Accessibility

When we talked about accessibility today, we focused on design for people who have one or more kind of disabilities. But I think that experience design and accessibility are at different level of human needs. I believe that accessibility is a basic need for a design, and of course every design has its specific target audience and utilization. Experience is on a higher level than accessibility. For example, if some people are struggling for food and clothes, they maybe will not pay the tuition to pursue their Ph.D degrees. And for normal people, what they are able to do sometimes are not what they'd like to do.

However, if the basic need is not well solved, the problem it could bring maybe very serious.

Poster for Mathers Museum of World Culture

Made a poster this afternoon. This is the my first time to make a poster. Critique and comments are welcome and needed!

Visit Computer Science and Informatics Poster Session

I visited the Computer Science and Informatics Poster Session in the evening yesterday. Other two my classmates and I have already worked on a poster for hours for our course project before we went the session. Before went there, I believed that poster should express one theme by using simple image, words and colors instead of complex diagrams, paragraphs. After I went there, I found out that most of the posters are framed by their research logic. For example:
Problem-> analysis-> solution->evaluation->challenge->future work.

My husband persuaded me that "Scientific poster is in this style". I agreed with him, and I saw that the posters which designed by HCI/d students are more romantic than those by computer science people. I like those artistic posters rather than scientific ones! But the problem is not which style I like! The problem is what style should we follow when we make a design poster? There is no answer. Maybe we can say that it depends, depends on the goals of why we make the poster, and on who are the audience of the poster. We can always say the words: “it depends" when we cannot get single， simple， right and wrong answer. Maybe the answer exists in the problem what design is, science or art. If we believe that design is a independent discipline, neither science nor art, then we have our own way to express our themes by using posters as a way, not a work flow, not a single piece of art.

Experience Design Experience

Experience Design Experience, begins from the curiosity, and continuing with designer's emotional experience. As a designer, we walk into the context through our research work, understand it; and we get passion, are happy to change the unknown world into known, and begin to run; at last, we can fly on our imagination to design. The loop is continuing.

Experience design

We were talking about the World of Warcraft game in Jeff's class this afternoon. And he said he was very happy that they celebrated lunar new year. There were lanterns and fireworks here and there as decorations, and they were invited and teleported to their enemy's territory to celebrate together and ate dumplings which were supposed to give them some super powers. And unfortunately, they were killed on their way back to their own place.

First of all, I'd like to say that I feel very happy that people pay attention to our Chinese festival, and celebrate it online in their virtual life. This means a lot for me as a Chinese.

However, when we talking about experience design, my first response is that culture experience design should based on deeply understanding of the culture and pay attention to details. For example, the fireworks are alway covered by red paper in reality. Maybe sometimes their are some pictures on it, but the background color definitely should be red.

Secondly, the experience designer pay attention to people's emotion experience. Lunar new year is so important to Chinese not because we can reunion with family and friends, eat good food and get relax from work, but because that lunar new year means the end of the past, and another beginning of a new period of the journey of our life. Therefore, there are new hope and chance. We never talk about words like die, pain, illness, kill, hurt ... We believe that the Bodhisattva, the personifications of wealth and happiness drop by our houses and give us bless, lucky and new chance at the moment between the old lunar year and the new one.The emotions were perceived in the reality experience should be promoted by the experience design rather than changed.

At the last part of the class we discussed about toy design. Toy design is following the way of modeling things happened in reality world and the natural order of the existing world.

Education and Experience

The belief that all genuine education comes from experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated with each other. From some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. An experience may be such as to engender callousness; it may produce lack of sensitivity and of responsiveness... a given experience may increase a person's automatic skill in a particular direction and yet tend to land him in a grove or rut... An experience may be immediately enjoyable and yet promote the formation of a slack and careless attitude...Each experience may be lively, vivid and "interesting", and their disconnectedness may artificially generate dispersive, disintegrated, centrifugal habits. The consequence of formation of such habits is inability to control future experiences. They are then taken, either by way of enjoyment or of discontent and revolt, just as they come.
---Dewey 1938:13-14

Article review:Toward intelligent styling for digitalmuseum exhibitions

= Toward intelligent styling for digitalmuseum exhibitions =

== Reference ==
Jen-Shin Hong, Bai-Hsuan Chen, Sheng-Hao Hung. ”Toward intelligent styling for digitalmuseum exhibitions: modularization framework for aesthetic hypermedia presentations”. Int J Digit Libr (2004) 4: 64–68 / Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s00799-003-0059-3, 2004

