Back in the classroom teaching Understanding Users, am covering human working memory and its limits we all experience when being bombarded with new data. I used the example of trying to remember someone’s telephone number the first time you hear it while trying to find a place to write it down. You know, it’s the classic example of how you rehearse the data continually until you can dump it externally. In the course of this, I came to realize that most students of a certain age have not experienced this specific example. Technology has moved us all along and phone numbers are not rehearsed in memory until recorded anymore are they? People just call and leave a record, or they instantly mail/txt numbers to each other in real time, letting the computer do the work. How many telephone numbers can you even remember anymore without checking your phone? Time for me to get some new examples now that ‘cognitive offloading’ is the norm.
New book on Info Design
I’ve put a couple of new chapters together in the past year on the nature of design knowledge in information. The latest has just been published in an impressively large volume edited by colleagues at the University of Reading in the UK for Gower, entitled Information Design: research and practice Find out more here
