Personas, Clara Huang
Persona
Scenario
After being cooped up in her apartment all weekend, Sheri decides to take a walk outside. She walks past building after building, wishing that there was a place to sit down besides a dirty bus stop bench or a restaurant patio. She passes a sign on the street that says “Rooftop Garden: Open to the Public” with an arrow directing her inside a building. She takes the elevator to the top floor and finds a well-maintained garden with chairs and tables around for people to sit down. She grabs a free seat and takes a deep breath of refreshing air. “Ahh,” she says, finally able to relax.
Storyboard
Narratives: Clara Huang
“Friday night, long week at work. I just want to go home and stress eat in bed with my cat. I guess I can stop by Ralph’s on my way home. Ralph’s sucks, but I can’t deal with Whole Foods right now. Ugh, I should be healthy though. This works, right? Close enough. CICO, IIFYM, whatever that means.”
Geographies: Clara Huang
My experience, as you can see on my map, was greatly affected by the sun. Perhaps I should have used that as a force in downtown Los Angeles. That, in addition to several hills that I was trying to avoid walking back up, was a determining factor in how I interpreted the instructions. I ended up walking around in circles, hitting many of the same landmarks several times. I did approach them from different directions, which sometimes gave me a new perspective on what I had previously seen.
I don’t think our observational facilities can be trusted to objectively describe a familiar environment–I walk around this area all the time because I work here and take the metro stop that I walked by several times. I found that unless I tried especially hard to be aware of new things, I reverted to the same mindset that I always have when leaving work, which is to keep my head down to avoid interaction with potential harassers and get home as fast as possible.
Exercise 2.2 Architectures, Clara Huang
Apartment
Office Floor
Street
Project 2, Mappings: Clara Huang
Contrary to the downtown districts in most cities, downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) is not the heart of Los Angeles. It’s in a central part of the county, houses City Hall and much of the homeless population, and has gone through renaissance and revitalization just in the last five years.
Parts 1 and 2: Forces
Force 1: Fashion and Jewelry Districts
Downtown’s many areas are all in wildly different states of development and gentrification. The Fashion and Jewelry districts are representative of what DTLA used to be in the early 20th century: a hub of commercial growth largely due to banking and rail development. These days, these districts still house specialty stores that sell wholesale goods, but they are distinctly behind the times—you won’t find too many Instagram influencers walking around here. They have become old and weathered, and turned into the slightly more unsavory parts of downtown. Walking around, it’s likely you’ll witness all those parts of city life you’d rather not, like feces in the street and likely mentally unstable people shouting at nothing.
Force 2: Public Transportation
As I have begun to explain in previous exercises, public transportation is another force that drastically affects DTLA. Downtown is the hub of the LA Metro. Union Station connects the underground metro, Amtrak/MetroLink trains, and Metro light rails. There are rapid transit buses that connect many cities to DTLA, like the Silver Line that runs from San Pedro in the south to El Monte in east LA. Metro rail lines run from the 7th/Metro station downtown to Long Beach and Santa Monica. Public transportation not only allows people to move more easily between various regions in LA, but also provides refuge for homeless people in LA. In downtown LA especially, you can see that people congregate in or outside metro stations to rest, recharge their phones, or just exist. Development also pops up around metro stations, driving up property value.
Force 3: Skid Row
Of course, downtown LA is also where Skid Row is located, containing one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in the country. It’s a sobering area to pass through, and one that people unfamiliar with the area are often surprised to find in such close proximity to the wildly gentrified Arts District and Little Tokyo neighborhood, and next to City Hall. In the rest of LA, you can generally find homeless encampments on some sidewalks, in underpasses, and in less-trafficked areas. In Skid Row, sidewalks are lined with tents and tarps, trash is piled up in the streets, and people who live there walk on roads ignoring cars as if they own the place (which they do). Skid Row is where local governments around LA and OC cart their homeless populations to, as if when they ship them away they disappear. It is a visual reminder of the failure of our society, and most people stay away.
I am lucky to know people through work that have created outreach programs bringing music to Skid Row. Major arts institutions like the LA Phil, The Broad contemporary art museum, The Music Center, and my own place of work are just a stone’s throw away, full of the kinds of privileged people that come to LA to “live their best lives” and never think about homelessness. These outreach programs bring some of those people down to Skid Row for community performances and classes, and I had the opportunity to attend one of their concerts this past week.
Force 4: Arts Institutions
The arts institutions of DTLA are another major force in the area, bringing
revitalization, culture, and tourism to the city. Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, has become a landmark for the city, as has The Broad. Rich people and philanthropists tend to like high-class culture, and this is the hub that shows where the money is. My own workplace is trying to up its profile and contribute to the redevelopment of the area by announcing a campus expansion project with public spaces and music venues to serve the community, also designed by Frank Gehry. Of course, it’s going to cost a lot of money.
Force 5: Luxury Developments
DTLA has historically been a drive-in, drive-out part of the city filled with workers during the day and empty at night, since no one wanted to live in the derelict part of town. In the last 10 years, the Los Angeles City Council passed a measure that made it easier for developers to convert old, vacant office and commercial buildings into renovated luxury apartment complexes. As a result, more people are starting to live in downtown, and development is continuing to build around those complexes. Hip restaurants, coffee shops, and other new businesses are now standard in those parts of town, creating a relatively safe bubble for new residents.
