Typography & Information Design: Reflections and Critiques

Feb 18, ’13 2:06 PM

A stroke, a letter, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and a book: all essentially linear constructs of the typographic mind put into action. There is a typographic order of “things,” a logical sequence from the most simple, to the most complex. A line, a space, a rectangle, a margin—an aesthetic device for visuality. As an infinite list of signifiers, the above lists signify the qualitative/quantitative display of the visual properties of typography:
the micro and the macro, the color and the density, the positives and the negatives, the visible and the invisibles; these are some of the typographic paradigms that yield communicative visualization.

I taught typography and information design concurrently for more than a decade in the Parsons Communication Design program (now Parsons The New School for Design), serving as a full-time faculty member between 1998–2009.

The intrinsic properties of these mutually reciprocal endeavors, typography and information design, form the “twin topic” subjects of this brief investigation. I believe I have succeeded in sharing my fascination with all my students, they who were most patiently tormented by my investigative interrogations. Indeed, it was reputed that I, not they, were confused; this earned me, in some circles, the stigma of being the most “confused” instructor of all time.

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Interplay between User Experience Evaluation and System Development: State of the Art

Dec 31, ’12 12:34 PM

User Experience (UX) is an emerging research area pertaining to as well as extending beyond the traditional usability. Issues in the realm of usability may be amplified in UX because of its larger scope.

Four key non-orthogonal issues are: definition, modeling, method selection, and interplay between evaluation and development. Leveraging the legacy of a series of earlier workshops, I-UxSED 2012 aims to develop a deeper understanding of how evaluation feedback shapes software development, especially when experiential qualities such as fun, trust, aesthetic values are concerned. Is feedback on these fuzzy qualities less useful for problem prioritization or less persuasive for problem fixing? This and other challenging questions will be explored in I-UxSED 2012 that brings together researchers and practitioners from two communities – HCI and Software Engineering.

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Author: Effie Lai-Chong Law
Department: Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester, UK

Author: Silvia Abrahão
Department: Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Valencia, Spain

Author: Arnold P.O.S. Vermeeren
Department: Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Author: Ebba Thora Hvannberg
Department: School of Engineering and Natural Sciences, University of Iceland, Iceland

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Faces of product pleasure: 25 positive emotions in human-product interactions

Dec 28, ’12 4:26 PM

Positive emotions differ both in how they are evoked and in how they influence usage behaviour. Designers can use the set of 25 positive emotions to develop their emotional granularity and to specify design intentions in terms of emotional impact.

The study of user emotions is hindered by the absence of a clear overview of what positive emotions can be experienced in human-product interactions. Existing typologies are either too concise or too comprehensive, including less than five or hundreds of positive emotions, respectively. To overcome this hindrance, this paper introduces a basic set of 25 positive emotion types that represent the general repertoire of positive human emotions. The set was developed with a componential analysis of 150 positive emotion words. A questionnaire study that explored how and when each of the 25 emotions are experienced in human-product interactions resulted in a collection of 729 example cases.

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