Lesson 8

This module discussed a variety of issues that are critical to consider during the early phases of establishing the signs and metaphors for your Web site. These issues are dealt with primarily by the Creative role. However, all roles do have some input into these decisions and should be able to discuss and analyze them effectively.
You should now be able to:

1. Describe how HCI concerns influence signs and metaphors
2. Describe how HCI affects design of visual and editorial content
3. Describe the challenges that inform designing for a global audience
4. Describe constraints on creating images during design and development
5. Describe the principles for using type effectively on the Web
6. List and describe categories of software used for creating signs and metaphors

In this module, you were introduced to the following glossary term:

1. Cascading Style Sheets:Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML5 and JavaScript.

In the next module, you will continue to learn about signs and metaphors, by looking at the success factors and risks that are involved in this first layer of the Web site development process model.

Humanistic psychologists have warned that as humans become more dependent on technology and inhabit an increasingly technological world, we too are subtly madeover and reinvented by the very technological world we invent. As people try out multiple new identities online and experiment with virtual reality simulations of reality, the self becomes more mutable and fragmentary than it has ever been in human history.
To value machines and virtual reality over our humanity is a choice that will clash head-on with 500,000 years of biological evolution.
The question now is: how are the relationships we are forming with computers changing what it means to be human?
One example of this impact is how readily the computer metaphor for the brain has been adopted both in the health professions and in popular culture. The choice of linguistic metaphor has profound implications for how that phenomenon is viewed and interacted with. In the case of health issues,

Instead of confronting how we are creating and reacting to the stresses that cause human conflict and sickness, we look only to how we can maintain and repair the computer-brain. This translates into servicing the human machine with drugs; drugs for sleeping, drugs for waking up, drugs for shifting moods, drugs for recreation, for upset stomachs, and for migraine headaches. As if taking ourselves in for a lube job and oil change will fix the problem. Our acquiescence to technology has lowered us to its level, rather than pulling it up to our level.

Even technology's critics are also searching for ways that it can lead to enhanced connections with others and a deeper sense of self by merging with the machines.