Heart Switch

 

For my creative switch I made a Heart switch, where by putting the two pieces back together, the red LED illuminates. ❤ Inspired by Igoe’s puzzle piece suggestion in the Electronics: Switch lab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Readings: 

I Really enjoyed the readings, and agree with Norman’s Emotional Design abstract, that attractive things work better – as long as it doesn’t become an issue of form over function. The hardest part is reaching a symbiotic balance between the two.

I also loved seeing all of the different category breakdowns in Igoe’s Physical Computing’s Greatest hits. Would love to experiment with many of those ideas. And love that it encourages people to not be discouraged if they come up with a similar mechanism concept or design, but that there’s always something new to bring to the table each time. More facets of the same concept to be explored.

I love the book Design of Everyday Things, ch. 1, and found the concept of Affordances to be really essential. ”

I also really agreed with many of his other points including his two main principles for designing for people:

• provide a good conceptual model
• make things visible

Equally important are:

• the principle of mapping – “is a technical term meaning the relationship between two things, in this case between the controls and their movements and the results in the world..(pg23)”
• the principle of feedback – “sending back to the user information about what action has actually been done, which result has been accomplished..(pg27)”

 

Paradox of Technology 

“added complexity and difficulty cannot be avoided when functions are added, but with clever design, they can be minimized.”