8 - Rachel Legge

Learning about “playing the whole game” of HCI Design has been a wonderfully informative experience.  The emphasis on the importance of “rigorous honesty” is something that really hit home with me.  I often catch myself sugar coating my critiques of other’s work, and now I understand just how detrimental that can be not only for that person but also for the group as a whole and the final product as well.  I have started giving much more straightforward critiques for the past few projects – in this class and others - and have found the results very beneficial.

Learning the 7 Themes of Good Design over the past several weeks has been wonderful.  Some of the topics seemed common sense when first reading each subject line, but after delving into the deeper meaning of each I gained a much better understanding of what each meant.  For example, theme #4 “Provides ease of learning” at first appears to be stressing that good design is easy to understand.  But I found being educated on the fact that it was also highlighting the fact that the brain is better at recognizing patterns, making generalizations, and concept learning –rather than memorization- very interesting.  Until the class went over this fact in class, I hadn’t thought about the reason behind why I was able to easily pick up on patterns/choreography in my dance classes (I’m a dance minor); and had such a difficult time memorizing all the bones in the body for my Anatomy class.

I’ve really enjoyed what we have been learning about “playing the game” of HCI Design so far, and I look forward to finding out what we will be learning in the next 8 weeks.