Reality is Broken by Jane McGonnigal

"Reality Is Broken" by Jane McGonigal was my introduction to the concept of Gamification. It definitely changed the way that I look at the world around me. Gamification seeks to reshape and redesign the world around us to more closely resemble a game, as games are one of the most powerful motivators. The book explores videogames such as FoldIt, a puzzle game in which users manipulate proteins and the data generated during gameplay is used in research on curing diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, and Alzheimers, as well as a school in New York City that structures assignments as quests and adventures to keep the students interested and passionate about what they are learning. I find this concept absolutely fascinating because I think it has the potential to make enormous changes in our world, and that gamification as a concept will be embraced by many industries and organizations in the future as a crucial consideration in design.

The title of the book aludes to the current debates over the damage that video games have done to children's minds. Kids who play a lot of video games may have trouble focusing and staying interested in school, but Jane McGonigal makes the argument that it is not what is wrong with the children but what is wrong with the way we are trying to teach them. Children who watch television are used to passively receiving entertainment and information, but when playing video games, children are actively involved- they are making decisions, taking action, and receiving immediate feedback. Children then go to school and are expected to be little more than passive observers. When compared to psychological needs met by video games, reality IS broken.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

After an incredibly slow first few chapters, this book was one of the most interesting things I have ever read. I first heard about it during an episode of Radiolab on NPR, where the author gave an interview about the book. The basic premise is that there is an almost predetermined path to the march of technology: like evolution, there are certain events that are always going to occur. For instance, it is estimated that eyes have evolved in species independently forty times. Such an incredibly efficient and useful mechanism is always superior to the alternative, so it arises again and again. Much the same thing happens with technology, where inventors who are working independently, completely unaware of each other, develop the same technologies because it is an efficient and useful mechanism. In a way it was similar to the "Me, Myself, and Muse" episode of Radiolab (reviewed here), in that it explored the idea of concepts existing on their own, but reliant on humans to come to their full form.

US Army War College Locator

When I worked for at the US Army War College in 2010, the administration was considering giving iPads to the next year's incoming class and were interested in exploring potential uses for the device. One of my jobs of the summer was to develop two web apps for the campus: a trail guide for the US Army Heritage Education Center Trail, and a locator app for the War College campus.

The design process for the Heritage Trail app (which I don't have access to) was a learning experience because it was the first time I ever used Adobe Fireworks for mockups. It featured a transparent menu overlay on an image of one of the cannons on display.

The locator app was quite different, as I had very little idea how to accomplish what I wanted to do. I wanted the app to use javascript geolocation to find a user's location and display it as a glowing blue dot that moved as the device did. This took a few days of research and debugging to get right, as I was using the Google Maps API. Once the tricky part had been accomplished, I added smaller details, such as 3D renderings of the many of the buildings on campus and nametags and descriptions for each.

bigbalemulcher.com

bigbalemulcher.com

For webdesign, I usually begin with a white board and plan out the structure of each page, as well as the navigation . For the current Big Bale Mulcher website, I had a navigation structure already created- I mainly wanted to change the look and feel of the page. My next step is always to create mock-ups using Adobe Fireworks. My first mock-up for the home page was quite different from the final finished product, but was disliked by the customer.

The three boxes at the bottom were to have been pictures and text. Once this design had been declined, I started a new design, but kept many of the elements the same: The grey stayed, but went in descending order by darkness, the font stayed the same, pictures were displayed differently. Once I finally had an approved mockup, it was just a matter of optimizing the HTML and Photoshopping the images.

Sir Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity

This video wasn't so much about design as creativity, and how we need to do a better job of encouraging and embracing it as a society. Sir Ken Robinson argues that we are educating children for a world that can only be imagined. We do not know what the future holds in the next five years, let alone the next sixty-five, so creativity should be as important as literacy; this is an idea that was also explored on the first day of MAE451.

Children are far more creative than adults; kids will take a chance, they are not yet afraid of being wrong or making a mistake. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." In the current education system, however, in this country and throughout the developed world, children are discouraged from making mistakes. Public school were created to meet the needs of industrialization, but they continue to churn out workers for jobs that don't exist anymore. We no longer need students trained to be cogs in the machine; what we need now is to stop wasting children's talents and creative abilities because they will "never do that for a living."

I like this video's assertion that without mistakes, there is no originality because this is an issue that I often struggle with. I evaluate my ideas too quickly and too harshly because I am afraid to make a mistake, but this is a crippling habit that I have been working to overcome.