Week 09 - Origination

Class Format

Todays lesson was about chapter 8 'Trust' of John Maeda's book 'The Laws of Simplicity'. Although it may seem like they do sometimes to our little squishy brains, computers do not 'guess' as he suggests, they simply 'do' based on a predetermined set of parameters.

 

Group Exercise

Reading Quiz

Answer the following questions as succinctly as possible in your own words.

1. Provide an example of a situation where you have to have trust – in the same vein as the author in his swimming lesson example. What made you trust in this situation and how did you feel?
   - I learnt how to drive in 2011, previously I cycled everywhere. When I drive a car I feel that I am giving an amount of trust to the vehicle and further to the other motorists with which I share the road. A vehicle is a complicated mechanism and when I operate one I am trusting that it will perform as expected. Beyond knowing how to operate it, I have little knowledge of how a vehicle actually works.
2. Where in our exhibition do we need to instill trust? Give examples. How are we going to achieve this?
   - In an exhibition such as this we need to trust our peers as it is with them we are collaborating.
3. What strategies are used to instill trust? Examples? Where do we need to employ this in this year’s exhibition? How are we going to do this?
4. If you could “undo” any aspect of the preparation for the exhibition to-date, what would you “undo”? With this in mind, what would would you change now in your preparation strategy to overcome having to “undo” anything?
   - Wow, that is one convoluted question. Basically you are asking; how would I 'undo' a preparation decision and at the same time avoid changing this decision. There is also a typo in the question where the word 'would' is repeated.
5. Homework: How are you using the laws in relation to your contribution to the student exhibition? Provide a short explanation and example for each of the laws so far.
   - so we have this text about simplicity from which you have again extracted complicated questions. I can understand for the most part why you have done this as it is exemplified in Meada's fourth law 'Learn' (particularly the repeat aspect), but honestly this is getting tiresome. 'Reduce' - we have reduced the number of deigns that we are printing. 'Organise' - we have created a timeline. 'Time' - we have organised our time. 'Learn' - we have learnt stuff from our research. 'Differences' - we have researched different fabrics and printing techniques. 'Context' - we have shifted our focus to adult consumers. 'Emotion' - we have used emotive designs. 'Trust' - Cherill and I trust one another. 

 

Research

Video

I do not really have a tangible link between this video and this weeks topic. I am posting it because it is pretty and was created by a recently graduated design student, Kyle Mowat from Canada's Sheridan college. This came in via an RSS from The Fox is Black

Images

Insert images and comment

Reflection

I would never say that my computer 'guessed' anything. It would probably annoy me if started doing so and prompt me to investigate in order to put a stop to its presumptuousness (wow, that's a hell of a word). My computer does happily surprise me, but only when it performs a predetermined action that I had forgotten that I had told it to execute.