Multimedia & design - Essay Example

It is at the reflective level whereby issues of self-worth and personal values are found. With regard to Don Norman’s scheme, I believe that it is important to separate things such as visceral or aesthetic appreciation. Emotional appreciation is a very important element of life, brought about by emotion. Without emotion, people’s thoughts, feelings, therefore behaviors, would be made worse (Norman, 2004). Don Norman does not overcomplicate the importance of emotional appreciation. This is because he attribute recent advances in the scientific field when understanding the brain to his view on aesthetics and pleasure in design.

Drawing a line between the systems affect and cognition of processing information, he, however, proposes that they are actually intertwined. It is the affective system that has the responsibility of making quick judgments as well as quick decisions, and helps analyze the objects available in the current environment, whether good, bad or dangerous. On the other hand, it is the responsibility of the cognitive system to interpret and understand the environment. It is for this reason that emotions are usually the conscious experience of affect.

Based on given experiences and situations, the emotional system can prepare and modify the body as the cognitive system seeks to survey the changes. Therefore, the emotional system stage-manages cognitive processes and in the end, changes the way people think. Understanding and appreciating this interrelationship is what can empower designers to control the emotional position of users using aesthetics. According to Norman, creativity and open-mindedness are reduced, especially when people are affected by anxiety because of a narrowed field of thought processes.

He also posits that on the contrary, when a learner or a user is relaxed and is in a pleasant mood, he or she becomes more creative, and is even more tolerable to small deficiencies in usability. Contemporary research carried out from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) suggests that aesthetics and usability can make people feel satisfied and pleasant, amplifying creativity and broadening the thought processes. He has also presented the three levels of emotional design, which are the visceral level, behavioral level and the reflective level.

Separating things like visceral or aesthetic appreciation is important in multimedia and design because visceral design, for example, explores the emotional impacts of environment or an object according to the intrinsic physical features such as sound, look and feel. As important participants of the evolutionary process of nature, people continually receive influential emotional indicators from the environment. Worth noting is that people’s perceptions are produced in relation with the underlying principles of visceral design, for example organization, cleanliness and attractiveness; these attributes are inherent to the visceral processing layer and more importantly, consistent within cultures (Norman, 2004). 2. The Philosopher’s tool kit Each one of the nineteen chapters in this book look at the iPod mobile digital device acording to a philosophical perspective.

According to the writer, the iPod is a cultural fact that is changing individual communities and lives in important ways. Tools of the philosophers that I believe will be useful to me in the future are with regard to the iPod’s effect on the community. The iPod has individuating and isolating characteristics, considering the disconnectedness of personal