Farrar, L. (2010). “Chinese companies ‘rent’ white foreigners.” CNN. Retrieved on 3 October, 2010: http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/06/29/china.rent.white.people/index.html In China, white people can be rented. Chinese companies are willing to pay high prices for fair-faced foreigners to join them as fake employees or business partners. To have a few foreigners hanging around means a company has prestige, money and the increasingly crucial connections — real or not — to businesses abroad. The requirements for these jobs are simple: Be white. Do not speak any Chinese, or really speak at all, unless asked. Pretend like you just got off of an airplane yesterday. Those who go for such gigs tend to be unemployed actors or models, part-time English teachers or other expats looking to earn a few extra bucks. Often they are jobs at a second- or third-tier city, where the presence of pale-faced foreigners is needed to impress local officials, secure a contract or simply to fulfill a claim of being international. Occasionally, these jobs can go awry. A company can hire a white foreigner, swindle millions of yuan out of their clients , and after police shows up tell that the white guy was the one really in charge, White women are…
Tag Archive for user satisfaction
Cognitive Blindness, Conceptual Design, Contributor, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Mental Model Traps, Perception
Re “Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception”
by Van Nga •
Svitil, K., (2008). “Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception.” California Institute of Technology. Visited on October 4, 2010: http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13091 This article is a research study about how the region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex showed higher activity when participants drank wines at a higher price. A wine tasting study was conducted at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Twenty volunteers tasted five wine samples at different retail prices: $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90 per bottle. The volunteers tasted and evaluated which wines that they found more pleasurable. Two out of five of the wines were the same but one was priced at $10 and one at $90. In the experiment the subjects rated and preferred the $90 priced wine more than the $10, although they did not know that they tasted the same wine. Cognitive Design What does the product do? In this study the cognitive design was a wine tasting experiment. The concept of the research was to experiment on the perception of price on different wines. The setting was controlled in that the subjects did not know that they tasted the same wine but told that the price was different. While tasting…
Cognitive Blindness, Conceptual Design, Group Decision Errors, Interface Design, Mirroring Errors, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding
Working with Clients
by Olga Werby •
We once had a client who made his secretary drive to our studio with a piece of a carpet from his office to be used as a color swatch for his company’s new logo. And while the final logo looked okay (very logo-like), it did little to represent the company’s brand. The company is no longer around today. Having a client who opines on the color of the background, choice of typeface, thickness of line, or layout mars the design process. It’s easy to get lost in details and personal preferences—who is to say that green is better than orange? A good designer has to be able to manage the client, keep the conversation focused on business goals and user needs. But before we can delve into the design process, we have establish trust. Clients need to feel like they’ve been listened to, they have to know and understand that design is hard work, and they have to buy into our expertise. The First Date The initial group meeting between the design firm and their client tends to feel like a first date: this is a chance for everyone to declare their expertise and expectations of each other. And like a…
Conceptual Design, Contributor, Flow, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Product Design Strategy
On “For digital artists, apps provide new palette”
by mabelev •
Harmanci, R. (2010). “For digital artists, apps provide new palette.” New York Times Online. Retrieved on October 4, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/us/20bciart.html To illustrate the impact of mobile/handheld-device technology on the arts, this article describes the work of several individual artists who have used iPhone/iPad applications as an artistic format. In my overview, I focus on the work by Scott Snibbe and pose the following question: what is it about handheld apps that sets them apart and makes them a more successful environment for interactive art than any other? Scott Snibbe is an artist for whom interactivity, i.e. the opportunity for audience participation, is a central theme. His installations are often designed to capture human bodily actions and respond to them. The audience thus has the experience of bringing an art piece’s content into existence. For example, in Falling Girl (2008) and Make Like a Tree (2006), people’s movements are replicated, with some time lag, by silhouettes projected onto screens, while in Blow-Up (2005) people’s breath triggers fans that reproduce its spatio-temporal contour. Snibbe’s very popular mobile apps are closely based on an earlier Dynamic Systems interactive series that involved manual action, except that their original version used more traditional cursor-based interface. …
Conceptual Design, Contributor, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Perception
Sense of Touch Shapes Snap Judgments
by patrickgary •
Keim, B., (2010). “Sense of Touch Shapes Snap Judgments.” Wired.com. Visited on October 3, 2010: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/touching-cognition/ Brandon Keim’s article for Wired.com’s science blog provides a brief overview of recent research into the role that tactile sensations play in human interactions. This new area of psychological research, referred to as Embodied Cognition, could potentially have a significant impact on how we understand social and physical interactions. Put simply, the core findings of the research show that our physical responses to our immediate environment, combined with other factors, can directly and measurably influence our decision-making. One of the examples provided involved giving the subject a heavy clipboard to hold during the experiment; when holding the heavy clipboard, the subjects tended to regard their own opinions and problems presented to them as being more weighty and serious in nature. Other examples showed how a tactile interaction with a rough surface prior to an interview could lead to a harsher attitude towards the interviewee. The article itself is somewhat of a stub, so we are left to imagine the further implications of Embodied Cognition ourselves. What relevance does Embodied Cognition have for product interaction design? After all, it’s not as if touch has previously…
Conceptual Design, Contributor, Cultural Differences, Interaction Design, Interface Design
Antisocial Networking?
by Roman Shumikhin •
Stout, H. (2010). “Antisocial Networking?” New York Times Online. Retrieved on 3 October, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html The main topic of this article is that technology may be changing the very nature of kid’s friendships. Children used to actually talk to their friends. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail is becoming rare. Today’s teenagers and preteens, prefer to make friends and communicate using cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. People now are more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. The article shows two opposite points of view on the topic. The author believes the quality of human interactions is becoming worse without the intimacy and emotional component of regular face-to-face communications (hence the title of this article). The ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends, but close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families, develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language, and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. On the other hand, online social networking allows children to become…
Conceptual Design, Contributor, Interface Design, Language, Product Design Strategy, Users
Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners
by Mallika •
Kershaw, S., (2009). “Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners.” New York Times Online. Visited on October 02, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/dining/23menus.html. This article discusses how an understanding of human psychology is being applied to sculpt a restaurant menu into a lucrative tool for the restaurateur. Restaurateurs play down the importance of the cost figure by eliminating the dollar sign and decimals. Adding a personal touch to an item (‘Grandma Mary’s cake’) or a descriptive menu label (‘buttery pasta’) draws more attention to the dish. Other decoys include using a description that glorifies a more profitable dish compared to others. During the tough economic times in the last year, some restaurants were reinventing their restaurants through such menu design techniques, and were hoping that would make the difference they needed. Conceptual design: When you go to a restaurant, good food is not the only thing you seek; you are looking for a good experience. Of course sometimes, great food can make us turn a blind eye to any other inadequacy and draw us back into the restaurant. Nevertheless, a good experience overall manifests itself as a stronger loyalty. If your overall experience has made a lasting positive impression, you may recommend the restaurant…