Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Design Theory & Bathroom Computing
Gillian Crampton Smith & Phil Tabor popped in for 2 days last week to give us a few lessons in Interaction Design theory. We've been through an intensive course in programming & electronics, so it was good to take a break and compliment that with some solid theory based learning. They gave us some tips on brainstorming, information about using mental models and flow charts to describe a system's process.
Bathroom Computing
One exercise included re-imagining the desktop metaphor. We we given the task of applying a bathroom metaphor to computing to see how well it would fit. The answer, is surprisingly well. Here's a sample of the ideas we mapped onto the functions:
| Bottles | information holders (files) |
|---|---|
| Cabinet | place to store bottles |
| Toilet | Flush them down to delete items |
| Plunger | Defragment your harddrive |
| Taps | Water & taps would represent networking. So you would have a tap for ethernet, wifi, bluetooth. |
| Shower Cap | Firewall |
| Toothbrush & toothpaste | Anti-virus software |
