Shanel Wu

They/them. PhD student: smart textiles, weaving, computational craft, hardware hacking.

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9 September 2019

Reading Assignment 2 - Users and Tasks

by Shanel

While many of these concepts about who users are and what tasks are involved in a system are fairly intuitive, I found these readings useful for terms that rigorously labelled the concepts. If anything, I’ll just sound a lot more technically competent if I write “task decomposition” rather than “to-do list”.

I have a few thoughts about personas. First, I appreciated the creative element of creating and fleshing out the personas as fictional, but believable characters. I’m not a creative writer, but I really like making characters, their backstories, and their strengths and flaws. In my other class, we’re reading a book titled Design is Storytelling, which is a pretty apt metaphor here. I had a little yellow traffic light activate in my head when I read Cooper’s line about “believability” over “diversity”, as if the two were different. His example of choosing “Nick” (a nerdy guy, probably white) over “Hellene” (a statuesque beauty) was dangerously suggestive of the stereotype that girls, especially pretty girls, don’t know computers.

To be fair, the more detailed example of working with personas in designing Sony’s in-flight entertainment system was much more nuanced. The passenger personas were archetypes drawn from the airline employees’ experiences, and at that point in the reading, the author had also introduced their orientation on the user euphemism pyramid (super users vs. “naive” users) as well as the idea of prioritizing the persona that was least experienced or would have the most difficulty adapting. From my experience in education, I appreciate that the author worked against a deficit model of users who were “less experienced”. Rather, these “naive” users were treated as having assets of their own outside of computer knowledge, such as social skills, specific fluency in particular programs, etc.

Task Model of Warping a Loom

Warping a loom: a woven fabric consists of two perpendicular sets of yarns, warp and weft. The warp is set up on the loom before the actual weaving, usually spanning the loom from front to back. The process of setting up these warp yarns is referred to as “warping” and can sometimes take as much time as the rest of the weaving process. There are many types of looms each with variations on how to warp them. The following task model describes the process of warping a TC2 Digital Jacquard Loom, one of the looms we have in the lab.

  1. Wind (measure out) the warp
    1. Decide how long to make the warp
    2. Use warping tools of choice to wind all the yarn
      • Warping board and single cone
      • Warping board, paddle, and multiple cones
      • Warping reel and single cone
      • Warping reel, paddle, and multiple cones
    3. Remove wound yarn from the warping reel or board
      1. Tie bundles every yard or so to keep together
      2. Store bundles using method of choice to prevent tangles
        • Twist around a stick
        • Loop it on itself into a chain
  2. Beam on the warp
    1. Load warp bundles into raddle
    2. Attach warp onto the loom’s back beam
    3. Tension warp bundles with method of choice
      • A person holding the yarn as reins (short warp)
      • Suspending from a high beam and weighting (long warp)
    4. Wind the warp onto the back beam
  3. Thread the warp through the loom (if first time warping)
  4. Tie on the new warp to existing warp (if loom was already warped)

See this flow chart for a visual description.