The Design of Everyday Things

We live surrounded by devices that are able to solve all of our problems but are too complex to use. as Donald A. Norman mentions in his book, " added functionality generally comes along at the price of added complexity". The computers at the Flawn academic Center for instance, are connected in a very ellaborated network, but sometimes users get confused by the complexity of it's software.

Beyond Words

Words affect the way we think. We think through words, and everytime we read, we are pronouncing the words in our head, which means that not only words affect our thoughts, but their sound also have an influence in our way of thinking. Words act as "light bulbs" in our brain, because everytime we pronounce a word, we make associations with other words that have the same sound. The spanish journalists Alex Grijelmo, in his book "The Seduction of the Words", states that "nothing could ever measure the power that is hidden by the words... Words are the structure of thought, the embryos of ideas, and their content exceeds the simple and official definition given by the dictionary... Words have their roots in thoughts and evolve with them, but these words contain previously the seed of a cultural heritage that transcends an individual", which means that words evolve with our civilization, and sometimes a word have a meaning that goes beyond it's denotative representation, and that is affected by its history, and by our personal experiences. Words hide a power that has been discovered and applied by people like politicians, journalists, and publicists, to affect perspectives and thoughts.

Tokens

According to Denise Schmandt the beginnings of writing are directly related to the use of tokens in ancient times. After reading the different theories concerning "how writing came about" I believe that Denise's theory is the most rational and well supported and even though William Warburton's pictographic theory is also well supported, The evidences of Denise's Theory are more ancient. Denise describe the use of symbolic tokens about 8000 B.C.,like clay objects of different shapes that were used as counters of different products. I find interesting the use of tokens in the ancient times because tokens are portable and relatively easy to create and use. Denise also mention that the the beginning of sign communication could have its roots in the incisions that were made in the envelopes used to protect the tokens, which seems as a very rational idea because it connects the "pictographic theory" with the "token theory".

Re-redesigning The Butterfly Ballot

The concept is the same, but now I used a bigger size of letters, and I change some colors. I still think that using many colors is a bad idea because colors have different psychological meanings, and some colors can have advantage over others(some colors are more visually appealing and eye catching than others). I also put all the candidates in one column because if they are in two columns, the left side would have more advantage than the right side. I still think that the first candidate in the column has more advantage than the others, because his name is the first name seen by the voters.

Augmenting Human Intellect

I believe that technology could be used to augment the human intellect. Eventhough it is true that using tools as a calculator not necessarily "make us smarter" but efficient, we can use technology to understand complex concepts, uncover patterns, and enrich our perspective through tools like visualizations and complex data representations. It is not the same, for example, to understand the graphical aspect of tridimensional functions from a calculus book, than to learn from an interactive 3-dimensional visualization represented in a computer. We can also use computers to access huge amounts of information in small periods of time, which make us able to make more connections of ideas and to expand our perspectives. As someone mentioned in the class, technology is also becoming an important tool for education, and it is being used to help little kids to have a better understanding of math, sciences, and even art.