Hand, Eye and Brain: designing for voice, vision and mind

Introduction

Design principles need to address place and time for a pause. This need can take a minimalist inflection. The designer provides the blank, the silence, the invitation to concentrate.

Minimalist approaches tend to avoid a surfeit of eye candy

Less glitz is considered better. Less decoration is equated with less distraction.

In valuing a mimalist aesthetic, designers and instructors can encourage less glitz more gloss. They can invite more commentary and exchange. The idea here is that a pared down presentation style can trigger the imagination. It works for both material presented to learners and material produced by them.

But glitz can lead to more gloss. Very densely informative material may invite exploration and arrest the learner attention. In a high glitz space, saliancy is produced by the observer-participant. Triage is necessary.

Glitz in the sense of high information does not mean reliance on high tech or on platform-specific effects. It does mean reliance on modularity and building complexity out of simple units.

Both glitz and gloss are related to an appreciation of modularity. There is the synthetic orientation: how parts fit into a whole. And breaking a whole into component parts is a function of analysis.

Modular design usually accompanies a desire for portablility. A modular and minimalist aesthetic values the fungibility of the design components. To value fungibility is to plan for the recombination of components. Fungible components can be measured or counted and thus moved. Movement can be a function of navigation. [For example you can change the order of reading Theory III, Theory II, Theory I.]

Learners can reshape material to suit their needs. Some of that reshaping is creating paths, organizing a mental representation of the material.

Activities that improve the appropriate appropriation of material are designed. Well-designed activities are likely to reiterate learning experiences beyond the boundaries of a course. The activity produces a take-away. I make the material mine. I author. There is also the take-away of technique: each appropriation, each reworking, invites me to stretch my repertoire for reshaping material that comes my way.

The grace of simplicity adds richness to content. Rich content is enhanced by simplicity.

Example I

Unpacking a slide is skill which tugs at the intricacies of animation. Even a still demonstrates a kinetic presence which moves the eye along and drags the brain in tow. Knowing where one wants to go influences the show.

Chongim Choi http://as1.ipfw.edu/99tohe/presentations/choi.htm with a presentation which explores technology, multiculturalism & teaching approaches using art clearly sets a route for the viewer.

I quote from a key slide. The line breaks being indicated by slashes: " conceptual rationale /// multiculturalism / learning about others // CSILE (computer supported intentional learning environment) / learn with technology // constructivism / learn in the process " This is a list. They are often found in presentations. The list has a heading, "conceptual rationale" and under that heading are their pairs. It is a list that discloses a two column table of terms and definitions. The keywords fall at the end "others // environment // process". All this is acheived by placement and simple mechanism of the line break. And some play with fonts builds some additional word poetry which encapsulates further the interconnectedness of other, environment and process: _about_, _with_, and _in_ are found in italics, a trick easy to reproduce with underscoring. Getting students to translate is like asking them to consider the disappearance of certain markers: fonts, colours, even case and line breaks. it is an invitation to reparse the content. See:

Ask a person to notice the arrows that connect term and defintion (or expansion). Are the like the shoots of a growing plant? Why the upward direction? Guide them to considering right justification and the impact it has on the arrowhead-like alignment of the italicized trio of *about* *with* & *in *. How is the root motif reiterated in the various vertical blocks of colour ? How do they explain the non-perfect right angle of the middle arrow? Change the metaphor to runways and planes ready themselves to taxi and fly off.

Good design does not just tolerate appropriative metaphors. It becomes the screen for the imagination in action. Across the manipulation of the visual presentation, good design preserves the idea of a space for things to happen. Adequate redundancy is built into the design. There is a degree of overdetermination which entertains the learner's attention on the relations between the elements. Complexity is focussed through modularity.

In this case-specific interpretation of a visual motif, the vertical gradient is not just a ploy to guide the eye. It is also a marker of conceptual territory. The syntagm is strong: a learner even by invoking a reversal is likely to translate this rationale (i.e. process > environment > others) by sandwiching the technology between processes and people. It occupies this place of mediation both visually and conceptually.

The decoration supplements the meaning... layered colours, smartly boxed and offset head element, vertical gradient bringing the eye downwards... Even when all that goes we are left with a primitive layout and even without the layout you are left with the list structure.

If you have access to the appropriate viewing software, you can play more with subtracting design elements and test more of the overdetermination by downloading a copy of the presentation [http://as1.ipfw.edu/99tohe/]. Run the slide show. Observe the variety of animations from frame to frame. From which direction does and element come? Where does it stop? If you have access to authoring software (whether or not it the software that created the resource), you can appreciate the non-use of a master slide as a technique for asking learners to cull design elements to emphasize the look of a key slide in the sequence (for example, the "tab" in the upper right hand could disappear on a key slide). Remember manipulation tests the limits of the concept. Show and tell is powerful for communicating understanding. Soon learners will be engaging themselves in the dialogue of the thought experiment and that counts as placing technology in the mediating position between people and process.

Example II

Catharine Reznicek, Distance Learning Specialist with the Shoreline Community College, authored a tutorial for a product-specific classroom suite.
http://elmo.shore.ctc.edu/blackboard/discussionboard/locating_tools.htm#communicationcenter
Like many other good presentations it provides plenty of margin space on both left and right. This helps brings out the centred layout of text and images. The text does not wrap around the images which are screen shots from the classroom suite of software tools. The design invites the reader to scroll and, in a sense, to stroll between words and images. The reader can browse through the the screen shots connected to a given section of the tutorial and either focus on the descriptions and explanations or return (via a link at the bottom of the page) to the table of contents to launch another line of exploration. A similar layout (chunking the tutorial into linked sections) echoes the scroll-and-stroll structure found at the section level. Readers can take advantage of the footer with links to the table of contents or to the next section. The same feature can accommodate those who prefer to work through the material from section to section beginning to end and those that use the feature as a means of flipping through the material to land at the spot that engages their attention. It is important to note that this navigational device does not appear at the top of the document thus forcing a scan of the material through vertical scrolling (either with a mouse or with keyboard [page down] shortcuts.

For some critics such a layout would seem to imitate the best of good print products (using the conventions of bottom of the page). The best of hypertextual critics would describe the layout as providing the appropriate level of direction in its navigational linking (either forwards or back to the table of contents). And the analysts of interactive multimedia would recognize the manual work involved in scrolling as supplementing nicely the cognitive absorption of the material. Quite apart from the technical accomplishment of providing documents that download in an acceptable space of time, the layout engenders a sense of the pause as the attention shifts from section to section or between image and words within a section.,/p>

The design encourages lingering. It does so because it signals that the content is to be absorbed by both a reading of the words and a perusual of the images and a matching of the description with the thing described. The lexical element is strong. Such uncluttered space makes the discrete letter "d" to the right of the images which links to a glossary entry function as a treat for the observant reader willing to roll a cursor near an image or somehow pick up that the lone underlined letter offset from the image is a link. The presence of the "d" also serves as a marker of expected progress as it tends to disappear in the later sections since it is only used upon the first occurrence of the illustrated concept. The reader is cleverly cued to the sequence.