Pipsqueak Articles

Posts written by Olga Werby or Christopher Werby

Background Knowledge, Background Knowledge Errors, Cognitive Blindness, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, ZPD

Science vs. Media: Degree of Public Involvement

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Recently, there has been an explosion of public discourse (fueled by the media) on whether we should do away with tenure in our institutions of higher learning. The basic argument boils down to “tenured teachers can do as they please due to job security and education suffers as the result.” Tenured professors, we are told, focus on research and publishing incomprehensible articles aimed at a few individuals in the world who could even understand them. What’s the use in that, people ask? My son/daughter/neighbor’s kid are being taught by a TA (with poor language skills) while we pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of these children attending universities with all those lazy good-for-nothing tenured professors! You might say that my summary of this world-view is extreme and simplifies the ideas to their comic representation. But that’s the point: the articles (and the readers’ comments they inspire) are written to get an emotional response. The issues of tenure, of the research that these tenured professors are engaged in and the articles they publish, and of teaching styles are complex. To evaluate the contribution of a scientist to his field, one needs to have a certain amount of expertise in that…

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Background Knowledge Errors, Conceptual Design, Errors, Ethnographic & User Data, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Mental Model Traps, Mirroring Errors, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Users

Metacognition Failure: If I find it easy, it must not be important

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Making something easy to understand is extremely difficult. A good designer knows this, knows how hard one has to work to make something comprehensible and easy to use. Unfortunately, users and consumers of products (including education) tend not to get it. We live in society ruled by “More is Better” p-prim: more stuff is better, more money is better, more food is good, more medication is great…more, more, more. Movies, television, newspapers, magazines, all reinforce this idea in our minds. We live in a “super-size me” world. But this basic decision-making algorithm leads to very faulty reasoning. There are multiple corollaries to the “more is better” axiom: thick books without graphics are more educationally valuable, more important (this is based on research I did many years ago with 5th graders); longer essays are clearly better and should get higher graders (the students worked harder/longer on them); big words are better than small ones in expressing ideas (thus we get very pretentious writing); work should be judged by the time it took to complete and not by the quality of the results it produces; more expensive clothes (cars, stereos, etc.) are clearly more valuable (this is a true statement, but most…

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Background Knowledge, Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Great Design = Technique + Ideation

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How do we get great design? Most of us can recognize it, but creating it is another matter. I spend a lot of time thinking about product design: How can Apple come up with product after product that’s beloved by their users? Why does Microsoft have difficulty achieving the same? I think the key is in combination of two necessary components of greatness: mastery of technique and richness of ideation. Let me explain. Consider art. What makes Picasso great? During his lifetime, the man was incredibly prolific. He worked in many different mediums from paint, to metal, to charcoal. He excelled at Analytical Cubism, easily surpassing Braques in both quantity and quality of work. Picasso borrowed from African art and from impressionists. He followed Matisse until Matisse’s students started to follow him. Picasso dived into an art form and explored with fury until he transformed it into something his own. He borrowed from everyone and bent it and molded it into a unique creation. Picasso was rich in ideation. But ideation is not enough. What good is an idea when it lacks execution? Picasso was an art prodigy. He was able to draw amazingly mature life drawings at age fifteen that most…

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Cognitive Blindness, Cultural Differences, Ethnographic & User Data, Personality, Pipsqueak Articles

We’re Only as Happy as Our Unhappiest Child

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Recession is an interesting prism by which to examine our modern society. The scarcity of jobs a century ago, led to an abolishment of child labor, an extension of the educational system to accommodate these out-of-work children, and a development of new laws to serve them. Most importantly, dire economic conditions were the direct cause behind the “discovery” of a new stage of life: adolescence. The current economic hardship is particularly difficult on the 18 to 30 demographic. These “adults” are struggling to find jobs, life-long relationships, educational opportunities, and self-fulfillment. The term failure to launch is coined to describe the restlessness and ambiguity felt by this population. Dr. Jeffrey J. Arnett describes this phase of life as emerging adulthood: “Instead of entering marriage and parenthood in their very early twenties, most people now postpone these transitions until at least their late twenties, and spend their late teens through their mid-twenties in self-focused exploration as they try out different possibilities in love and work. Essentially, a new developmental stage has been created between adolescence and young adulthood.” [http://www.jeffreyarnett.com] Dr. Arnett discusses the internal traits that define his newly-proposed phase of life: identity exploration instability in work, relationships, living circumstances self-focus…

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Background Knowledge, Background Knowledge Errors, Pipsqueak Articles

Categorization & Context

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What is art? Do the objects in the images above form a category of “sculpture”? In Kindergarten, young students are taught a game: every kid brings an object to class; each student is asked to create two piles—the “in” group and “out” group—based on his/her own imagined set of rules; the other children guess the rules that make the category. It’s a great game. A collection of 20 objects can be sorted a staggeringly large number of ways: by color, by size, by use, by ownership, by gender, by taste, by feel, by name, by materials used in manufacturing, by the degree of fun, by shape, by temperature, by degree of reflectiveness or transparency, by the feelings they inspire, by history, by age, by weight, by dimensions, by utility, by the maker, by origin, or any other trait or combination of traits. This is a task that’s truly shaped by imagination. Categorization is a work of creativity. Guessing the rules of categorization is deductive reasoning at its best—scientists, detectives, and doctors do it everyday. But unlike the Kindergarten game, there’s usually no one to tell when the guess is wrong. How we perceive a group of objects depends on the…

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Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Ethnographic & User Data, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Space-Time Changes in Cultural Variables

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Some designs are timeless, some are dated. TV shows, movies, books, and even Web sites change as both technologies driving the medium change and as our sensibilities as consumers alter in time. Cultural shock is easy to spot as we move globe trot, searching for new experiences. But cultural shock is just as easy to get at home, watching old commercials and movies. As product designers, we want to find those attributes that will stand the course of time and space. The need for innovation and push to grab the most number of users makes evolutionary design less and less appealing. But it’s the “hammers” of the world that retain their value long after the newest fads have come and gone. A product that is build as an answer to a specific, human need, stands the test of space-time utility.

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