4 of 365 - affordance - place setting by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
4 of 365 – affordance – place setting by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Affordance is the design principle in which a designer considers the ease with which the user can make use of the design, in comparison to other solutions. A design with high affordance is valued because it makes more logical sense than other solutions. It allows for more understanding, and less misunderstanding. An example is a door with a handle on one side and a push plate on the other, in which the suggestion to pull is clear from one side and the suggestion to push is clear from the other. Another example is that both a round wheel and a square wheel will roll, but one clearly makes easier work of rolling. Good design that incorporates affordance considers the clarity and ease with which a task is done.
I recently attended a lovely lunch with a friend, and it seemed as though there was no design to the layout of the table, that anything could go anywhere. In learning about affordance, I thought that designing a placemat in which places were predetermined for the various dishes, drinks, and accoutrement would have been helpful. Since there is a shared central dish in the design, all of the places would be connected by it. The design could work in a round table, a long table, or a square table. By suggesting actions, the design considers affordance. In the same way that you can push on a handled door, you could place dishes anywhere on this place setting, but the most sensible action suggested by the design brings ease and order. This placemat would be reversible, in the event that a left handed person was seated.
Advance Organizers are a design method where an audience is given new information in one of two ways to become oriented with a new concept. In cases where the audience is newly introduced to the topic, we might use an expository advance organizer. If an alien was trying to learn about the way that a human hand functions, for instance, we might use an expository advance organizer in the form of a description of the look, feel, uses, and functions of the hand. If the alien had hand like appendages, let’s say 3-pointed claws, we might use their understanding of that in the form of a comparative advance organizer that showed the similarities and differences between the alien claw and the human hand. The purpose of either would be to grant the audience a better understanding of the new concept before going into deeper detail, training, or demonstration.
Above is an illustration of the comparative visual anatomy of serif typography and sans-serif typography, in which the letter A is used in a comparative advance organizational method, since you, the audience, is likely familiar with the letter A.
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Let’s say you want to create a visual effect in which you have objects floating with regularity around another object, such as creating tick marks around the center of a clock. In this post, I’ll explain how you can do this easily in Inkscape. The key is in moving your center-point for the outer objects.
See the video below for a clearer explanation of these instructions. Open Inkscape. Using the text tool, create an ‘o’. Create a line with the bezier tool as your first tick mark. Put it in the perfect topmost position, aligned with the ‘o’ vertically. Click the tick mark with the selector tool until it is in rotation mode. Take the plus mark for the selected tick mark, and move it to the center of the o. This centers rotation at the center of the o. then, select the tick mark in rotation mode, and while dragging the rotation handle, hit your space bar at each place you want a tick mark. In 12 clicks of the space bar, you will be done.
I was inspired by a recent clip I saw of Ray Park practicing martial arts to do a split screen of him with perhaps his most famous role as Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode 1. The clip shows exactly how integral Park’s physical appearance and performance were in the creation of the character. I tend to do a lot of this kind of facial alignment work in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) because it offers all the right tools for photo manipulation in the perfect price of free.
How I made the image in GIMP
I started by gathering the two images, one of Ray in makeup/character and out. They were of a similar size, and of a reasonable size for my piece. The glossy of Ray was angled, where the image of Darth Maul was horizontally aligned, and so my first task was to drop horizontal and vertical gridlines at Darth Maul’s eyes, nose, and mouth. Then I dropped the opacity of Ray’s face and used the rotation, scaling, and move tools to align his face with the gridlines. I returned opacity to 100%. I added a layer mask to Maul in full opacity, then added a selection that took up exactly half of the face and filled it with the opposite color. In the GIMP, Black and White are the degrees of opacity in layer masks. Finally, I needed to repair the angled edges of Ray’s picture that were created in rotation, so I painted with the color of his shirt and the color of the background to fix those, and used the Stamp tool to repair his hair, which had highlights and texture that would have been difficult to recreate from scratch. It’s not perfect, as the angle of the head in the two shots is slightly out of alignment, but I think the illusion works. Apologies to Ray Park and Lucasfilm (Disney, now) for the unauthorized use of their images for the purpose of education and commentary here.
