What Matters?: Putting Common Sense to Work

A cognitive psychologist and an industrial design engineer draw from their experiences trying to make technology work for people to reflect on the foundations of Cognitive Science and Product Design. This work is motivated by the sense that there is a large gap between the type of experiences studied in laboratories and experiences of people working with every day technology. This has led the authors to question the metaphysical foundations of cognitive science and to suggest alternative directions that might provide better insights for design. An important inspiration for this alternative direction is Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality described in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. The goal is to move beyond ‘information processing’ and the computer metaphor, toward ‘meaning creation’ as inspired by recent discoveries in dynamics and selforganizing systems. This book takes the reader on a journey beyond the conventional dichotomy of mind and matter to explore a world of ‘what matters’ in hopes of inspiring the design of human-technology systems that work beautifully

What Matters?: Putting Common Sense to Work

A cognitive psychologist and an industrial design engineer draw from their experiences trying to make technology work for people to reflect on the foundations of Cognitive Science and Product Design. This work is motivated by the sense that there is a large gap between the type of experiences studied in laboratories and experiences of people working with every day technology. This has led the authors to question the metaphysical foundations of cognitive science and to suggest alternative directions that might provide better insights for design. An important inspiration for this alternative direction is Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality described in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. The goal is to move beyond ‘information processing’ and the computer metaphor, toward ‘meaning creation’ as inspired by recent discoveries in dynamics and selforganizing systems. This book takes the reader on a journey beyond the conventional dichotomy of mind and matter to explore a world of ‘what matters’ in hopes of inspiring the design of human-technology systems that work beautifully.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/books/1128/thumbnail.jp

Beyond Affordances: Closing the Generalization Gap Between Design and Cognitive Science

As designers and cognitive scientists begin to explore human experience as a relation between people and products, there is a need for constructs that index relational properties (i.e., properties of a product that are dependent on properties of an actor). One such construct that has recently become popular with designers is affordance. Affordances, such as pass-through-able, depend on properties of both an object (e.g., width of an opening) and properties of an actor (e.g., girth or shoulder width). In this article, three relational constructs are suggested to reflect important properties of the coupling between humans and products: affording, specifying, and satisfying. Affording refers to constraints on the action coupling between actor and product. Specifying refers to constraints on the perceptual or informational coupling. Finally, satisfying refers to constraints on value (e.g., attractiveness or desirability). The case is made that each of these three constructs are critical to determining the quality of the experience of an agent with a product (e.g., the capacity for satisfying interactions)

Beyond Affordances: Closing the Generalization Gap Between Design and Cognitive Science

As designers and cognitive scientists begin to explore human experience as a relation between people and products, there is a need for constructs that index relational properties (i.e., properties of a product that are dependent on properties of an actor). One such construct that has recently become popular with designers is affordance. Affordances, such as pass-through-able, depend on properties of both an object (e.g., width of an opening) and properties of an actor (e.g., girth or shoulder width). In this article, three relational constructs are suggested to reflect important properties of the coupling between humans and products: affording, specifying, and satisfying. Affording refers to constraints on the action coupling between actor and product. Specifying refers to constraints on the perceptual or informational coupling. Finally, satisfying refers to constraints on value (e.g., attractiveness or desirability). The case is made that each of these three constructs are critical to determining the quality of the experience of an agent with a product (e.g., the capacity for satisfying interactions)

Navigation Methods for an Augmented Reality System

BUILD-IT is a planning tool based on computer vision technology, supporting complex planning and composition tasks. A group of people, seated around a table, interact with objects in a virtual scene using real bricks. A plan view of the scene is projected onto the table, where object manipulation takes place. A perspective view is projected on the wall. The views are set by virtual cameras, having spatial attributes like shift, rotation and zoom. However, planar interaction with bricks provides only position and rotation information. This paper explores two alternative methods to bridge the gap between planar interaction and three-dimensional navigation