WK 5 Blog Exercise: Visual vs Symbolic Language

Photo credit:  http://crazetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/unemployment.jpg

Responses To Image

• depression
• just fired
• lost
• confused
• worried

Symbols In Image

• Suitcase
• Bottom of stairs
• Suit
• Dark/Overcast location
• Business/Financial area
• Sitting on steps
• hand on head
• looking down on floor
• no one around

In this picture, there is a man that looks to be just fired from his job.  He is still wearing his suit and his suitcase is right by him on stairs he is sitting on.  Not only is he sitting on the floor, but he is at the bottom of the stairs which can show some sort of symbolism as if he is back on the bottom of the corporate ladder.  As he sits on the stairs, he has his head down facing the floor with his hand on his head in a state of depression, confusion, and just being lost in the situation.  It also appears that the weather looks like it is either very dark or overcast, or it is at a later time of the day in which he was fired after his shift at work.   The area he is sitting in also does not have anyone around which can make it look as if he has been sitting on the steps for a long time and everyone had already left home. 

WK 4: Visual Thinking Research

On this exercise, we had chosen the puzzles of the cat and finding what month the symbols create.  When doing the cat puzzle, I first started just by pattern seeking right to left.  From there I scanned the image from right to left while numbering and seeing the obvious triangles that stood out.  After that I had used the pattern completion to see what other possibilities there may be that were not so obvious at first glanced.  When I was finished counting, I had 18 triangles counted, while my friend had 21triangles.  From there we looked over what triangles we had chosen and noticed through the pattern completion that I was short of one and he had went over by 2 triangles making the total of 19 triangles that were in the cat.  In the Finding The Month puzzle, I had initially started looking at each symbol to see if there were any patterns that may relate to a certain season. I had began to categorize the shapes but saw no similarity.  On accident, I had glanced at it from the bottom going up and saw the letters J-U-L-Y forming.  This may have been the visual memory part due to the noticing and remembering the shapes that those letters form. 

Week 3 Blog Exercise - Feature Hierarchy and Visual Search

Being an Industrial Design major (Product Design & Development), I tend to look at the design and layout of things with a lot dept.  Pictured above is a controller for the Xbox 360 game console.  I chose this because it displays the whole Visual Hierarchy in a great, simple way.  When looking at the controller at first, it is just all black except for the Y, X, B, & A buttons which pop-out due to the bright coloring of them.  These grab your attention and allow you to get familiar with where each lettered button is positioned since these buttons will be frequently used through out the use of the Xbox 360.  The button silver the middle which is lit up is also an important button for it turns on the controller and console.  By looking at the controller, you can see how important it would be for some features to be seen.  The directional pads and joysticks (in black) are towards the bottom.  The colored buttons would be next up as they are brightly colored.  And the "power" button in the middle which is silver and lit up would be the highest in the feature channel hierarchy.  The shape of the controller is also important as it is easy for the user to access all the buttons simultaneously.  Not only does it allow easy access, but the smooth lines of its design flow nicely to also create a comfort when holding the control.

Product by Microsoft
www.xbox.com

Week #2 Exercise: Top-Down Visual Processing

Top-Down Visual Processing is used on a daily basis, multiple times a day.  Walking around campus, most, if not all people, will scan the area they are walking around or towards for a familiar silhouette of a person they know or a type of person they are interested in.  Once a match has been found, whether it be a friend or a person of interest, you will start to look at the details of the person.  For example, if someone is enticed by nice eyes, this person may notice the way someones eyes are before anything else.  They may look at the eyes, then their smile, hair, etc. in whatever way it is prioritized in their mind which would later on lead to scan paths that go back and forth to the person's eyes.  In more ways than one, we always focus in on an area of fixation.  Once we have observed that area, our eyes will start to jump around, like what was shown with the eye-tracking demonstrations.


Photo credit: http://www.meganfoxonline.net/wp-content/gallery/MeganFoxWallpapers/Megan%20Fox%20%28114%29.jpg