Week 5 & 6: 7 Days of HCI / Fall 2024
I’ve been learning about breaking things down in order to understand their granularity and ultimately understanding concept holistically. All in terms of categories, mental models, data, emotions, or even stories for that matter.
Mental Models are more generic in nature as compared to it’s name.
The thing about user experience is that there are descriptive words for jobs, methods and concepts. Whenever I come across a new term on the internet, I am intrigued to find the meaning and its usually something I already know but with a different name. But that doesn’t mean things in the field of UX are repetitive, they are rather descriptive and niche in nature.
In a similar way, mental models exist in every part of our lives. It’s the way you think the world works, or even a dishwasher for that matter.
Pre-Attentive Attributes may also be a form of ancestral mental model of living.
“Pre-attentive attributes are information we can process visually almost immediately, with no thought whatsoever.”
The reason I mentioned human beings tend to chunk things is because we need to understand the granularity of a subject matter to create meaning in our minds. Meaning-making is often after interpretation and description. But the purpose will determine the categorization of subject matter. Information is categorized according to purpose and then prioritized according to preference.
Because our environment is constantly demanding attention,
we must categorize to live.
Purpose + Context — serve as the essence of categorization.
Senses and emotions are closely interlinked and influence behavior.
Above is a visual representation of facial expressions, but meaning-making isn’t limited to expressions.
I’ve been learning how we create meaning from our environment and with people. Facial expressions are one form of interpreting what might be going on but it isn’t limited to expressions. We create meaning through our senses and our emotions. Feeling something when you are in a particular room. Feeling something when you are with someone. Feeling something when something happens on a screen. Feeling something when you interact. We associate some sort of feeling to anything pay attention to.
Feelings are created in intended experiences.
I’ve come to understand that experiences are intended. Stories are broken down to create feelings are various points in time. Categorization is done to understand and distinguish purposes. Mental models exist to understand similarity and difference between ways of thinking or interpreting. And even though organizing worldly concepts for human consumption is difficult, we pay price with human attention. Human attention is further divided with chunks to understand the world as a whole.