Week 1 - Thoughts turned-around

The visual exercise that we did in class illustrated for me some of the complexity of interface design. The thing that stood out the most is the role that connotation, for lack of a better term, played in our interpretation of a visual clue. For example, in the "turnaround" drawings, our group seemed to get the action that was being communicated, but because one of the drawings was of a dancer (or more accurately, a stick figure with skirt - my drawing skills are not the best), the action was interpreted to be twirling instead.

This shows how we bring a lot of perceptions to how we understand images, and those perceptions can have personal, familial, cultural, or national origins. For example, had someone in our group had a background in ballet, they might have identified the image as "pirhouette". Anticipating these perceptions is a major challenge for designers. Implicit in this idea is that designers, too, have perceptions that they bring to their designs. Another challenge in design is identifying your own biases in order to create something more universally understandable.