Studio 2 | Reading Week

Studio 2 - Reading Week

1) What does "usable-in-life" mean?

"Usable-in-life" is a expression to state if a gadget or device is launched in a non isolated testing room and into the real world, from there see if the device is user friendly.

2) How is usability-in-life different to usability-in-itself?

Usability-in-itself is the term of a gadget or device which get tested in a isolated testing room, but where usability-in-life is where the gadget or device is launched in the real world.

3) How is the iPod designed to be both usable-in-itself, and usable-in-life?

The way the iPod was designed, when tested in a isolated room, it perform all the individual task in a reasonable amount of time, which shows its usable-in-itself. And when the iPod was thrown in the real world, the tasks still work in a reasonable time, therefore proves it is usable-in-life.

Studio 1 | Reading Week

Studio 1 - Reading week

After reading "Everyware" the definitions of pervasive computing I found was:

• Information technology will appear in many different context and take a wider variety of forms, but it will affect almost every one of us, whether were aware of it or not.


• Desktop machine per se would largely disappear as the tiny, cheap microprocessors that powered them faded into the built environment. But computation would flourish, becoming intimately intertwined with the stuff of everyday life.


• Computing has leapt off the desktop and insinuated itself into everyday life.


• Meant not merely "in every place", but also "in every thing".


• Mark Weiser - A computing that "does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere".


• Most of the functions we now associate with these boxes on our desks, these slabs that warm our laps, will be dispersed into both the built environment and the wide variety of everyday objects we typically use there.


• A "tangible media" extending computation out into the walls and doorways of everyday experience.


• In 1989, workers wearing an active badge in an instrumented building could automatically unlock areas to which they had been granted access, have phone calls routed to them wherever they were and create running diaries of the meetings they attending.


• Information processing embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life.


• Elements like walls, roofs, tables and seating, clothing. And, of course, the body itself- Our original and our final home. In everywhere, all of these present appealing platforms for networked computation.


• Dor Norman - Difficulty and frustration we experience in using the computer are primarily artefacts of its general - purpose nature. A truly human - centred design would explode the computer's many functions into a "quiet, invisible, unobtrusive" array of networked objects scattered throughout the home: simple, single-purpose "information appliances" in the form of shoes, bookshelves, even teddy bears.