Visual Notes From Attending a Human Factors Seminar Series

A while back I attended a series of Human Factors seminars taught by Lucy Dunne. This gallery shares visual notes I doodled from 5 of those sessions. Such great lessons and examples, I enjoyed these classes so much.

Complexities of Measuring Bodies

Complexities of Measuring Bodies. I left amazed how difficult making things that fit well is so stunningly difficult that I wonder how we're not collectively stuck wearing mostly blankets and potato sacks.

Process of Perception

Process of Perception. I had a chance to review so many useful concepts to human centered systemic design like task analysis, visual perception and more.

Sensory Perception in Modalities

Sensory Perception in Modalities. Absorbed learning about stimulus, layers of the epidermis, selective hearing as adaptation, and classifying patterns of audio and sensory substitution.

Memory and Cognition

Memory and Cognition. I gained awesome reminder and new perspectives in short term and long term memory, memory errors, and recall.

Attention and Affordance

Attention and Affordance. Super useful mental models for design to offer usable paths to bring people to the tools and capabilities you offer in your product.

Looking back at these notes, I find visual note taking useful in a few ways:

• Visual note taking is a great way to focus and connect with the information I'm hearing and seeing.
• It helps when I look back at the pages because I reconnect with the experience of being there, the stories, and resources I was connecting with at the time.
• When I share these kinds of notes with others who weren't at that particular event, it's a visual prompt with curiosities for me and the people I'm talking with.
• Sometimes others get detailed understandings from these notes, but not as often as for myself or others who were part of a given event.

I'll share more thoughts on this in an upcoming Polytechnicast, walking through some of the pages to demonstrate more about how it works for me. It'll also be a good chance to celebrate and highlight ideas about Human Factors.

Also I'm excited to share my new Patreon launch, if you'd like to support the kinds of podcasting and writing I do that's a great place to support my work. You can join me there for more thoughts and resources on human centered product development, ux design, game development, and storytelling. I'm posting a variety of work as patron-only thanks, for example I have more pages of visual notes on these human factors seminars I'll be posting soon.