objects, communications, and environments oh my

This reading was pretty interesting, although most of what it covered was already familiar to me. Nonetheless, there were some very interesting points made. I remember reading about Philippe Starck's juicer a while back in Donald Norman's book Emotional Design. I've always had mixed feelings about that product. Norman mentions that he bought one of the special edition golden ones, and that it couldn't even be used for juice, because the acid would damage the gold coating. In my mind, that doesn't really seem like design, at least the special edition ones that don't even function. In the same book, Norman mentions ATM's, which were also discussed in this chapter. He talks about an experiment conducted in Israel, in which two ATM's were tested against each other. Each one had the same exact functions and used the same system, with the same display, but one of them had been re-designed to be more aesthetically pleasing. Customers who used the ATM's were asked to rate the machine's usability, and it was found that people actually thought the aesthetically pleasing machines worked faster and were easier to understand. I always thought that was interesting, and I think it's something that every designer should know. We had a discussion in one of my landscape classes last quarter about the role of beauty in landscape architecture. In contemporary practice, most landscape architects will write off the value of beauty, choosing instead to focus environmental and ecological aspects. I'm all for that, but I think that beauty plays a more important role than most designers (or at least landscape architects) think it does. In the chapter about communications, I found it strange that the Weather Channel's website was used as an example of good interactive design. Sure, its great to have quick access to the weather forecast for the next ten days, but that website sucks. Half of it is advertisements, and they constantly change the layout, making it confusing and difficult to get the most out of. The environment chapter was interesting to me for obvious reasons, but even more so because it dealt with the type of environments that I don't spend 60 hours a week thinking about. The point I found most interesting was about how Japanese homes utilize vertical dimensions. I stumbled upon a video of a Japanese man who converted his apartment to be made up of move-able pieces, so that he could reconfigure it into several different rooms. It was really cool because each room looked like something you would see in an American home (size-wise at least), but he was able to fit it all in a couple hundred square feet.