• Question: what insires you to keep on doing your work?????

    Asked by nicenadia to Alessandro, Angela, Claudia, Marina, Phil on 8 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Phillip Wilkinson

      Phillip Wilkinson answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      I want to make games that improves people’s social and emotional intelligence. So games for empathy, communication skills, confidence, happiness etc.

      What motivates me to keep on working on this is the fact it feels like no one else cares about this. When I was at school, if you were getting good enough grades they don’t really care if you’re unhappy or not confident. It seems that little has changed as well.

      Note: This isn’t to say I’m blaming schools or teachers! Its just that if the government continues to measure how good a school is on SAT, GCSE and A-Level results then the schools will have to prioritize this or worry about being closed down. No one is really to blame, just the system itself needs an overhaul. I’m pretty sure that teachers don’t want to be limited by teaching to exams and to the standard curriculum but they’re forced to. Ask them, see what they think for me?

    • Photo: Claudia Krehl

      Claudia Krehl answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      I am really interested in making technologies “human friendly”. When computers were first invented nobody cared about this. Obviously it was hard enough just to get the machines to work and they were really complicated and filled entire rooms just to run simple algorithms. Today of course that is entirely different. In a sense we have started to master technologies. But often when technology and devices that people use are created the designers and engineers do not think about how we will use the technology and what abilities people have, and how technology use can be improved when it is designed with people in mind.

      This can probably be best described by showing you what happens when things go wrong. The Three Miles Island Accident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident) for instance almost caused a nuclear meltdown. One of the main reasons for that was that the operator was not able to see the valve was in the wrong position as there were thousands of buttons and levels in the control room and the controls were covered in tags (http://www.animatedsoftware.com/hotwords/control_room/control_room.htm). This incident and others in this era created research areas like human factors and human-computer interaction.

      Although I focus on small devices such as mobile phones the same principles are still relevant. Designers often don’t think about how the rest of us use technology and I believe so much more can be achieved by making technologies human friendly. And there is always new technology to be improved!

Comments