Instructional Design example- Studio Work on "how to use a toaster"

Step description:

1. Find a pwerpoint. 2. Turn the power switch on.

3. Check the powerpoint see if it works. 4. Plug in the toaster.

5. put in 1 or 2 pieces of bread. 6. Turn on the toaster.

7. Adjust time setting to a aprropriate time.

8. Wait for 2-3 mins, make sure the bread is not too burnt.

9. Wait when time's up, take out the bread out of the toaster.

10. Turn off the toaster, make sure the plug is removed away from power point.

Flowchart:

Story Board:

Information /Instructional Design

Information Design is a visual method of explaining, interpreting complex information and data, to achieve a certain objective. The key of information design is about breaking things down, making sense of information through the use of various visual elements. When we look at a certain information design, we always need to think, what kind of message this particular design is trying to deliver to the audiences. If one particular information design can not let the audiences see its message, then this informarion design is failed.

Today we see a lot information design in people's everyday life, such as, line graphs showing people's birth bouce through a year, Bar charts showing the wages of diffirent people in a company. Those information invovles huge amount of complex data, it's not approriate to show the information through writing a report, it would be a lot easier and clearer to show through graphs, and this is where information design comes in. Information deisgn also could be advertisement, billboard, poster, etc.

There are different types of information design invovled in people's everyday life, the 3 main types of information design are:

-Navigational information design
-Instructional information design
-Statistical information design

Here, I'll mainly talk about instructional information design,instructional design is about creating instructional tools or content, translating the rules of learning and instruction into plans. The key is to help users to learn through the translation of instructions. An example of instructional design could be a sofware installation guide, which invovles a series of diagrams, teach users the moves of installation step by step. People love instructional design, because it's obvious and eay to follow the graphs to do stuff, rather than looking at instruction book, working out by themselves. A good instructional designer, would translate the instructions into graphs precisely, make all the instructions clear, easy to understand, easy to follow.

Interactive Design

Interactive Design is the interaction of design activities that industrial designers brought up to people's everyday life. It aims to shape people's everyday life, through the use of various design products. Today lots of artifacts we see in our life, are not just designed for the use of it, or for it's functionality purpose. Those artifacts are designed more in the way to be influential in people's everyday. And this is where the interaction happens, the interactive design exists.

Look back the early invention of World Wide Web, it was invented for people to retrieve information from, there was not much interaction for users to play around with. People search the internet, read information on the webpage, learn tips from the information, and that's the end. This is certainly not what people always expect to do in their life, people always feel like being involved in everyday life activities, they don't want just read things already published on the internet, but more than that, people want to create their own sites, or give their opinions about what certain person said about things, and most likely they want to play around with the stuff they see on the internet.

So, this is where Web 2.0 comes in, Web 2.0 was created from the concept of interactive design, as I mentioned on my 1st post, Web 2.0 is "the understanding of the network is the platform." What's is platform? Platform is the where people interact with each other, where the interaction takes place. So basically, Web 2.0 was created for people to have more interaction on the internet. Today we can post our own video on the internet, publish our own opinions about certain things, we can even create our own websites. These interactions are brought to our life, through interactive design. Interactive Design shapes our everyday life, most likely interactive design enriches people's everyday life.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in computer industry caused by the move to "the network is the platform". According to Tim O'reilly's definition of Web 2.0, it's the understanding of "the network is the platform", figure out how to build database to get better, to get more people to use them.

The main characteristic of Web 2.0 is, it has great interactivity, it allows the users not only to retrieve the information from the network, but it also alows the users to run software-applications entirely through a browser, users can own the data on the network, and control over that data. For example, the users of blogger, are allowed to retrieve the data on the blogger network, which could be viewing other people's information on their blogs, this is what traditional websites do, but Web 2.0 also allows the users to build their own blogs, through running the particular software-application applied on blogger site, users own the data on this site, they got to manipulate the data on this site as well, such as changing the look of the layout of their blogs, posting their articles, becoming followers of the other people on blogger, etc.

This stands in contrast to traditional websites, which limited visitors only to viewing and whose content only the site's owner could modify. The other examples of Web 2.0 are "Google Adsense", "Flicker" "Google Map", "Technorati", etc.