Visual vs. Symbolic Language

African-American poverty

Lower classes

Two extremes of society

Racial discrimination

Racial inequality

Limited opportunities of education

Labor market

Unemployment

Waiting in Line

Cold weather

Not enough money to leave kids with baby sitters

Hope

Reality vs. Idealism

Portraying the “American Way”

The perfect living vs. what’s really happening

No chance for daydreaming

Smiley faces vs. empty looks on people’s faces

This image is a photograph of African-American people formed in line waiting to receive some kind of help for their poverty condition. What is ironic about the photograph itself is that on the background of this line of people, there is a big add showing the “World’s Highest Standard of Living.” A white family is depicted driving their car (most likely a Beetle) and seem to be completely happy and full of joy. There’s the mom, the dad, two children and a dog. Even the dog seems to be smiling while it enjoys the landscape and its head and front legs are out the window. Out of all people formed in line, only one person is aware of the big ironic add next to them. Only that person notices the difference between their cruel reality and the idealistic portrait. There is some more text on the add: “There is no way like the American way”, this isn’t really true for these African-American people. They’re still American but can’t afford that kind of standard living the add advertises. There is proof of cold weather by what people are wearing: big coats, hats, gloves, and warm clothing in general. There’s one woman who holds a basket, two other people who hold steel buckets and one more man who holds a big paper bag. The overall look on people’s faces is plain, empty and without too much expression of emotion, probably they’re living an “emotional hell” inside and might be just used to this kind of everyday routine.

WK 4: Visual Thinking Research

For this puzzle me and my roommate Maria tried basically the strategy of Visual Reasoning explained in the McKim reading: "Images in Action". We followed each one of the possible paths in which the persons of the exercise would get to their respective homes. This way we noticed when they were crossing on each other's ways and kind of tried several times until we figured out the way of using all the space available on the puzzle area and doing it the correct way. It took us about 25 min to get it done, and we colaborated with each other's work. We also did some deductive reasoning when we were going from the abstract idea of getting each one of the guys to their homes to a concrete idea of actually figuring out the solution for this puzzle.

With the Cat's puzzle we just used one of the most common operations in visual thinking: the Finding strategy. We basically looked at the cat's image and saw if the shape of triangles was concealed in the cat's body parts. Then we counted all the triangle shapes we could observe and when we added up our totals Maria had 2 triangles less than I... this was because she didn't notice the 4 tiny right triangles in the cat's eyes. She only counted the 2 regular triangles which represented the contour of the eyes of the cat.

Feature Hierarchy and Visual Search

This figurine is called KeyBot and it is basically a container for your keys. I think it relates to feature channels and visual search somehow because you don't need text or icons to be able to figure out how this works and what's its purpose of functionality. Just by looking at it and maybe interacting with it you'll find what it has been designed for. Its shape and size are the main feature channels that will communicate the user about the object's purpose. After that, its color, curvature, and layout might also be considered as existing features in this case. I chose this object because my field of study is Industrial Design, and I want to take out from this topic a lot of important tools that are necessary for those kind of designs that won't need too much of icons or text to communicate their functionality to the user. There are objects that simply "speak" by themselves and I consider them very creative and clever because they just don't need that extra visual aid.

This object was designed by Claudia Muñiz García

http://davidreport.com/blog/2009/11/

top down visual processing exercise (Modular Kitchen)

This is a Modular Kitchen Concept that I've taken as an example related to Top-Down Visual Processing and my area of study which is Ind. Design. The visual information this modular concept conveys makes the user to have an attentional process when figuring out how it works, how the different parts function and the kind of purposes they have. I think the goal here is to visually understand how this kitchen works and the different actions or interactions the user has to perform in order to find every detail that supports the functionality of this object. However, the different biases that designs like this may produce can anticipate the way users are going to understand and even like a product. The many eye-movements when analyzing this object are consequence of the top-down visual processing we do when focusing on something we are looking at. In this case, I think the user needs to visually analyze and physically interact with the object to be able to have a better grasp of its functionality setup.

This Modular Kitchen Concept was made by Fevzi Karaman for 'Treehugger, a Discovery Company'

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/less-is-more-modular-kitchen-concept-fevzi-karaman.php