Web Design on the Brain

Regardless of the debate on evolution reverberating still in America, the fact is, our brains were built for one purpose--survival in the natural world.

Have a look at this picture.. Where are the lions?

The brain is designed to take in massive amounts of information, concentrate on details, discriminate what is important, focus on a goal, design a plan and send out commands for action.

I was pleased to read that even in the eyeball-and-index-finger world of the web, that the same mental process is still taking place! More to the point--designers need to understand how the brain works in order to build navigation systems and information hierarchies that enable (rather than frustrate) our paleolithic instinct to hunter and gather.

According to Ben Hunt, "The Website Profit Expert": "One way to think about designing for web users is to consider what the brain is good at, and to design to take the best advantage of those strengths."

From a post titled The Brain's Strengths on the blog, Web Design from Scratch:

Matching shapes

The minds of higher order animals are highly skilled at recognising things by their shape, or outline. We have an amazing ability to associate shapes with their meanings very quickly. This can be helpful for spotting your quarry when hunting in thick vegetation or in poor light. We're more likely to use this skill when associating the shape of an icon with 'I can make a printed version of this page if I move my mouse and click on that', or to decide to ignore a banner ad based on its shape.

Seeing patterns

Our brains are great at spotting associations between objects, based on similarities, alignment and grouping. This is helpful for working out where to move in order to separate an animal from its herd, or for telling which strangers belong to which tribes. Today, we're more likely to use this ability to find the navigation on a new site, or to tell at a glance how many unopened emails we have.

Focusing on the important; ignoring the unimportant

When we match shapes and patterns, we quickly sort what to focus on from what to ignore. This is a talent we share with all natural predators. If the brain loses its ability to filter out noise, we go mad. We use this skill every time we look at a web page, by scanning for clues that help us get nearer our goal.

High-speed problem solving

When faced with new problems, we're great at working out new ways of addressing them, even by abstracting patterns that have worked for different problems. Our minds are tuned for computing available information, and quickly choosing a most likely solution. (This capacity is one of the things that distinguishes the intelligence of apes from monkeys.)

Stasi Chic

When I lived and traveled in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down, I was captivated by the interior design of utilitarian minimalism that pervaded the former East Bloc.

Whether in Slovakia or Bulgaria or Moscow, there was something so ubiquitous and clean about the architecture of dictatorship.

From We Make Money Not Art:

Daniel & Geo Fuchs have documented the architectural legacy left by the former GDR’s Ministry for State Security (Stasi), the main security and intelligence organization of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

The Stasi had nearly 90,000 official workers and 170,000 unofficial collaborators in a country with a population of 16 million. The organization was dissolved 18 years later, yet some of these sites have remained practically as they were.

The photographs show the rooms that the Stasi used to interrogate prisoners; prison cells for political prisoners; the offices of the minister for State Security; bunkers; and the files stored by the Stasi Documentation Office in Berlin - endless stacks of protocols generated by control and espionage, division and corruption – witnesses of the total control of a regime that clung to power for over 40 years.

The images are on show at La Virreina in Barcelona until July 1. Images.

The NARC in Your Sneakers

From Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:

Spy Chips

Be(a)ware of how your belongings could track you

This book will make you look at every store-bought item you own or debate owning with a curious skepticism that -- after reading the book -- won't seem too unwarranted. It was published two years ago (a cheap paperback came out in the fall), but if you've yet to explore the fascinating, potentially paranoia-inducing, world of RFID and you want the cautionary, consumer-advocate perspective about the Radio Frequency Identification tracking being proposed -- and used! -- by certain companies (for instance, Gillette, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart), I highly recommend this one. I've been meaning to read it for a while and so some of the stories were familiar (i.e. the nightclub in Spain that chips its members), but there were plenty of bits that were new and interesting to me (i.e. all the patents IBM has applied for, including one for an RFID-enabled closet). Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre take a pretty sensationalist tone -- "Big Brother" is mentioned a number of times -- but the scope of the research is impressive (lots of endnotes) and their insight into how this tech could be abused is thought provoking.

-- Steven Leckart

Spy Chips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move
Katherine Albrecht & Liz McIntyre
2006 (paperback), 304 pages
$11
Available from Amazon

PowerPoints the Matter: US Secretary of Evil

As a person who attends more meetings than I can stick a shake at, I sure am sorry I missed this one. It seems like some vital new updates to national policy were delivered in rare style.

From that time-honored lighthouse to truth, The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC—In the latest in a long series of ominous public pronouncements, the Department of Evil released a statement Monday demanding that all residents of the United States must die.

Dread Secretary of Evil Hammond S. Reynolds told reporters that they, too, must die.

"Yes, all must die," Dread Secretary of Evil Hammond S. Reynolds said during a press conference in Room 1228 of Washington's Robert C. Weaver Federal Building. "There shall soon come an accounting in which all will fall before the Grim Reaper as wheat in winter, as lambs under the knife. Soon all necks will feel the steely bite of our soul- thirsting axe, wielded by the unforgiving iron hand of the Department of Evil. Thus spake I, Dread Secretary Reynolds."

Getting the Whole Spimey Backstory

As sensor technology becomes cheaper to deploy, and the metadata embedded therein and broadcast therefrom becomes richer and more detailed, we approach a time in which every tennis shoe and ham sandwich has its own backstory.

We can know whether the pig in the sandwich had a happy life, or, more important, if it was exposed to harmful bacteria or unethical farming practices.

In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling makes much of the emerging product form tagged with his self-created neologism... spime.

These are "material instantiations of an immaterial system, digitally manufactured things from virtual plans." In layman's terms, these are objects that can be manufactured, tracked, interacted with and recycled through digital systems embedded in the object and the environment. Now, knowing a product's backstory is emerging as a core principle of commerce.

[Listen to Sterling's discription of spime here. Or watch the oddly unnerving interview segment, SpimeTime on Rocketboom.com.]

From the WorldChanging Team | May 7, 2007 5:24 PM

Principle 1: The Backstory

As the public gains interest and personal investment in living more sustainably, knowing the backstory becomes increasingly important. Whether it's food, lifestyle products, building materials -- most everything in the designed or built environment -- a big part of making good choices involves knowing where things come from, what's inside them, and how they got to point of use. If we know the backstory as consumers, we can make good choices; and if businesses and designers know they'll have to tell the story of their product, they make sure it's a story someone would want to hear.

'92 LA Burning: Woman + Son Cross Still-Burning Street

Woman + Son Cross Still-Burning Street, originally uploaded by danagraves.

Twelve years ago, I was in my last year of art school. From my vantage points as young man looking at the world he was about to enter, things looked nuts: the First Gulf War broke out; a big, nasty Recession was looming; and the Rodney King beating had become one of the first subjects of the citizen-journalism debate.

Go here to see some photos from the riots that broke out in LA after the Rodney King verdict brought the hammer down on a city seething with rage.

From Dana Graves:

On April 29, 1992, twelve jurors rendered their verdicts in a controversial case involving the 1991 beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers.

One of the officers was found guilty of excessive force; the other officers were cleared of all charges.

At various points throughout the city that afternoon, people began rioting. For the next six days the violence and mayhem continued."

These photos are what I saw in & around my LA neighborhood of Echo Park.

Riot Gears

May 04, 2007 | from On the Media :

15 years ago, riots raged across Los Angeles and TV screens worldwide. Much of the media portrayed the riots as a response to the beating of Rodney King. But historian Mike Davis says that simple narrative did L.A. another injustice: it ignored the reality on the ground.

• Listen