Interface Design Week 1, Class 2 – Reading Reflections

Escaping the Flat Lands:
The Author begins with talking about the struggle to liberate information that is bound to the flat 2 dimensional space & how through the centuries people have been trying to do so. During the renaissance, artists experimented with different ways to portray depth on a flat canvas. Theories usually involving the study of geometry to give the illusion of depth & space. The article goes on to talk about how Galileo recorded & displayed the sunspots he so carefully researched. He shows his research & data in a multitude of ways which shows the limits of 2D dimensional paper he tried to explain his findings from. The Japanese during WWII used the complexity of the Java railroad schedule used by train agents working as spies for the Japanese to prepare them for future invasion. “The spy graphical timetable portrays detailed operations of an intricate & irregular system &, at a more distant view, the overall structure & pattern of the railroad – a dual mirco & macro reading. It is very much like an excellent map, but with many dimensions breaking free of direct analogy to conventional cartographic flatland” ~Envisioning information/ Escaping the Flat Lands by Edward Tufte ~ page 26. What I gathered from my readings of the Flatlands is to stress the importance of going beyond the 2 dimensional to add a 3rd or 4th dimension when trying to display data but as to not go overboard with design to the point of making the data irrelevant to the readers of the information I am trying to communicate the data to as a designer.

The Power of Representation:
Basically the reading starts off talking about the amazing potential power of the unaided human mind to be adaptive, grow & be flexible in a changing environment. & how in societies with a written documentation information is gained in a variety of different ways. e.g.; through apprenticeships, or through oral learning. 2000 years ago Plato wrote that Socrates initially felt that written records were not as effective as receiving the same information directly from the author. He felt that because you can’t ask a book a question if you have one where as if the same information came directly from the author you would have a more effective way of receiving that information. He felt reading was more for entertainment of the masses & not to be taken seriously. In contrast in the Middle ages, Susan Noakes felt that the abilities of a novel to continuously propel a reader forward to be a hallmark of a well written piece of literature. She felt it best not to have the author there to contest the readers own thoughts & ideas to be more interesting due to the varying points of view. The author, Donald Norman, goes on to describe how using cognitive artifacts or symbols to aid in story telling help add precision & power to the memory of the unaided mind. How do I relate this to my own experience, well the use of symbols as representations of things or people is used pretty often in the design world. E.g. Video game symbols as representation of real world objects. So it would relate to me if I were to say design a video game where as this type of thinking would be important. How do I feel that the reading from The Power of Representation relates to my own work? Well In this reading I felt that the section “Additive & Substitutive Representations” had pretty specific information regarding designers. “Color (hue) is frequently used to represent density or quantity, especially in geographic maps, satellite photographs, and medical imagery. But hue is a substitutive representation, and the values of interest are usually additive scales. Hence hue is inappropriate for this purpose. The use of hue should lead to interpretive difficulties. ;Many colorful scientific graphics, usually generated by a com­puter, use different hues to represent numerical value. These graphics force the viewer to keep referring to the legend that gives the mapping between the additive scale of interest and the hues. Density, saturation, or brightness would provide a superior representation.” The Power of Representation” by Donald Norman