Tuesday, July 29, 2014

New Terms, New Discussions

Muscle Memory: On discussion between cricket and baseball, Siddharth was talking how inspite of the similarity of the two games, the way you are used to hold the bat is the key to play the game. Muscles thus, have a memory, bodies thus, behave in certain specific ways.

Dogfood: My cousin was explaining me the way many tech companies go about evaluating their own products. Many CEOs would go by the question - "Will you eat your own dogfood," essentially asking "Will you use your own product."

Frustration Free Packing: Going nuts over opening a recently ordered telephone shower, my cousin was frustrated after using all kinds of objects to undo its plastic case. He thus told me about the concept of packaging things in a way such that they are convenient to unpack, open (read without the use of external objects like sharps, knives, scissors, too much pulling, crushing, tearing, and so on). Amazon, my cousin informs, markets a lot of products for its frustration free packaging.

On Intuitive Design: Another question we stumbled upon is the idea behind intuitive design in mobile phones. We debated what would it mean for mobile phones to make its design and use intuitive. We discussed that it involves translating a host of cognitive object-action relationship and behaviour into the virtual world? It is about transferring the real physical space of the object into the virtual world, trying to keep the engagement of the user still similar. While some linkages are certainly broken (for example our tactile understanding of objects and things that are no longer physical), they are replaced by newer visual or other cognitive definitions. For example, the replacement of paper letters and envelopes by e-mails as communication devices is cognitively established in the virtual space by icons that will consist of "envelop", "pencil" and such other diagrams. What intuitively is at work here is the visual mental association, and not the tactility of the object, which is actually taken over by the computer screen and keyboard. The paper translates as a flat rectangular outline box on the screen, sometimes even virtually textured or ruled. However, the keyboard certainly fundamentally changes the way in which we write. Thus, an intermediate level of intuition is achieved where the material qualities of paper and pen are ascertained through their symbolic existence.

(more terms to follow)

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