Instruction Sets For Strangers / Reading response

  I like the method that they used for observing elderly people’s environment. They considered a lot of part of elderly people in various aspects and tried to be objective such as cultural differences, age gap, etc. Especially, I like the way they get information from elderly people. They didn’t ask a specific question but try to reduce giving some what direction that can affect to the answers from them. I also like the part that they used very analog way – postcard – which I think it is good to understand their feelings and thinkings more deeply than just giving a questioning paper form. In addition, I like the way they apply to new technologies. In specific, they tried to make the new technologies after understanding elderly people whereas people try to build just fancy and surprising new technologies nowadays. Some people are just focusing on producing amazing technology and showing up their ability of making it, but I think people need to understand more about users before just producing it, otherwise it is possible that our lives will be taken by technology.

 I agree with the idea that he described in the reading, ‘we see what we expect to see.’ I think the expectation make us to observe in limit, but it is hard to break our frame and open all the senses to think in various aspects.

I like the way of observing people’s movement in spaces and I am very interesting the author’s thought which is about foot movement are silent language. People usually make movements in some purposes and these can be a good resource to understand how people interact to environment. In other point, I want to compare what people really do unconsciously to what people say to questionnaires that can extremely different from each other. It would be very interesting to compare how people interact to the environment in reality to how people think they are interacting with the environment.