ah teaches information design (Understanding Context lecture)

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Just a heads up that if you have your SFU email forwarding to another service (i.e. Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) you are unlikely to receive emails from SFU after February 1st.

Office hours

In-person office hours on January 29 and February 5 will be moved to 6:30-7:30pm.

Apologies for any inconveience.

Today's critique

Our approach

We will be taking the approach of asking questions of the work for today's critique: Please frame each critique as a question.

Today's critique is solo

This week I would like you to form your critiques individually.

Context

The relationship between a user and all the parts of their environment, as they perceive it.

Mobile context

How would you describe the relationship between you, your mobile device, and your environment?

You have 2 minutes to chat with a neighbour.

Presentation context

How would you describe the relationship between you, this presentation, and your environment?

You have 2 minutes to chat with a neighbour.

Layers of information

1. Physical: A user's relationship to their environment.
2. Semantic: Messages or meaning established for others.
3. Digital: Encoded/computer-centric messaging.

Physical layer

Methods of interpreting information

• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinesthetic

Alternative layers

The physical, semantic, and digital layers are not the only ways to think about context:

1. Our perception and cognition
2. Spoken language
3. Written or visual language
4. Designed or organized information
5. Digital information

Connections and humans

We're lazy, er, or efficient

"...users have time to read [on average] 20% of words on a page."

Affordances

Affordances are the properties of an object that suggest a complementary action.

Affordances are learned.

Patterns and chunking

Giving us consistent and reasonable chunks of information makes it easier for us to use.

Patterns and chunking

A visual example

Course bias

So far this course has been biased towards North American/European design. The next project is intended to have you explore some design beyond our context.

Assumptions

Your next project will have you map out your assumptions, and then work on converting them into questions.

Questions we can answer.

Assumptions we cannot.

'Audience'

In earlier courses you may have considered an 'audience' for your designs from a demographic sense. This can be limiting as it can:

• Run the risk of stereotyping someone
• Does not help our qualitative insight
• Demographically similar people can often have different considerations

Audience assumptions

Let's look at a 'demographic' audience and write down our assumptions.

What are your assumptions about 40 year olds?

You have 3 minutes to list all your assumptions.

Assumptions to questions

Let's practice turning some of our assumptions into questions.

Context assumptions

Thinking about your first project, what are some assumptions you have (or had) about the context of your project?

Research

Ideally, research allows us to move beyond our biases and assumptions to understand the actual individuals.

Primary & secondary sources

Good research tends to involve both primary and secondary sources.

Evaluating sources

We are going to start off by considering a couple of things when evaluating our research sources:

• Who: Is this person an expert? What demonstrates they are?
• What: Is this relevant? Does it seem credible in relation to other sources?
• When: How recent is this material?

Evaluating sources

Let's take a look at a potential source.

Next lecture (February 5)

Content Structures

Considering not only the design of content, but the content itself as a part of our process.