articles - Nour Diab Yunes

The Backtalk of Self-Generated Sketches – Gabriela Goldschmidt

"The inventive process" is an iterative process of jotting down ideas in the form of language or graphic drawings and of modifying them, reevaluating them, editing them, and so on, to transform or perfect an initial concept or solution.

“A Human-Centered Technology.” – Don Norman

While innovation has a historical contribution in terms of providing appropriate and efficient tools for society that help enrich human knowledge and enhance mental capabilities (memory, thought, reflection), it has however created modes of entertainment that increasingly promote a consuming rather than a productive people and is accountable for the apparent social divider between the haves and havenots of technology.

‘The Changing Sites of Value’

As part of The Internet as Playground and Factory, a conference series on the politics of digital media organised by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Orit Halpern, and Melissa Gregg introduced their individual areas of research and idiosyncratic takes on the notion of 'affect' and its evolution in meaning today as a result of technological progress.

Rob Wynne

As a dyslexic, Wynne's work revolves around ideas of language and found defects in texts and matter. He uses a wide range of materials and works on a variety of scales and surfaces, from installations, glass text, drawings, embroidered paintings, to ceramics as well as glass sculptures.

‘Reckoning with Torture’

On October 13, 2009, at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, was hosted a conference entitled: ‘Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the "War on Terror." ’ Guest speakers included Matthew Alexander, Jonathan Ames, K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Auster, Ishmael Beah, David Cole, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, Nell Freudenberger, Jenny Holzer, A.M. Homes, Jameel Jaffer, Susanna Moore, Jack Rice, George Saunders, Amrit Singh, and Art Spiegelman.

Armando Guiller

Armando Guiller is a mechanical engineer by training, and a growing artist by passion, and has won numerous honorary awards. His sculptural work has the ability to communicate with scientists, engineers and artists, as it involves craft, mathematical precision, and highly conceptual and philosophical investigations into spatial and perspectival associations. He uses both industrial (metal) and natural (wood) materials, which he treats himself with heavy machinery.

How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests – Jeffrey Rubin & Dana Chisnell

Testing has two main objectives: on the marketing level, it aims at improving sales; on a user-centered level, it aims at minimizing user frustrations and maximizing a product's usability. As the authors point out, testing goals inform the design of a product; those work in terms of the usefulness or relevance, learnability, efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction factors.

“Recruiting Participants” – Dumas & Redish

Dumas & Redish lay-out the steps and tactics for recruiting participants; those include: Finding Appropriate Participants, Reaching and Screening Potential Participants, Deciding Who Should Recruit Participants, Knowing What to Say When You are Recruiting, Arranging for Payment or Other Incentives, and Having a Back-up -- But Not Double Booking

The Simplicity Shift – Scott Jenson

Scott Jenson defines 'feature blindness' as users being blinded by a feature list. He identifies the bottom-up approach of creating a user persona and a task scenario as more efficient than the top-down approach, in terms of organizing a commonsensical hierarchy of a product's features. The ideal visualization would be to 'tame' the feature list and prioritize features in accordance to a set of usage requirements and subsequent usage frequency.