cargille@astroatc.UUCP (Allan Cargille) (08/30/89)
In article <56868@aerospace.AERO.ORG> lubofsky@aero.UUCP (Nick Lubofsky) writes: >Wouldn't all people recognize this? > > O > --+-- > | > / \ > >Wouldn't that be a universal icon? No, IMO, gender gets confused when placed this one, which I do not think is universal either. O --+-- | | | allan -- C. Allan Cargille "MadTown" (Madison), Wisconsin cargille@cs.wisc.edu `I give you a new commandment: love one another...' If not us, who? Let's build a better world.
sandyg@tekirl.LABS.TEK.COM (Sandy Grossmann) (09/01/89)
The Poison Control Center has created a round, yellow-green sticker meant to convey a warning to youngsters. The sticker shows a graphic of a grimacing face with a tongue stuck out. (This is a bit hard to convey over the net!) It is not a friendly looking face, let's put it that way. I guess the Center felt that yellow-green was a distasteful color and that children would consequently associate the sticker with something to avoid. Unfortunately, the brightness of the color and the cartoon appearance of the face are apparently rather attractive to toddlers. However, it brings up an issue that is relevant to icon design. Sometimes we forget that humans tend to recognize human facial expressions better than they recognize symbols. Can you think of applications for icons that use human expression (or posture) to convey meaning? Perhaps for cautions? Or ???? Sandy Grossmann sandyg@tekirl.labs.tek.com
fbushnell@eagle.wesleyan.edu (09/01/89)
yeah, i seem to remember from the old Gletitman psych text that expressions of given feelings were pretty universal. this is not to say that different people show the same feelings to the same extent as other people, of course; cultural norms might discourage the display of certain emotions. if there were some way to convey a given expression in iconic form, perhaps that would be as close to a universal icon as possible. fitz
sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG (Scot E Wilcoxon) (09/04/89)
In article <5861@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM> sandyg@tekirl.LABS.TEK.COM (Sandy Grossmann) writes: >... >Sometimes we forget that humans tend to recognize human >facial expressions better than they recognize symbols. >Can you think of applications for icons that use human expression >(or posture) to convey meaning? Perhaps for cautions? Or ???? Over 10 years ago I read about an experiment in monitoring the status of a computer system. A computer system has many items which can be quantitatively measured, such as number of items in the input and output queues, number of active programs, memory in use, percent of processor time used, etc. One system was instrumented to measure many such items and the numbers used to generate a human face on a CRT screen, with each item affecting one feature. Number of items in the input queue would raise the outside of the left eyebrow, the average memory size of items in the input queue made the eyebrow thicker, the number of active programs affected how open the mouth was. (I don't remember the specifics, but that's the type of relationship which was used) The "face" was set up so when the system was balanced the way which the system managers preferred, the "face" had a neutral smile. When anything was changing outside normal, various expressions or grimaces would appear. The author of the report noted that changes in these "facial expressions" were much more obvious than trying to directly observe a screenfull of corresponding numbers. -- Scot E. Wilcoxon sewilco@DataPg.MN.ORG {amdahl|hpda}!bungia!datapg!sewilco Data Progress UNIX masts & rigging +1 612-825-2607 uunet!datapg!sewilco I'm just reversing entropy while waiting for the Big Crunch.
eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (09/05/89)
>Using faces as computer monitoring icons.
Examples of such have appeared in previous SIGGRAPH slide sets. LANL
made examples using faces and other icons (such as oil tank trucks
for oil companies. I think it's the 1978 set. I thought about using
a C-Cray computer shape (most other computers are just rectangular
boxes, so you can't get much geometry from the multivariate data.
I've not digitized a Cray-icon (it would have to be a 1, X or Y, 2s lack
seats)). I thought about using them for performance measurement.
There was an article in American Statistician I think (you can do a literature
search, my copy is buried). Chernoff is or was
at Stanford. The S stat package has a faces(1) function, see the S book.
Chernoff tested faces up to 18 variables, S faces can go to 15 (so
says the documentation). The gist of Chernoff's paper and my conversation
with Rick Becker at ATT BTL about faces is that faces are able to show a
greater dimensionality of multivariate data, but the interpretation
is difficult because you have to associate the dimensions correctly
to get the proper unambigous effect. They will likely remain a novelty
without much practical use. Cute, but useless.
Another gross generalization from
--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov
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