Verbal Reflection

Trading Zones

The world is continuously changing in terms of accelerated growth, technology, and radical contingency. There is noticeable damage that has resulted from the “human signature,” the footprint we have left behind from our need to advance as a civilization. The Kyoto Protocol and the Aral example are examples of how humans have changed the environment. Technology is an integrated cultural process; it has become an extension of us. During the industrial period, railroads helped people build cities and build economic growth. Today we are living in a post industrial period where fossil fuels are becoming less of a necessity and more of a key cause of climate change. Science and technology has allowed alternatives to these fuels that are more environmentally conscious.

Intro to information design 

In UX and graphic design, it is important to to have your product influenced on several key principles. Your audience, or the buyer & user, needs to have the most influence. Design is better when it is specific and made for a target market characterized by demographic and psychographic elements. 

Displays need to be created with plenty of considerations in type and image hierarchy, structure and proximity, legibility, and the media it is being displayed on. Chapter 1 discusses information design as a whole: it defines what information design is. Humans have communicated visually since the cave paintings. We learned to be spatially aware through map making, or cartography, displaying projections of the world around us. Charts and graphs help display data sets of information collected by small and large sample sizes. The design of the graph or chart has a huge impact o how people perceive the informant provided. More vocabulary you run into in this chapter are ISOTYPEs which is a form of presenting information pictorially. 

Type on screen

Chapter 2  gives insight on how design works and how to make your information design the best it can be. Wireframes provide the skeletal structure for websites and applications. They are useful in the process of displaying information graphically. Low fidelity iterations help to throw out bad ideas and find new ideas in time saving fashion. Designs that are worthy can be iterated again with higher fidelity versions that are higher quality but take greater chunks of time and effort. Designers employ standard elements to represent how a user is expected to interact with the material. 

There are plenty of do’s and don’ts in graphic design, and this chapter explains menus, type, drop shadows, gradients typography and data tables that are usable. The more you now about your audience, the better you can design to meet their needs. Characterize the target audience based off of age, gender, religion, geographic etc. The braille phone is an amazing idea and I feel like it’s a perfect example for designing for a target audience. Making cultural considerations is also important when designing for your audience, for example green meaning go and red meaning stop is universally known. t’s a way to empathize with your audience and put yourself in their shoes to find out what the would like best.