I was fortunate to be asked by Sophie Brookover and Library Link NJ (visit them at http://librarylinknj.org/ for great Library resources, insight, and help, especially for New Jersey Libraries) to co-host a Facebook Forum on effective Social Media for Libraries, and in the post-show we had a discussion about other topics for future events. We discussed a few things, but one interesting topic that came about was the idea of the ways that we had worked together to plan and collaborate for the Forum. In case you want to see the record of the forum, please visit the status update where that discussion lives.
Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Français : Logo de Facebook Tiếng Việt: Logo Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
At any rate, in planning for the event, we used five communication/collaboration channels, all interesting and useful in their own right. I’m writing this to organize my thoughts for the potential future products we talked about, and to give you some insight into our process. I talk about each of these in increasing order of communication channel richness. In other words, as we progress in this document, the capabilities for more sensory information increases.
Facebook discussion
In Facebook, each status update has a discussion attached to it. There, we can have a social gathering complete with links, pictures, video, text and other media types. If you can digitize it and produce a link to it, it’s fair game, though Facebook does a very good job of presenting the visuals right inline in the discussion. The key reason that we used it was because we wanted it to be open, sharable, publicized, fairly rich, archived for posterity, easy to use and join, and able to join people from all over. One unexpected benefit was that Sophie and I were both kind of sick with colds, coughing and sniffling, but no one had to suffer through our potentially contagious presence!
Since the forum is run on inquiry and discussion, we needed a planning document, and Google Drive provided a perfect platform for us to write our questions, rules, and reminders together both synchronously and asynchronously. Since Sophie and I both have and use our Google accounts, it was no effort or question. Plus, we got to see what each other was writing as we wrote it, discuss the changes by phone, add links, quotes, formatting, and photos. We would have lost the ability to format properly or keep easy track of the document if we used Facebook messaging or statuses, for instance, and the privacy settings of the document are quite flexible.
by-Phone
Car Telephone (Photo credit: bjosefowicz)
Because writing in text makes it very difficult to emote, and writing planning documents and discussions can easily trigger miscommunication, missed messages, and general confusion, we opted to talk by phone as we planned our Forum. Even though our voice based communication was sparse as we typed, it allowed for easy and quick clarification, justification, and suggestion with the added benefit of those temporary notes not being archived and cluttering our documents. We also had the ability to smile, laugh, end our sentences in a question tone, and show other emotions to underline our feelings as we spoke.
Google Hangouts
During the Forum itself on Facebook, Sophie and I used Google Hangouts as a rich backchannel to add all the benefits of phone communication with a video layer on top. Seeing a raised eyebrow, a smile, or a shake of the head during discussion added yet another layer of communicative understanding to our backstage work. I noted that it was a bit strange for us to use such a rich method for our backchannel of two participants while using a relatively thin channel in Facebook for the real event, when typically thin channels like Twitter are used for backchanneling while the main event is fairly rich. In this particular case, though, it was absolutely perfect. She and I were able to note changes to each other, clarify responses before typing, and give insights into the participants’ history and experience without anyone hearing our chatter in the public facing Forum.
In-Person
Before the first planning event, Sophie and I happened to both be presenting at the NJLA Adult Services forum and we got to see each other, greet each other, reinforce our in-person friendship and camaraderie, and have a rich discussion in real space. It was convenient that we both happened to be scheduled to speak and had the time to talk for a few minutes, because although this is by far the richest collaboration and communication channel it also represents the most effort. She and I probably both had to drive for 40 minutes to get there, spending time, gas, money, and planning, and if we hadn’t been going to this event anyway, we likely would not have had the opportunity to meet. In fact, while I list Sophie among my most valuable and respected colleagues, I have probably only been in the same physical space with her a handful of times. This shows the value of our other methods here, for sure.
How about you and your collaborators?
What methods do you use for communication and collaboration, and what benefits do they bring? Are you using email, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, or other methods to work together? What has worked best for you and what was the context of that success? What might Sophie and I have done instead of this and still get all the benefits of these various channels? List your answers, feedback and experiences in the discussion below!