== Synopsis ==

In current Web-based hypermedia environments, digital museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning, and enjoyment by constructing and maintaining online interactive and aesthetic hypermedia exhibitions. However, constructing a large-scale exhibition is not an easy work, and in particular, the shaping of presentation styles requires tedious multimedia composing and is indeed extremely laborious. The function of an intelligent styling system is to help museums efficiently and effectively produce and publish attractive exhibitions online. The authors propose a fine-grained modularization framework that decomposes the styling of a typical hypermedia presentation into fine-grained style modules (FGSM) as the first step toward developing an intelligent styling system for digital museum exhibitions. By using this modularization mechanism, a hypermedia authoring system could be implemented which allows content providers to efficiently develop highly aesthetic, media-centric, interactive hypermedia presentations.


image:Role of FGSM in the styling framework.JPG (see the paper)

Generally speaking, a digital museum exhibition should contain content elements and style elements (e.g., background animations, decorating graphics, functional scripts, audio loop, layout setting, font typesetting, etc.). To achieve the reusability, portability, and flexibility of hypermedia styling, the style elements should be decomposable into a set of self-contained, cohesive, and loosely coupled fine-grained style modules (FGSMs).A FGSM presenting a specific content fragment. By assembling and switching FGSMs, a content document can then be presented in different fashions.

image:Logical structure of content document and stylesheet.JPG (see the paper)

A hypermedia document based on a “mono-modal media handler” and a digital museum exhibition management framework has been designed to realize the concept of FGSM. Mono-modal media handler means that one handler deals with a single multimedia file's style.

== Reflection ==
This paper mainly focuses on the modularization framework which helps museums to create digital exhibitions. The reusability of the FGSMs makes the work of shaping presentation styles easier by assembling different set of FGSMs than by creating styling files for every single exhibition. It becomes possible that to create an online exhibition without technology specialists. And also, it enables the exhibitions to be reserved forever after they are created by storing the hyperlinks between content documents and FGSMs.

image:Exhibition forever.JPG

The lines are the handlers mentioned above

However, the styles of exhibitions should be changed according the exhibition themes and goals. It is hard to prepare FGSMs for the future use. On the other hand, it is hard to find an appropriate set of FGSMs for a specific exhibition.

At the beginning of the paper, the authors mentioned the users’ interaction with the virtual exhibitions. I believe that the interactive mode could be integrated in the framework as a kind of special FGSMs.

== Reference ==
1. Van Ossengruggen J (2001) Processing structured hypermedia: a matter of style. PhD thesis, Vrije University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

=The Museum Experience=

== Reference ==

*Book: John H. Falk, Lynn D. Dierking. The Museum Experience. Whalesback Books, Washington, D.C. 1992.

== Synopsis ==

Museums have their origins and inseparable missions of basic research and public education. However, unlike schools and universities, the audience is self –selected, and the learning is self-directed. The Museum Experience systematically examines the conditions for museum learning for visitor’s perspectives, and “attempts to present the ‘big picture’ of the common, but still poorly understood, use by the public of places like science centers, art museums, history museums, historical homes, nature centers, aquaria, botanical gardens, and zoos.”

The Interactive Experience Model was created as a framework to present a coherent picture of the visitor’s total museum experience.

image:The_experience_model

*Personal Context

The personal context incorporates a variety of experiences and knowledge, including visitor's interests, motivations, concerns, and varying degrees of experience in and knowledge of the content and design of the museum.

*Social Context

Social Context includes that if the visitor was in a group or alone; the mesuem was crowded or empty; the interactions with museum staff, volunteers and other visitors.

*Physical Context

The physical context includes the architecture and 'feel' of the building, as well as the objects and artifacts contained within.

By analyzing people’s motivations before the visit, behaviors during the visit and memories after the visit in personal, social and physical contexts, the museum learning was defined and the problems in museum experience was deeply explored based on the understanding of museums as gestalt. At the last part of the book, “a professional’s guide to the museum experience,” insightful guidance about how to create the museum experience for different kinds of visitors, casual visitors and organized groups was provided also on visitors’ perspective.

The analyses in this book are not only fit in museum, but also refer to all kinds of informal educational institutions.

== Reflection ==

The Interactive Experience Model is created to understand the museum experience at museums. It can be used to analyze the theories in Human-Centered Design field. We do user study in target audiences’ personal context, do usability test in physical context. And comparing the coming of the third wave of the human-computer interaction design, social context get more and more attention from designers, user-experience and co-experience are both important terms considered during design processes. It is a useful framework to analysis an experience. However, the three contexts are inseparable and melted into the reality world. How can we create more and more effectively applicable methods for designers based on the Interactive Experience Model?

Another thing worth to mention is that learning is a long-term effect. “People learn best those things they already know about and that interest them, and people are interested in those things they learn best.”