There are so many forces that affect DTLA that it is hard to separate them from each other and pick them out. They are all interrelated in creating the diverse, disorderly mish-mash of land that exists today as downtown Los Angeles.
Part 3: Forces, Combined
Arts Institutions and Development
Are artists to blame for gentrification? Probably not. But gentrified areas are more likely to have art, and you can see that in DTLA where new developments and arts institutions are clustered in the same area.
Public Transit and Development
At the same time, most new developments are clustered in the South Park neighborhoods at the lower left hand corner of the map, along the path of the Expo Line light rail, depicted in light blue. There is a common pattern in Los Angeles where new metro stops spur development and drive up the price of land and rent in the immediate area.
Avoidance of Historic Districts and Skid Row
It’s pretty obvious that new developments would avoid the “undesirable” parts of downtown, but it’s even clearer when you can see it laid out like this. There may be zoning or historic preservation issues involved, but it’s more likely that developments cluster around each other because it’s more profitable to do so.
Everything, All at Once
DTLA is booming, there’s no question about it. What will it look like in the next 5-10 years? Will city planners and developers do anything to alleviate the housing crisis, or will DTLA become even more segregated in its dichotomy of nice/not-nice areas? Only time will tell.
Informations, Part 2: Clara Huang
Use-It Leuven
Use-It offers a great collection of maps of European cities for travelers with tips from locals on “authentic” experiences and places to visit. The maps all have a different look and feel, but pack a huge amount of information into one visual. This map of Leuven, Belgium uses several design principles:
Gutenberg Diagram
From a zoomed-out perspective, we can see that all of the text is placed into several evenly-spaced columns that are numbered from left to right, following the Gutenberg Diagram principle.
Framing
The map’s entire shtick counts as framing, but especially this panel that gives tips on how to act like a local. The creators emphasize that for the most authentic experience, travelers should use their guide—perfect for young backpackers that prefer off-the-beaten and low-cost attractions.
Symmetry
An example of classic reflectional symmetry, across the “longest bar in Europe.”
Highlighting and Face-ism Ratio
It’s hard to pick out one thing in a huge block of text, which is why Use-It has highlighted several featured tips from locals. It also works as an example of the face-ism ratio. Because only heads are used in the design, it makes them look like authoritative experts.
Graphics: Clara Huang
Objects, Part 2: Clara Huang
This is my desk chair at work. I don’t really care for it, but it’s tolerable. If I sit with my back against the backrest, the chair leans back, which is not conducive to typing on my keyboard. It takes a really conscious effort to sit up straight. The seat is pretty comfortable to sit on, which is good because I spend a lot of time in this chair.
I associate this chair with sitting in a cave because my office doesn’t have any windows. It really induces my biophilia.
These are the seats on the Metrolink, the commuter train that I can take to Irvine. These are the best public transit seats I’ve encountered in Los Angeles County, besides maybe the commuter bus seats. I like them because they’re comfortable and have a high back.
They leave me with a bittersweet feeling, though. I like taking the Metrolink because it’s a nicer train experience and more reminiscent of European trains, but it runs so infrequently outside of normal commute times that I’m usually irritated or anxious about making the train.
These Metro seats are gross. They’re carpet, which means that they retain dirt and various liquids and bodily fluids much more easily. I don’t usually sit down on the metro, but if I’m on the train for longer than my usual commute it’s more comfortable to sit.
The seats invoke many mixed feelings because of the Metro. In LA, it serves mainly the low-income community, because those who can afford to have a car prefer to avoid dirty, uncomfortable, and sometimes unsafe public transportation. It comes back, in many ways, to the problem of homelessness that plagues LA. Which is not going to get solved anytime soon.
This is one of four Ikea chairs that I have at home, along with the matching kitchen table. The wood is hard and not very comfortable, so I don’t really enjoy sitting in them. Sometimes I actually eat standing up instead.
These chairs, along with others in my home, remind me of my current income bracket. They’re actually my roommates, and I can’t afford to buy new furniture, so I’m stuck with what’s there. I hope to one day not have to sit in them.
This is another Ikea chair that I inherited but don’t like. It feels cheap, but it’s ironically also heavy. The feet make an annoying noise when I move the chair, which means that I have to pick it up every time I want to adjust it slightly, or be subjected to a horrible grating noise.
Besides my financial state, I also associate this chair with my freedom and millennial flightiness. I’m not in a place where I want to own furniture because I don’t want to settle down in one city yet, which is why upon moving to LA, I scavenged the previous roommate’s furniture that she didn’t want.
This is the only chair in my home that I actually like—another piece of Ikea furniture that I do not own. I like that it allows for easy and comfortable lounging, with a high back and a headrest. The padding is actually removable and replaceable, which is very convenient. For about $30, you can have basically a new chair.
Unfortunately, I don’t actually sit in this chair very often. It’s the cat’s chair, and he likes to sleep on it.
