I really like the way the author illustrate the classification of human factors and related design projects, which makes it very clear and pleasant to read. I would like to highlight two points in the reading that caught my attention.

1. "An aesthetic approach might subsume and subvert the idea of user-friendliness and provide an alternative model of interactivity." Most of the time, we tend to see aesthetic pleasing as a way to approach user-friendliness, which often means we have to give up most of our "peculiar" artistic imagination and concentrate more on what we assume will make a product nice in users' eyes. In that way, we usually end up with a great number of similar-look-like products with slight differences in function or other tiny parts. But this should not be the future of design, as designers we have to extend the aesthetic part of design so as to challenge the traditional view of user-friendliness when it's necessary. A good example occurs to me is a reddot design award-winning clothes tree called NUDE designed by a group of Chinese designers. Its unfamiliar and even odd but beautiful look subverts the traditional idea of user-friendless when people think about a clothes tree, but it actually functions very well as a commonly used product. So instead of being a submissive part, aesthetic should have taken more active role in design.

A GIF of NUDE clothes tree: https://goo.gl/images/QQyDjK

2."The electronic object does not have to fulfill our expectations; it can surprise and provoke." TOTALLY AGREE WITH IT! Design is not just about giving people what they want for now; it is also about offering people what they have never thought about having in this moment. Design can be the driving force of demand, especially in electronic aspect. We'll progress slow if we focus only on fulfill existing demand, but if we go bolder, the result might be a giant leap in society. It's great to know that designers still practice this philosophy nowadays so we have more to expect for a brand new world. I attach a video below that bumped into my mind when I read these words. It is fictional for fun but also gives me some insight of designing designed that exceed people's expectation.

Video：https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFxt1B19d7A&list=RDvN1eDPejYjI

As mentioned in the reading, the core of participatory design is to involve all stakeholders in the design process to better fulfill their needs and also make sure the product is usable. This actually emphasizes the importance of letting people in to create a co-design environment, which ensures designers make the most use of all resources. However, in reality, when we talk about user-centered-design we tend to put ourselves into users' shoes instead of let user speak and behave themselves; we weight our users' opinions greatly but we don't really give them the power to make the decision, which can easily end up in less useable design. But in an idealized situation, when designers empower those people to make design decision and use professional tools, it is also very likely that they will never come to an agreement on how should the final design work as they each have own perspective of what needs to be done. This is a somewhat contradictory but mutually reinforcing approach of design and finding the balance of two sides should be the essence of this theory. It kind of reminds me of the video of designing a shopping cart that we watched in class. The design group split up with various stakeholders and finally came up with multiple solutions related to their (user's) focus, which made the whole design both effective and comprehensive. But they could only have one final design under that circumstance, so they had to take extra time to merge all these solutions together and eventually get "the best" shopping cart, which turned out not quite appealing for users.

In this reading I have several points of interest, which will be discussed below.

1. In "The long Wow" part, the author talks about how the innovation from time to time that surprises the users can achieve long-term customer loyalty. There're two more things I want to point out: first, make sure the innovation is updated and helpful function rather than features that only contribute to getting short-term attention. Second, keep in mind not to push to fast at one time. Doing to much innovation will result in great change in product, which maybe in some case hard for current user to adjust to.
2. "Think of he client's desire when offering design brief." This makes think of last time's lecture, when Prof. Tonya said:" Making them into designer and then they will all defend the design as hard as you are!" It's both stratagem and goals. As a designer we need to match our design strategy with the bigger business strategy and also try to present our ideas in a way that seems to fulfill for our client's wishes.
3. "The feature paradox" from James Surowieckis is mentioned in the reading. As he said it would only capture users favor for short time and will quickly be abandoned after using for a while. I personally want to challenge this statement by offering the example of many products that pursuit purely for aesthetics or a certain style. I once bought an app aims to learn Chinese traditional poem. At that time, I had a bunch of free-charged choices but I chose the one that has more unique features and therefor offers a different aesthetic feeling. The app had never been updated since a year before I purchased it, but when I searched online, a lot of users kept using it and recommending it to others. So I am thinking that the feature paradox holds true in most of cases except the one I mentioned above.

I find the Contextual Inquiry in the context of work part intriguing. As an interaction designer, we need as much as first hand user data, and the best way of acquiring it with minimum loss is to truly observe users and participate actually in the inquiry. However these are all about input, the more important part is the interpretation done by us as designers afterwards. It's worth considering how to process the information we got from contextual inquiry and eventually interpret actual data, problem or conclusion. In the reading material, the author mentions one way to solve this problem: “ask question after question, making assumption upon assumption, always getting toward the heart of the largest question of all: Why do people do the things they do” 1 This remind us the importance of the way we put forward questions as well as the content of questions that will have direct influence on the answer we are about to get, which is pretty clear. But I have another question: when we make assumptions, how do we make sure that they are true to reality? Even if we can assure the initial one is practical, will there be bias when we build more assumptions that overlie the former ones? The solution I came up with is that we make as little assumption as possible and avoid composition if not quite necessary. At the same time, we have to run user test aim at the very assumption we made to testify its reliability. This way is clearly time and resource consuming, when we have a large mount of assumptions it will cost a lot to test every one. So are we in a dilemma?

1.Jon, K. (n.d.). Chapter 1. In . Thoughts on Interaction Design (2nd ed.) (p. 28). Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann