It’s a couple of weeks now since my wife and I have played eRepublik. It is a MMOG game, “a mirror world where players, referred to as citizens, join in local and national politics, set economic policy, start businesses and wage wars with other countries.”

This game proves that there is not need of complex visual graphics to engage players. Today, there are more than 350.000 citizens! The game has a clear goal of entertainment and the creators have clear profit goals. However, it seems to me that the game have a powerful potential of learning social competencies. Reading some articles and discussing with my wife we found core mechanics that strongly review and reinforce social competencies.

One is described by Alexis Bonte, one of the cofounders in the game, in an Spanish newspaper interview. He described that some time ago the president of France reduced taxes to zero and the companies collapsed. Then players migrated. Bonte says that players auto regulate themselves, which is a relevant social competence.

Besides, talking with my wife, she concluded that essential social values such as recognition of others’ differences and citizen identity are reinforced. She for example compared political invitations between political parties in USA and Colombia and understood cultural differences in how people invite and promote membership. We also have done metacognitive analysis of our social potentials wondering whether or not we are able to participate in certain career paths like army, politics or business. Although the game offers you an option to try with low risks, you make decisions from your capabilities and how you better can support the community.

I wonder if the game has more potential for adult learning because children and youths might not be interested in a text-based game. Anyway, the growing alternatives that non-serious game industries offer can fit serious game needs in the future. Serious games aims could be achieved more effectively with instructional/interaction design than with game design and development.

These are two good examples of information design in audiovisual format. The first above es one the Sprint ads (cellphone service), it might be difficult for us “humans” to process the statistics but the goal is persuasion and the designer wants to show us how reliable, fast, and popular is the service, not to make information understandable at all. The ad is beautiful and very dynamic, which is great and enjoyable.

The other example below is the last video clip of the Story of Stuff. I love it because with very simple graphs they explain complex concepts. In audiovisual information, audio is part of the tools available to solve information presentation and the oral explanation of the presenter helps a lot.



Both clips are rich in rhetoric tropes, one of the design tools in which I am very interested. I think that the first one for TV teaches us that short persuasion is a powerful tool. Sprint wants to sell, but how can we use this persuasion tools for social change? The second one can be the answer, but I wonder if people stay passive that long.

PS. Gui Bosiepe is from who I heard first the concept of audiovisual rhetoric and you can read it here

I am just re-reading the classic book “Design Methods” from J. Chris Jones wrote in 1970 and I found that he claimed for an involvement of the user in the design process because the traditional methods based on drawing were not enough to cope with complexity of design problems. I thing that this idea is very contemporary. The book describes “new” design methods that include interviewing, user testing, and observing user behavior. Of course contemporary literature has more sophisticated analysis and revision of user-centered design methods but Jones’ text shows that user-centered design is not that new.

Korean Alphabet

After my trip to Korea, many things amazed me from the country. Seoul is a crowded city, but people do things with delicacy and care. For example food, crafts, information, services and so on. In contrast you might feel crushed and pushed in the crowded subway and some places in the city are disorganized. In this post I want to highlight one information design related thing: the Korean alphabet. The Korean language did not have alphabet until fifteenth century when the king Sejong the Great developed a writing system. He was an smart designer because he created a complete one-to-one correspondence between graphemes (symbols) and phonemes (sounds). You can actually say your name to any Korean speaker and he/she can write it in Korean. That is good! I’d say that king Sejong was a good user-centered designer, language rules are easy for people. I am native in Spanish and I’ve complained about English because there is a greater of difference between symbols and sounds compared with Spanish, but Korean is outstanding in this. The concept is that good that Cia-Cia language (an Indonesian dialeact) adopted the korean alphabet!

Korean Signage

I just took a look at google wave video. It is a technology that involves a lot of new things but I only want to discuss the real-type feature.

In this image the user “Casey” have not completed yet her text and the participants can see in real time what is she writing. In the video the presenters explain that one will have the option to disable this.

I wonder how much users will like this. I am an active user of google talk, which is embeded in my gmail account. Some months ago they included the real voice and video chat options, but it seems that no many want to use them. I think this reaction might be explained because people do not want real time communication. Indeed I think that the success of social interaction and improvement of social skills using digital media is due to people’s preference of taking time to wonder what they should or want to say. I am skeptic to the success of this in my specific culture/context/generation. But at the same time I want to see of teens/others react to this, they could like it a lot.

