November 14, 2008 Class Meeting

During our November 14, 2008 meeting, Kim provided us with information in regard to many aspects of the reading, including affordance, visibility, constraints. Kim explained to us the cultural aspects of these criteria. For instance, in terms of visibility, people from each culture are inquisitive in seeing something new, yet the response is different from one culture to another. Kim gave us an example in which a lipstick was explored by people from South African by eating them like candies since they were not familiar with it.

One of my comment is that there is a mental constraint besides a physical constraint. For instance, I have realized that the slit on the side of a MAC Computer can be constrained in various ways. A person might think of putting the disk into the slit, and that they do have a mental constraint besides a physical constraint. The mental constraint is that they would worry if the disk breaks after it is ejected from the slit. It is rather illogical for MAC computer to design a slit in which the disk can either break or damage just because it is the first time a person uses it, and that they might not know that they should put something soft under the computer.