Wednesday seemed so long ago, but here’s my recap:

I really appreciate Stephen’s HCI classes. I think that these classes give possibly the most helpful lessons that I know I’ll take back to my school. On Wednesday we talked about the Gendermag video, which I posted about earlier. I learned that when it comes to Human Error, intention is key. “Did I know how to do what I needed to do?” I definitely can relate to this question when I am given instructions. Whenever I don’t fully comprehend the instructions, I’m prone to making mistakes — and most of the time, I don’t know that I’ve made them. When we make programs for others to use, we have to think of any possibility that could go wrong, and often, it’s in ways we never expected. Or, we don’t have a list of specific missions for the task at hand. I think this was evidently true in the ‘cancel’ button example that Stephen gave. Its results were interesting. I found that software developers don’t think like UX developers do. I always thought that I was inherently unskilled compared to a software developer. But it turns out knowing things about HCI can also be equally as helpful.

We also talked about public speaking. Emmanuelle and I gave a very enthusiastic 3-minute presentation to Stephen about why he should eat at a Mexican restaurant. I thought that we could run out of things to say, but I ended up going over-time. I did a lot better than I thought I would have, given Emmanuelle and I only had 6 minutes to prepare. I think the most important takeaway from ‘how to give a talk’ was that we have to boil down our presentations into simple messages for our audience members to take away and remember.

This morning, I returned to VRAC after the four-day weekend. I found out this morning that the interns were listening to Jamiahus’ defense. I think he did a great job, and it was evident that he put lots of thought and care into how he ordered his experiment. The committee members asked some in-depth questions on his research, which shows the level of detail that the project went under. Overall, I was pretty intimidated. I’m sure I want to present a masters thesis or doctorate dissertation someday. Mostly that’s because I want to write a huge paper on design theory and practice.

We had an ethics class after the defense. We answered some of the questions we hadn’t thought of/pursued before. We answered what ethics was, which is principles that guide our behaviors and actions. I wonder, if we asked ourselves, “what are my ethics?” I would guess that most people would be slow to answer. We rush to say what we think is right, or what we think is wrong, but I feel that we don’t know each other well enough to think “these are my principles” and follow them in accordance with our actions. One could say that it’s open to interpretation, and that we can always change what we think, but I think we can always pursue the path of knowing ourselves better.