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Interesting, my initial reaction to reading the abstract was: why are we thinking about UX instead of investing the money and time in fixing the root cause - il
by iammjm 5y ago
Interesting, my initial reaction to reading the abstract was: why are we thinking about UX instead of investing the money and time in fixing the root cause - illiteracy?
But then I thought: It's not that people can't read or write, it's that they often move to new countries and have to deal with a completely new language.
So: I guess the solution would be less text, more visuals and symbols.
But: are symbols universally understandable? Not all of them for sure, but definitely a portion of them; especially those pertaining to our biology and lowest common denominators as humans. Pointing inwards with a finger at own's open mouth should be an universally understandable symbol for hunger; a pictogram for sun should communicate heat -- but it could also communicate other things such as good fortune, daytime etc. and this is where problems arise: precision suffers, misunderstandings happen.
Can we do away with language altogether? I was thinking about starting with the universally understood axiomatic symbols and using them to create more and more complex symbols to achieve precision. But I guess that's exactly what language and math does, even historically starting with cave paintings, through graphic languages and whatnot, increasing abstraction and information density. So this brings me back all the way to the initial problem, with the feeling like I've barely understood anything, not even mentioning a solution...
- kaba0 5y agoI remember reading a very interesting paper on how can we make nuclear waste dumps marked as unsafe for 1000s of years. It employed things like surrounding it with sharp, outward pointing dangerous objects, building a maze-like concrete structure around its general area and trying to create universally understandable pictograms to say “stay away”, even for a possible post-nuclear-catastrophe society. Unfortunately I couldn’t find that paper again, but it was really interesting read and you might also find it interesting. Another similar topic that comes to mind is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
- andrewaylett 5y agoThe key phase to search for is "this is not a place of honour", and you're looking for https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/ https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of...
- kaba0 5y agoWow, thank you very much for this! At times I even contemplated whether I just dreamt about this article, but I wouldn’t be that creative to imagine something like that :D
- Izkata 5y ago> It employed things like surrounding it with sharp, outward pointing dangerous objects, building a maze-like concrete structure around its general area This actually sounds like the perfectly wrong choice - it reminds me of various movies/TV where such traps are used around temples or tombs to keep treasure and sacred artifacts safe, making them prize targets for graverobbers or archeologists. See also various ancient tombs (Egypt being primarily on my mind).