Arduino Five Ten Egg Timer circuit – John LeMasney
Arduino simple circuit by lemasney
Arduino starter project 09: Motorized pinwheel
Introduction to Arduino
Last night I gave a talk on Introduction to Arduino at Princeton Public Library as part of their technology class offerings. I thought I might recap the talk here and invite you to come and visit the next time we offer it. For more information about their free and public classes, please click here:
Getting started with Arduino is the presentation I gave, complete with links, videos, photos, and other information.
What is Arduino?
Arduino microcontroller / Arduino Uno microcontroller ATmega328 / Arduino Mega 2560 / Arduino Nano ATmega328 / Arduino Pro Mini ver.3.3V ATmega328 / Photo by Arkadiusz Sikorski https://www.arq.pl/ (Photo credit: Arkadiusz Sikorski vel ArakuS)
Arduino is an open source hardware platform for learning and prototyping electronics projects. It’s open source in that the design of the board itself is shared so that you can build your own if you are so inclined. The software and scripts used to program it are also open source. It benefits from a strong worldwide community of developers, programs, and resources, including books, videos, and classes. It is an Italian project, co-founded by Massimo Banzi and others, and is designed to help people learn easily, even from a very young age. http://www.arduino.cc is the homepage for the project. You can get an Arduino Uno, one version of many good for getting started, for around $30.
Where can you get an Arduino and Learn more?
You can buy Arduino products in many places, including online on Amazon.com, element14.com, and in brick and mortar stores like Radio Shack.
http://makezine.com is a champion of projects using Arduinos and other open platforms.
What are inputs and Outputs?
Inputs are ways for the Arduino to get information. These include sensors like motion detectors, cameras, compasses, GPS, touchscreens, buttons, and many of the same kinds of sensors typically found on a contemporary phone. You use pins on the Arduino to connect them, and use scripts, called sketches, to tell the Arduino what to do with the signals.
Outputs are ways for the Arduino to send back information or do actions. Examples include Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), speakers, motors, and fans.
You can use inputs, outputs and sketches to scratch your own itches, often for a very low price. If you want a station that feeds your cat once every twelve hours but only if it hears a meow or when the cat comes near, you might use an arduino, an RFID (proximity) sensor, and a motor or latch to make it so that if the cat’s collar with an RFID chip in it comes close enough to the station, once in 12 hours time, the container of food has a door that opens for 3 seconds and closes again.
How do I get started with Arduino?
Cover via Amazon
There are many fantastic books, websites, videos, and communities of practice that focus on Arduino. Here’s one video that tells you how to get started with an Arduino. If you search for ‘Arduino tutorial’ on Google, YouTube, Element 14, or Adafruit.net, you’ll find many more.
How do I work with an Arduino?
The key to working with Arduino is writing sketches. You can use the Arduino program (an IDE or integrated development environment) based on an open source application called Processing to write sketches. Get it from http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
The most common starting example, with very simple capabilities is the Blink example. You can open the Blink example from file/examples/basics in the application.
“/* Blink
Turns on an LED on for one second, then off for one second, repeatedly.
This example code is in the public domain. */
// Pin 13 has an LED connected on most Arduino boards.
// give it a name:
int led = 13;
// the setup routine runs once when you press reset:
void setup() {
// initialize the digital pin as an output.
pinMode(led, OUTPUT);
}
// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:
void loop() {
digitalWrite(led, HIGH);
// turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
delay(1000);
// wait for a second
digitalWrite(led, LOW);
// turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
delay(1000);
// wait for a second
}”
~ Arduino – Blink –
What kinds of things can you do with an Arduino?
Here is a fun example that shows what you can do with the Arduino, with others in the presentation linked above:
Is Arduino related to Raspberry Pi?
Arduino and the Raspberry Pi are often talked about together, but they are very different devices. The Raspberry Pi and Arduino are both open source hardware, but aside from that they have very little to do with one another. While the Raspberry Pi has pins that you can use to manage electronics, the main purpose of the Pi is to have a $35 computer that you can use to connect to a TV or monitor via HDMI or composite jack and to a keyboard and mouse with USB. The Arduino would need to be very heavily modded to allow for anything like that. The Arduino is primarily an electronics prototyping platform.
