Week 1) Second Wind

Many weeks later... here I am writing my second journal entry. I've definitely narrowed my focus for this class, although how focused my project is remains to be seen.

I'm making an interactive map of Georgia. My idea is that I'll be able to feed an external actionscript file to a "smart" flash map. The external script will contain arrays of different kinds of information throughout the state. This will primarily be used to show distribution of [some variable] or other commonalities throughout the state, by county. I have an official government code for the counties, as well as congressional districts. I'm a little wary of deviating from county lines though, as most of my data will be county specific -- not district specific.

In the end, I hope to be able to put this map to work for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. We have multiple programs that could utilize this visual representation of the state. My goal is to make the project as portable as possible, as well as making the external scripts modifiable to accept new data without gumming up the Flash file.

To start, I think I can wing it without a database backing up the actionscript. I'd rather see a proof of concept first, then I can request particular data to be dynamically pulled into actionscript later.

Not sure how much sense-making I'm doing.... feels a bit techie to me!

As to the design of this, obviously, a state map is pretty standard. I've been thinking about Donald Norman's Emotional Design presentation -- it invokes the need to make this project beyond just functional and making it emotionally appealing. I can see dressing up the space surrounding the map to accomodate a prettier user interface. The smoother this looks, the more attractive it will be to the eventual user or potential client.

Of Norman's Emotional Design discussion, I especially like the 3 aspects of the brain that he discusses or the notion of the triune brain: the visceral, the behavioral, the reflective. I'm fascinated by the concept that our brains are constantly encoding our experiences with emotions, whether we are aware of it or not. Even in reflection we might add new emotions to long-past experiences. Better yet, the brain performs a particular defense mechanism -- if the visceral brain is threatened (unsatisfied?), little information goes to the next aspect, the same with the behavioral or "emotional" brain. On the other side of this, as we learn and if we reach overload, our brains shut down in this reverse order, retreating to the visceral fight-or-flight mode as a final defense.

I digress. Okay, so my goal is to keep that higher-order thinking going. No overloading for me and hopefully, my project's outcome will not overload my audience!

References:
Norman, D. 2004. Emotional design: Presentation made at the 2004 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. [podcast]