Photo Dario Cardona, La Patria, Colombia

The last decade in Manizales, where I live in Colombia, there has been a proliferation of call centers that offer customer services of different companies in Latin America and Spain. This make me wonder if the solution for bad information design and corporate communication has cause this call center increment. I also have felt that every year I use more call centers, to clarify services, make questions or whatever according to circumstances. Of course, I don’t have evidence about the correlation between bad information and the increment of call centers. But I do know that many information need a better design. See example below about phone company bill from Manizales (Emtelsa).

If you ask a designer which part of this visual information has the highest visual hierarchy, probably he or she would say that the number “51″ and text “Monday through Friday”. According to visual hierarchy design principle size, contrast and position define the order of visualization. However, designers always see through designers’ glasses; real world interactions are different. In a brochure with 3 tables like this above (Monday-Friday, Saturday and Sunday) I have asked people to find Saturday schedule and write down a departure time to arrive at 2pm to a destination.  Most of them focus on time tables and have written Monday-Friday time and then they realize later of the mistake correcting the answer. Some people even realize the mistake.

This means that a given goal changes the visual hierarchy principle. This issue leads me to think that visual hierarchy might be not a principle at all because people in real world interactions, that usually have a goal to achieve, definitely is not to see how the design manages contrast, size and position. I have found myself missing tittles or subtitles when I read journals, books, websites and so on. So, design research has a lot to do to study the traditional design principles that have been established for so long in the design schools.

PS A final thought: should high hierarchy information be part of details and pop up from them?

Part of my current summer fellowship is that subjects have to find a room inside a building. It is biomedical informatics 125, which is in floor 10. Subjects can not ask anyone for directions. I designed the experiment hoping that user will go an look at the directory, study it, and go to the correct floor; however, subjects forget biomedical informatics, and look for room 125 in the entrance level. The directory becomes noise and most of the people start to look at every room number in the 1st floor. Of course, there is a serious problem with the experiment design. I did not realize that the 100 number is a very strong standard in the people for first floor. Indeed, this reveals a numbering problem in the building.

Besides, I have seen that many people relies on others to find places. Why bother trying to process visual information if you can ask people everywhere that have very good mental maps because the are everyday users? This issue leads me to think that the design of signage is a very complex problem that designers poorly have solved. The everyday users of the directory have different rooms to go; but there is still much to learn to make visual information more versatile for people.

I got my Design Council newsletter today. It has a quite old user-centered design article (2007) that made me recall some questions I have about the diverse design ideas and methods today. The article makes interesting comments about how design is still focused on companies rather than users. Most of the claims were not new like the Norman principles but anyway highly worth. The article suggests that one should be cautious about the issues you ask users. It uses the meaning quote from Henry Ford: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.” I find this quote is very inspiring. Also, the article recommends that the designer must look at how users actually behave, not what they say they do. I agree that user-center design approach is the way for efficient objects whatever they are, but is efficiency the only need?

It seems that design practitioners that are applying user-centered design are refining the way they understand users. This is very good for design and for users. However, I just wonder if this method alone is enough for society’s needs. I believe that although user-centered design is necessary, it is an incomplete method that should be connected to an integral idea of design. Think for example in sustainability, can design be green and user-centered at the same time? I’d say that it should be. It happens too with other “new designs” like social design, universal design and so on. Design practice should be integral, not only efficient, not only green, not only inclusive, but all of them.

Currently, I am doing a summer fellowship. I am studying how intelligence and mood affect the way people use visual information in physical and digital spaces. This is my exploratory stage and I only need 20 students from 2 colleges. So far I have 11 volunteers but everyday is more difficult to get new ones. I have seen some difficulties for this. First, the 90 minutes session is quite long because I am collecting qualitative data. Initially I thought that it was short, and it really is, but free time is not abundant today.  Second, people need good compensation to motivate them. I decided to ask the university review board for introducing a small amount gift card. Third, if you are unknown, people do not feel confident. I believe that people have decided not participate because they do not know me.

For future projects it is essential to think about easy recruitment. For example, professors and their student groups with some affiliation to the project. If the project is with teenagers, one can look for high school partners. Besides, reducing the time as much as possible might be good. However, shorter times make projects more quantitative prone. Thus, this will depend on the research design.