Objects, Part 1: Clara Huang
An Object I Love: Oster Rice Cooker
While in general I am not the biggest fan of appliances with only one purpose, the ease-of-use and simplicity of this rice cooker make it worthwhile, especially if you make a lot of rice.
All of its parts and functions are easily visible, including the pot, steamer, lid, and button. The affordances of the pot easily indicate that the button is the only thing you can use to operate the rice cooker, which is also physically constrained to only move up or down.
The mapping is very clear too: when the button is in the down position, it’s cooking. When it’s in the up position after cooking, it’s keeping the contents of the pot warm.
When it’s done cooking, there is also unobtrusive feedback, as opposed to annoying beeps—you can hear the button click as it goes into the keep warm setting.
It’s very hard to mess up a pot of rice with this appliance, which is the most important thing.
An Object I Hate: Instant Pot Ultra (Interaction Design)
To be clear, I love my Instant Pot and will never stop loving it even though the interaction design on the Ultra, allegedly the most-advanced model, is awful.
The dial is the worst for selecting which function you want to use and making changes to the settings. The mapping is very unclear—does turning the dial clockwise make it go up or down? I have yet to remember, and I’ve been using it for months. There are also no affordances on the dial to suggest that you push it to select or confirm.
Once you manage to select what you want, you can also adjust the time, pressure, temperature, and other settings. The mapping is improved because the options are displayed side-by-side, but feedback and constraints become more relevant. When you try to select a specific setting with the dial to change it, the text on the screen blinks but isn’t actually clear on what the blinking means. The real problem though, is that there are no physical constraints on the dial to force you to go through the selections slower, or one at a time. It turns too quickly. This is useful to go through many options quickly when choosing the function, but not when there are only two options. On top of that, you’re forced to listen to very annoying and unnecessary beeping every time you turn the dial that means nothing at all.
Ironically, the older model actually has a more intuitive interaction design. It has buttons for each function and labeled buttons to control settings.
Team 6 Principle #8: Horror Vacui
Horror Vacui is Latin for ‘the fear of emptiness.’ It is the practice of filling a space with as many design elements as possible. As a design principle, it was a historically popular in the Victorian, Georgian, and Baroque eras, in times when having more meant you were more affluent.1
Today, we are overwhelmed with options and choice, so minimalism and simplicity have become the trend. This means that there has been a shift in value perception. Now, the busier and more cluttered a design, the cheaper the product feels. Brands may choose to employ horror vacui based on their product positioning—for the Dollar Store, cheap is a good thing.
Example 1: Dollar Store vs. Jewelry Store
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Source: The Visual Communication Guy |
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Source: The Visual Communication Guy |
Example 2: The Cheesecake Factory vs. Ramen Hood
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Source: The Cheesecake Factory |
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Source: Ramen Hood |
Example 3: Attorneys/Abogados
This store window in downtown Los Angeles markets the attorneys inside to low-income clients with its use of horror vacui. It not only fills up most of the window space with information, but also advertises many different kinds of potential lawsuits that the lawyers could represent the clients on.
Footnotes
1“Horror Vacui: The Fear of Emptiness | Interaction Design Foundation.” 8 Aug. 2018, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/horror-vacui-the-fear-of-emptiness.
Team 6 Principle #3: Desire Line
Desire lines, or desire paths, are traces of use or wear indicating a user’s preferred method of interaction with an object or environment.1 They are most often associated with walkways, in situations where pedestrians’ repeated traversals of shorter, more direct routes create alternative paths to paved ones. Landscape architects are now starting to embrace desire lines by allowing them to form and then paving over them, instead of predicting behavior and trying to force it with barriers and other constraints.
Physical examples include ergonomic keyboards that split in the middle and allow wrists to assume a more natural position, and the water fountain spigot designed for water bottles below. Prior to the installation of these faucets, the only way to fill up a water bottle was to tilt it sideways, a less efficient and more annoying method.
Footnotes
1 Lidwell, William, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler, and Kimberly Elam. Universal Principles of Design: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design. Beverly, Mass: Rockport Publishers, 2010. Print.
2 “Pave the Cowpaths – Social Patterns – Designing Social Interfaces.” 13 Aug. 2013, http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns/Pave_the_Cowpaths.
3 “Least Resistance: How Desire Paths Can Lead to Better Design – 99 ….” 25 Jan. 2016, https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desire-paths-can-lead-better-design/.
Histories: Clara Huang
The United States Courthouse building in downtown LA is consistently a bright spot in my day. When I leave work in the evenings, especially in the fall and winter when the sun sets earlier, I am treated to a completely different view reflected on the building based on the time of day, position of the sun, and whatever else goes into the lighting outside (including perhaps the amount of pollution creating haze).
After looking the building up, I discovered that the facade was especially designed to manage the intense sun exposure the building receives from the east and west sides. The east and west facing pleats are
opaque to minimize solar thermal gain, while the north and south facing pleats are transparent to maximize natural daylight inside the courthouse.
Mostly, though, I’m just impressed by the shiny colors and reflections. Form and function.