The design of everyday things - chapter 1

Most accidents are attributed to human error, but in almost all cases the human error was the direct result of poor design. This chapter introduces about the principles of design such as affordances, feedback and visibility. The fundamental principles of designing for people are to provide a good conceptual model and to make things visible. A good conceptual model allows us to predict the effects of our actions.

The right things have to be visible in design to indicate what parts operate and how, to indicate how the user is to interact with the device. Visibility indicates the mapping between intended actions and actual operations. Visibility indicates crucial distinctions so that you can tell salt and pepper shakers apart, for example.

How do people cope with studying so much visual perception. Part of the answer lies in the way of mind works, in the psychology of human thought and cognition.

Quick review for Forming Coalition chapter from Michael Wooldridge book

This chapter focuses on forming coalitions analysis, based on the realm of cooperative game theory. The cooperative game states the situation that there are a number of agents with their own utility. Each agent can work their own to earn a certain amount of money. But also they can work with others, by cooperating, to generate some surplus income, over and above the amount that could be earned by individuals. Agents can form as a team to obtain a certain utility, which can be shared among coalition members. The game itself is completely silent about how this utility should be distributed among coalition members. In addition, the agreement of how to divide the ‘pay-check’ is done by coalition members.

Three key issues have been raised: coalition structure generation, solving the optimisation problem of each coalition to maximise social welfare, and how to divide the value of the solution for each coalition as fair as possible.

Some representative solutions have been reviewed for each key issue. However, this is NP-Hard problem as the complexity is exponential in the number of agents. It is likely impossible to give an optimal solution if the number of agents is high volume.

Thinking: just a simple real scenario can raise lots of key issuesL.

A blog for PhD life

A big day stepped into this type of blog revolution. This could be a summary for whatever I would have done for my PhD life in IAM group.

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