“It’s almost shunned to say it: men and women are not the same. This is usually interpreted as meaning not equals. However, the fact that they are different is actually quite interesting. So: equals but fortunately not the same. Designers should also be conscious of this difference”, Bernique Tool
Design and emotion share an interesting correlation. Some products have a strong emotional connotation, think of an alarm clock for example. An alarm clock has a major effect on your mood in the morning, so why should the product not take your feelings into account?
Other products are simply hard to probe, for instance a product aimed at autistic children: how does one uncover the bond between the user and the product in such a case? Design and emotion offers designers tools to handle these situations.
And of course (consumer) products in general appeal to our emotions, to our sense of self. The products we surround ourselves with (have to) reflect who we are, who we want to be, or how we wish others to see us. The latter I find both intriguing and disconcerting: I highly recommend watching the amazing yet disheartening BBC documentary “The Century of the Self“, describing how consumerism has dictated our paths since its inception. The documentary makes you question your role and responsibility as a product designer: are you going to use your skills and abilities to try and push limits and inspire, or are you going to fall in line with contemporary consumerism to create purely profit driven incremental product changes?
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”, George Bernard Shaw
In the current highly competitive market, it is more important than ever before to deliver a perfect user-centred, highly integrated product experience. Throughout the entire cycle of product development the user is taken on board, design thinking is key with human factors providing the tools for research and evaluation.
Human factors (or ergonomics) is the scientific multi-discipline concerned with the understanding of the interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and applies theoretical principles, data and methods to design in order to optimise human well-being and overall system performance. It is essential knowledge for structured design and development. After all, as designers we try to ensure that technology and (artificial) objects in our environment adapt to us rather than the other way around.
As example, user interface design illustrates the importance of human factors perfectly: a user interface forms a thin layer of interaction with a very limited bandwidth between human and machine. One must be fully aware of the existing conventions, how tasks affect attention allocation and intensity, what search patterns are followed, how data is processed by the user, whether or not auditive or cross-modal attention may be of use, etc.
From scenario based product design with its design improvisation, endowed props, role-playing or tangible interaction to ethnography with its observation, CUTA or probing techniques (to just name a few): there is a wide array of human factors related tools available to address any possible scenario.
The majority of deliverables for the minor music design at the conservatory were of course in the form of music. It’s already been almost a year ago since I’ve finished my minor, but with the new site I figured it’d be fun to share three of the songs on here.
Slight backstory: I participated in the minor together with a fellow student with whom I’m also in a band. In the past we have been in a fair few cover bands and fairly recently we have started making our own music. The minor provided a nice opportunity to improve our producing skills, and we figured it would be nice to get some experience creating digital (house) music.
The song “Tonight there is sound” makes use of a presidential speech by Carter, and is an experimentation with creating contemporary catchy music (much like the last song).
The song “1, 2, 3, uh” differs in the sense that it was part of a more elaborate assignment. Each week the group participating in the minor would propose a line for an instrument, or a part of the song. For example one week a bass line would be proposed, next week a beat. After all parts were gathered, each individual would have to use those lines to compose a unique song. The lines were all rather dull, so Ruud and I decided to switch it all up: the bass line would become the beat, the melody the bass line, etcetera. And of course Ruud and I introduced some new elements, as well as a new melody.
The minor ended up mostly interesting for networking to be honest, skill wise improvement was entirely autodidact.
After having played in a fair few cover bands, it was time to create some music of our own. We‘ve experimented a lot with different microphone setups to record our sound, and we’ve bought some gear to be able to process our recordings. We’ve used a Roland Edirol UA-1000 for recording, and Cubase in combination with KRK studio speakers for post-processing. We’ve recorded the pieces in one go to be as natural as possible; not everything needs to sound crisp and clean. It’s material back from 2005/2006, I hope you enjoy our experiments.
Here’s to my brand new portfolio, made from scratch in Adobe Flash. As my first fling with flash and web design it was a rather steep learning curve with a lot of backtracking as soon as I learnt better methods to accomplish what I wanted – the usual learning process really. The skills learnt will definitely prove useful for future presentations or user tests. But for the time being it means my work is now available online.
Blog
My blog describes events from my life related to design and engineering. Hopefully it will give you more insight into my work processes and personal interests.
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