Assignment 1: Introduction to Wiki and Reflections on Everyday Things

Assigned: Thu Sep 4
Due: Thu Sep 11

Audience:

Your audience for this assignment is the TID class.

Objective:

This assignment has two goals:

Introduce you to the UMass Lowell wiki system.
Challenge you to think about the central ideas in Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things, including finding examples in your own life.

Research:

Read the prefaces and Chapter 1 of DOET (The Design of Everyday Things)
Make observation notes in journal template page (to be handed out) in binder

Medium:

The medium for this assignment (i.e., tangible materials in the work product) is a wiki page. In other words, you will be “turning in” a page you have created on the course wiki (see Part 1 for what is a wiki!).

Part 1: The UMass Lowell Wiki

A wiki is a web page or web site that can be collaboratively edited. If you are a member of the wiki system, you simply click “edit” on the web page and then you can change the contents of that web page.

Check out this YouTube video, for a fun, short cartoon introducing the wiki concept:

The university has adapted a campus-wide wiki system. If you are reading this on the web, you are seeing the wiki in action. (Or, if you are reading this in print, please go to http://tid08.wiki.uml.edu/assignment-everyday-things to view the video and continue your work on the wiki system.)

In Tangible Interaction Design, we will be using the wiki in several ways:

many assignments will be posted on the wiki (in addition to being handed out in class)
we will take notes from in-class activities and update the wiki, as an on-going journal of our public class conversations
you will present some of your work on the wiki, to share with both the faculty, your classmates, and the public at large who may be interested in your ideas!

In this part of the assignment, you will:

create an account on the UMass Lowell wiki
join the Tangible Interaction Design wiki space
create a page for your own work
link to your page from the everyday-things-turnin page

There are several steps here, so let's dive in.

Creating Your Wiki Account

You only have to do this once and you may use the wiki in other classes. If you don't yet have an account, go to:

http://www.wiki.uml.edu/user/join

and sign up. Make sure to use your UML email address.

It will take anywhere from a few hours to a day for your account to be approved.

Join the TID Wiki Space

Once your wiki account is approved, you can join the wiki-space for the TID class. Go to the TID web site, http://tid08.wiki.uml.edu . Log into the wiki, using the Sign In link in the upper right. Next, click Join this Space in the left-column menu. OK, now you are ready to create and edit pages on the wiki!

Create a New Page for Your Everyday Things Assignment

Now that you have a wiki account, you can edit existing pages, or create brand new pages on the tid08 space. Here, you will create a page for your results of this assignment.

Go back to the http://tid08.wiki.uml.edu wiki and log in. You should now see a link entitled New Page in the left-column menu.

Click on it, you will see a dialog for creating the page. It will look like this:

Now, the key here is choosing a good name for the page. You can't just use my-everyday-things, because everyone in the course could choose that name!

So instead, you should make a name that is unique to you, and also includes the name of the assignment. So I suggest using your initials. So Fred would create a page named fgm-everyday-things, and Karen would create a page named ker-everyday-things.

Now, go ahead and create your page, using your initials in the name.

Put Some Content in the Page

Now you have your page, you can start editing it. You can click the Edit Page button along the top, next to the page name:

Then click into the main page area and start typing.

You can style text using the editing toolbar:

Just type something into the page as a placeholder for now, and then click Save. You will go back and add content later.

Link Your Page Into the Everyday-Things-Turnin page

OK, the final step. There is a page called everyday-things-turnin. You must now go to that page (just click on the link -- everyday-things-turnin). Then, on that page, create a link to your page. Here's how.

On the everyday-things-turnin page, click Edit This Page.
Find the bullet list of links ("Add your links here"). Click the cursor after the end of the last one, and hit return.
You should get a new bullet. Now, click the Insert Link tool—it looks like this:
You will see a dialog labeled Create Link that looks like this:
Click on the Page Name pop-up menu and find your assignment page (e.g., fgm-everyday-things). Then click OK.
You'll be back at the everyday-things turn-in page. Your link should now be in the bullet list. Click Save, and you are done.

NOTE: ALL OF THE ABOVE MUST BE DONE BEFORE THE NEXT CLASS MEETING!!! That is, everything but the actual assignment content. It can take a day to get your wiki account approved, so plan ahead! Leave at least a margin of error, and go through the boring mechanics above right away. Thank you, thank you.

Mac users please note: Don't use the Safari web browser to edit wiki pages; you'll be dumped into a “wiki markup” mode. Instead, use Firefox, and everything will work great.

Part 2: Design of Everyday Things

Finally, the assignment itself!

1. Read the Preface to the 2002 Edition, Preface, and Chapter 1 of Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things.

2. In your daily life, find one extremely well-designed object, and also one extremely poorly-designed object. Then, document these objects with photographs and/or drawings, as well as a narrative that explains why the object is well-designed or poorly-designed.

3. Put your photos and narrative essay on your personal page for this assignment. For example, Fred has put his object stories on fgm-everyday-things. You may wish to visit his page (click on the link when you are reading this on the web) as an example of what we are looking for.

Here are some guidelines for the assignment:

You must actually encounter this object in your personal life, and you must provide an original photograph or scanned original drawing when documenting it. You may not use a photo found on the web of the same object, even if it exists—you must take your own photographs.
In your discussion, make reference to at least one of the design concepts introduced by Norman in Chapter 1 or beyond (e.g., visibility, affordances, conceptual models, mapping, and feedback). If you can reference more than one of these ideas for each of the objects, that is better.
Please do your best to find something original and different. You may wish to avoid web-searching on this theme—there's a lot out there already, and we would really like you to use your imagination.

A bit more on using the wiki here, specifically around images:

To upload image files to the wiki, use the File Upload dialog in the editing toolbar. It looks like this:
Before uploading your file, rename it so that it has your initials in the prefix. E.g., if Fred were to upload a picture of a door, he might name it fgm-door.jpg before uploading. This will make your images a lot easier for you to find after uploading them. As the whole class starts uploading images, there will be scores of them on the site. If you've named yours with initials-prefix, you'll easily be able to navigate to them using the alphabetic-index feature of the File Upload dialog.
Make sure your image files are relatively small. Set your camera to 640x480 pixels or resize your images to about this size before uploading.

When you are editing your page, click on the link help on how to format text to enter the extensive wiki help system. There's lots of instructional material in there—on images and far beyond.