week02 users, designers, and user designers

Users, Designers, and User Designers

2012 Fall Media Design Foundation Course

Week02 : Wednesday, 5. Sept. 2012Class A 3(12:00~13:15),4(13:30~14:45)Class B 6(16:30~17:45),7(18:00~19:15)

Launching the Imagination to Design 2

Book

• Stephen J. Payne, “User’s Mental Models : The

Very Ideas” in John M. Carroll, (2003) HCI Models,

Theories, and Frameworks : Toward a Multidisci-

plinary Science, CA : Morgan Kaufmann Publish-

ers, pp. 135-156.


Design Philosophy

• Herb Simon:

“Engineers are not the only professional designers. Ev-

eryone designs who devises courses of action aimed at

changing existing situations into preferred ones.

The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no dif-

ferent fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick pa-

tient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social

welfare policy for a state.”

– Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969 (p.129 of 1981 MIT press 2nd

edition)


Intro

Figure 1 (adapted from Norman (1988) p. 16): The problem of ensuring that the user's mental model corresponds to the designer's model arises because the de-signer does not talk directly with the user. The designer can only talk to the user through the "system image" - the designer's materialised mental model. The sys-tem image is, like a text, open to interpretation.


Users

• Mental Models

– User’s knowledge about the system they use.

• Bounded Rationality (Simon, 1955)

– People often have to act too quickly to allow full consideration of all their rele-

vant knowledge – they do the best they can to achieve their goals according to

the knowledge they can bring to mind, and the inferences that knowledge sup-

ports, in the time allowed.

– “Bounded rationality” : rationality that is bounded by the environmental con-

straints on their performance, interacting with their limits on access to knowl-

edge and the limits on their performance, interacting with their limits on access

to knowledge and the limits on their ability to process relevant information.


Mental Models

• Idea 1. Mental Content vs. Cognitive Architecture :

Mental Models as Theories

– Bounded Rationality : the general limits of the human infor-

mation-processing system – the constrains on attention, re-

trieval, and processing.

– Human information-processing architecture : theories of the

structure of the mind.

– Contents of the mind : what do people believe about an as-

pect of the world, what is the relation between these beliefs

and reality, and how do the beliefs affect their behavior?


Cognitive Architecture

A model of the user based on an information processing metaphor


Mental Models

• Idea 2. Models vs. Methods : Mental Models as Problem Spaces

– Mental models of machines can provide a problem space that allows

more elaborate encoding of remembered methods, and in which novice

or expert problem solvers can search for new methods to achieve tasks.

– Stepping through a sequence of states in some mental models of a ma-

chine, is often called “mental simulation” in the mental-models litera-

ture, and the kind of model that allows simulation is often called “surro-

gate”

– Reasoning is performed by sequential application of completely domain-

specific rules and thus is knowledge bounded rather than architecture

bounded.


Kissenger brings digital love to the real world

http://youtu.be/oSckuNlzQdMhttp://kissenger.lovotics.com/

http://youtu.be/oSckuNlzQdM

http://youtu.be/oSckuNlzQdM

http://kissenger.lovotics.com/


Mental Models

• Idea 3. Models vs. Descriptions : Mental Models as

Homeomorphisms

– Mental models are a special kind of representation,

sometimes called an analog representation – one that

shares the structure of the world it represents.

– Example

• The spoon is to the left of the fork spoon fork

• The knife is to the left of the spoon knife spoon fork

– Such a model allows deductive inferences to be “read

off”


Social Game : Farm Ville


Mental Models

• Idea 4. Models of Representations : Mental Models

Can Be Derived from Language, Perception, or

Imagination

– Mental models can be constructed by processing lan-

guage, but the same models might also, in principle,

have been constructed through interaction with and per-

ception of the world. Therefore a mental model provides

a way of mapping language to perception.


Interactive landscape 'Dune 4.2'

http://youtu.be/TsnBo0CZMRk

http://youtu.be/TsnBo0CZMRk


'Dune 4.2'

Dune 4.2 is a new, permanent interactive landscape by artist

Daan Roosegaarde besides the river Maas in Rotterdam, NL. This

public artwork of 60 meters utilizes less than 60 Watts while intu-

itively interacting with the behavior of its visitors; rendering it a

sustainable as well as cutting-edge concept.

Here the people of Rotterdam have a daily 'walk of light'; in this

collective experience between humans, technology and land-

scape.

www.studioroosegaarde.net


Mental Models

• Idea 5. Mental Representations of Representational Artifacts

– The yoked state space hypothesis(Payne, Squibb, & Howes, 1990)

• To construct a conceptual model of a device, the user must conceptualize

the device's representation of the task domain. This knowledge can be

represented by three components: a device-based problem space,

which specifies the ontology of the device in terms of the objects that can

be manipulated and their interrelations, plus the operators that perform

the manipulations; a goal space, which represents the objects in terms

of which user's goals are expressed; and a semantic mapping, which

determines how goal space objects are represented in the device space.


Mental Models

• Idea 6. Mental Models as Computationally Equiva-

lent to External Representations

– If structure-sharing is taken to be an important property

of mental models, then a mental model derived from

text shares the structure of the situation, not of the text.

– However, it is not clear that this distinction extends to

mental models derived from “reading” other representa-

tional artifacts, such as maps, or diagrams.


Homework Progress

• Personal Statement

– In text (A4 1 page)

– Movie (3 min long / on Vimeo)

• Social Apps

– Blog/Facebook

– Slideshare (PDF/PPT)

– Vimeo

– Pinterest

– Cover page