since I click it only when I'm frustrated and giving up. While it's a stretch to suggest that I've been harmed by the psychological manipulation this interface attempts, I see the interface working against the ethical goals of the "your rights as a volunteer" statement I had to read through before I started the survey.

To top it all off, when I finally went ahead and hit "Cancel," I got a "server not found" message.

Not only did this survey waste my time, and the time of who knows how many other people who took it, it also wasted the time of the researcher -- who's going to have to get another list of potential survey respondents.

Oh, well... it gave me something to blog about.

To cut to the chase:

• The game industry currently doesn't believe in "game research". You're either working on a shippable product, or you're bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation.
• There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can't be invented through a sequence of incremental, shippable products.
• Academia currently has no funding mechanism (and potentially, no tenure mechanism) to support research inventing new game genres (research that often, along the way, involves solving some hard, first class technical problems).

So neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore these hard to reach regions in design space. Who will?

Michael Mateas --Whither Game Research (Grand Text Auto)

Mateas focuses on interactive drama.

Just-in-Time HandoutsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

After looking at my teaching evals from last term and talking with the boss, I can see I need to spend more time discussing my assignment expectations. I'm teaching mostly freshmen, which means they are perhaps more needy than the students in the upper-level tech writing classes I used to teach every term. But I'm a freshman too.

I rarely create paper handouts; if I'm going to design instructional material, I'd rather do something that can go right on my curricular website. The world at large simply doesn't need to know what I expect my students to do in Exercise 3, but my students do. I usually first show them the skeletal description of the assignment on the course web page, perhaps clicking them through one or two of the online handouts describing the assignment genre or major issues that are part of the assignment. I might write a refresher on the board the week before the assignment is due, and invite questions. If I get any e-mailed requests for help, I'll reply to the whole class.

My teaching strategy typically invites students to try to solve certain problems on their own first, after which they submit an ungraded draft for peer-review and/or my own review. I will then hold a more detailed workshop, focusing on a handful of issues arising from my examination of their rough drafts. Now that I have a better idea what parts of journalism, blogging, web authorship, or literary study SHU students find the most challenging, I think I'll be able to be more pro-active next time around. But for now, some students protest that, if they had known what I wanted in advance, they would have given it to me in the first place, and then they wouldn't need to revise it so much.

I do try to emphasize that as a writing teacher I am not so much interested in the efficient generation of perfect product, but rather my job is the much harder task of training them to develop a good process -- which includes the revision of multiple drafts (even if the original draft was pretty good).

Still, students want more guidance. I believe I've noticed that SHU students may have a little more trouble following oral instructions than I'm used to facing in the classroom, but perhaps that's simply because I'm teaching mostly freshmen, upon whom study guides and worksheets and checklists were lavished in high school.

A few times in the past few weeks, I've noticed that the students were hungering for a handout that I hadn't yet written, and that I wouldn't have the time to write in order to get it to them early enough to help them meet the deadline. Since I've given three talks in the past three weeks, I'm feeling a little more frazzled than usual, but I tend to overprepare my handouts because I'm always trying to add to my collection of online instructional tools.

The world at large doesn't really need to learn how Jerz wants his EL150 students to complete Exercise 4...

Here's where the "just-in-time handout" comes in. It's not pretty, but it's the process, not the product, that counts.

When students seem to have more than the usual amount of questions about a topic or assignment, I've started opening a blank word processor at the teacher's station in the front of the room, typing subject headings, and then asking the class to help me fill in the details. When the class period is over, we've collaborated on the rubric (see the "presubmission report handout" (for Intro to Lit Stud). It's far from my best handout -- it probably won't make much sense if you weren't there in the class as we were constructing it -- which only shows just how much effort goes into preparing an instructional resource for the Internet. I tell myself that it's OK for me, once in a great while, to create a handout that's just for the students of one class, and that is' OK for me to use the Internet like a photocopier, simply to distribute that handout without turning it into a respectable online document.

As I lead the class discussion and insert student comments in the proper spaces in the outline, I wonder if perhaps more students are doodling instead of taking notes. Further, sometimes I wonder whether that typing student contributions into a word processor is fundamentally different from doing the same thing with marker on the whiteboard. And if I already knew what parts of which assignments my students would find challenging and which they would find easy, maybe I wouldn't need to spend class time fielding so many questions and tweaking assignment parameters.

The wisdom bourne of experience is something I'm lacking in my first year teaching in a brand new program. Fortunately, I'll see many of these students again, and I'll get to the same courses again with new students. I'll learn what works.

Update, 05 Apr: This entry has generated some discussion on Pedablogue, Mister B.S., and CultureCat. Thanks for the great conversation, everybody.

Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kind of work that it requires for students and faculty. This article presents a qualitative case study of a Web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a taboo topic: students' persistent frustrations in Web-based distance education. First, this paper will analyze why these negative phenomena are not found in the literature. Second, this article will discuss whether students' frustrations inhibit their educational opportunities. In this study, students' frustrations were found in three interrelated sources: lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions on the Web, and technical problems. It is concluded that these frustrations inhibited educational opportunities. This case study illustrates some student perspectives and calls attention to some fundamental issues that could make distance education a more satisfying learning experience. --Noriko Hara and Rob Kling --Students' Frustrations with a Web-Based Distance Education Course (First Monday)

One of my upcoming projects is putting together an online course, "Computer Game Culture and Theory." While I assume that students who opt to take that class will have a high level of technological aptitude, I'll still need to be aware of, and compensate in advance for, the ways that my particular teaching style will have to change when transferred online.

I tend to over-prepare online handouts, adding to them year after year, adding ever more examples and explanations. One year when I filled out the syllabus in advance, with links to every handout and sample assignments to download, the students felt the website was confusing and overwhelming. The next year, I prepared all the handouts and supporting documents, but only added them to the online syllabus gradually, as the students felt a need for them. This caused a different problem, in that students felt a little frustrated that long detailed handouts appeared after they struggled with a much shorter set of instructions and produced a rough draft that, they felt, would have been better if they had known, in advance, the kind of document I "wanted" them to produce.

It's human nature to ignore the instructions, so I'm not surprised when students don't read the eight-page, densely hyperlinked handouts I sometimes foist upon them. In a face-to-face situation, I can very easily talk my way through any online instructions that are vague. I think I may have been depending too much on orally presenting information. Hmm... it's ridiculously late, but I just had a thought. (See next blog entry.)

People use these devices [i.e. remotes] while watching movies or TV shows at home. Given this, two key elements of the user's situation are likely to be:

• Wearing glasses for distance viewing, rather than reading
• Low levels of lighting

Of course, a young designer whose vision hasn't yet started to deteriorate wouldn't have the first problem. And anyone reviewing design options in a brightly lit meeting room wouldn't have the second problem. Finally, professionals reviewing design proposals are likely to be sober, whereas many of their customers will be making a major dent in a six-pack, reducing both visual acuity and clarity of thought. If your customer base is likely to imbibe, you must design accordingly. --Jakob Nielsen --Why Consumer Products Have Inferior User Experience (Alertbox)

I used to tell my tech writing students, "Write for Homer Simpson."