These Six ideas are psychologicaly speaking by definition how people interact with things. The ideas are: Affordance, signifiers, Mapping, feedback, constraints and conceptual models. Using each system you can determine how the thing can possibly be used, determine the relationship between two set of things, the informatiom the aids to an understanding, the limitations designed into a object and get the explanation on how something works.
As a Graphic Designer, this terms help me to analyse everything that I do, in the same way the groups in the class were analysing objects, we as designers have to analyse everything that we do for a client. We have to think about to whom we are designing, what are their needs, their vision and what do they want as a final piece. When something is being designed for kids for example, what do we want to express with the design, how are we expressing, is it affecting the children the way it is supposed to?. When we are talking about the affordances of something for instance, it should apply clues to the operations of the thing just by the visual, if you cannot tell what it is supposed to do by looking at it, there is a clue that the design need improvments. What I found interesting the most, was the conceptual models, because I agree that with design, things have to be simple and minimalistic, if it is too complex, there is a chance that it might have failed.
The design has to be in an agreement with the public target, it has to interact with the public target. A good design takes a lot o care, planning and thought, not everyone has the capacity to so, and they still call themselves designers.
Bayne jardine 