Stanley Milgram

This book was a biography of Stanley Milgrim. It starts out with his childhood in New York. It goes through his education, and his high intelligence. He was able to get financial scholarships to go to Harvard and get into grad school. He was the center of moral controversy with his obedience experiment. In that experiment, his subject "shocked" one of his partners, but prerecorded screams of pain were recorded and played so the subject would hear. The results were that people would follow the commands of someone with supposed authority. The obedience levels were still relatively high even for people who had to hold the hand of the person to the shock plate. He did debrief the subjects afterward, and told them that there was no harm actually done. Even with this, people still were not pleased with his actions. After finishing grad school, he taught at Princeton, and then City University of New York where he continued his research. Other experiments he had done include the memory mapping of New York City and Paris and the six degrees of separation.

I believe that the obidience experiment may not have been ethical, but it is realistic to some situations that could happen in the real world. The goal of the experiment was to find out what would cause obidience to authority, and the results show that most people are willing to put aside their concerns if the authority figure commands them to. The stress felt by these people were probably similar to those felt by the people who were indirect accessories to atrocities in World War 2. So, even though the experiment may be unethical by the standards of the time, the results are realistic because in the real world, people go into stressful situations all the time and I don't think this experiment went too far in that respect.

Also, the other experiments like the mental mapping and six degrees of separation provided interesting results. I knew that some areas in cities are more familar than others, since that area may be the what the city is known for. However, I wouldn't have expected that sometimes, they knew the famous areas better than their own neighborhoods.

Emotional Design

Emotional Design, by Don Norman, was mainly about how we associate emotions with everyday things. Attractive things are easier to use because we are in a positive state, which means we're more relaxed. We can think more critically when we're at ease, so if anything goes wrong, alternative solutions can be found. When we see something unattractive, we become more stressed, so our train of thought becomes more narrow and we may miss obvious solutions to our problems. Also, he mentioned the levels of emotions: visceral, behavioral, reflective. Visceral level is based on the appearance. Behavioral is based on how effective and pleasurable it is . Reflective is more looking back at the experience. Some designs focus on each of these levels separately, but good designs use all 3. These concepts can be used to make better games and sites for the public, but most companies don't implement them. For example, the google search page has 1 o in google for each page. Little things like that makes a website seem more fun than the generic yahoo search pages, which is rather bland and more work oriented. Also, game companies could use these concepts to create better games that cater to subgroups that use their products. However, they don't do that and sell a game system for everyone. Of course, this could be due to business reasons.

I like this book. The idea that we like to use attractive things is something we don't think about, but subconsciously do. Also, the levels of thinking and how lower levels can be overridden by higher thinking makes sense, although we don't think in those terms.

Don't Interrupt Me

This paper was about interruptions while in the workplace and how they affect the time it takes to complete the task and the mental strain on the workers. They sought to measure the disruption cost of the interruptions (the additional time to reorient back to an interrupted task or stress) and whether personality factors can affect the disruption costs.

They ran an experiment with 48 German university students. They were assigned a task to answer emails as quickly, correctly (using a fact sheet), and politely as possible. In the first task, they had no interruptions. In the second, they were interrupted by a superior through the phone or IM on related topics (the human resource context). In the third, the interruptions were not related to what they were doing. They were told to attend to these interruptions immediately.

They measured how long it took to complete each set of emails and how long they took to respond to the interruptions. They also measured the subjective workload through a modified NASA Task Load Index, with the addition of stress. They also noted the personality of each of the participants.

The results show that same context interruptions are not more beneficial than different context interruptions, although they may be perceived to be. Interrupted work is performed faster, mainly because the person will work faster, with the same politeness and correctness. However, they experience more stress, higher frustration, more pressure and effort. This could have an effect on system design. Through the results, even 20 minutes of interrupted performance can cause higher stress and frustration in people. Newer systems can keep track of these interruptions and control them over a long period of time, so the person will not be too overloaded.

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review of technical paper:

Mark, Gloria, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. CHI 2008.

I'm sorry dave, I'm afraid I cannot let you have eggs today

I read the book The Design of Future Things by Don Norman. It is the same overall concepts from the last book The Design of Everyday Things but with more relevant examples. The last book was written 20 years ago, and many of the examples in that book have been resolved or are unfamiliar to us. He discusses how contemporary technology will be like in the future. However, he warns that we still make the same mistake in designing technology without the human factor. He mentions how automation may be good, but can be disastrous if it was not designed for humans to take control in time to correct a problem. Some examples in the book include cars that can drive itself amd a house with appliances that tries to get you to follow the doctor's orders. He also gives some rules for design on page 193, but I won't write it out here since it would take up too much space.

I think this is a decent book. However, some of the examples seem a bit too science fiction-like. The automated car that can drive by itself sounds good, but the public would never let that happen for the same reason why the autopilot on a plane will never handle takeoffs and landings for passenger jets. I think very few people would trust their lives to a computer and hope the programmers have thought of every possible situation (which they won't). Next, his talk of the super house seems creepy. Although it could be helpful, like the house playing loud, angry music as a wakeup alarm would be nice. But having the refrigerator and toilet to team up to pester you on your eating habits seems too much. Also, his talk of intelligent robots doing menial tasks to make human lives easier seem like the plot to every sci-fi movie/show where the robots decide to attack all humans.

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