What Does This Say to You?

To some it may just say "I'm a another place baseball is played" but to me it says much more. The right field wall, tall and made of bricks says "I'm difficulty and sturdy". The peep holes offer a free sample to passer-byes saying "give it a try". The large high definition scoreboard conveys professional and technological superiority saying "we have the very best". The over sized glove 501 feet away establishes a larger then life experience especially when neighboring a just as cartoonish coca-cola bottle both say "Hey, tonight your a kid again". The Design team behind the interior and exterior of AT&T Park did a fabulous job in visual insuring a great fan experience.

Some standard characteristics are the out field fence, scoreboard location is typically in the center, lights in center field, bleacher seats in the outfield, and the dimensions of the field share common aspects as most ball parks.

Mind Games

Five Routes Puzzle: Find the routes for the five men to get home without crossing or making a diagonal move.

A very static attempt by friend X at solving the problem likely rooted in trial and error

Similar approach like when chess is compared to checkers

Next Square Puzzel: Which is the next square in the sequence?

A wild guess

Two wild guesses

Visual Design Hierarchy

Muni vs. Muni

Why is it that the MUNI maps for the light rail are so different then the MUNI bus lines? I know there are many more busses and that the maps are geographically accurate - but why? Why are the street level maps so unlike the more conventional and successful mappings of the light-rail, BART, NY Subways, and the London Underground? One may retort that the London Underground and the London Bus system mapping share the same parallels in design as the San Francisco systems and I would agree but also point out that they suffer from similar understandability issues.

With all the issues surrounding specifically MUNI like cost, reliability, and service a redesign of the system mapping is well over due! Boy would I love that opportunity!

"We are also capable of directing attention toward or away from encountered stimuli based on our goals (top-down modulation)"

In Top-Down visual perception one sees what one is looking for based on accomplishing an internally driven goal. It is a bias form of perception, sort of like the saying "selective hearing". For example in this picture of...

Now depending on what your looking for, your definition of what the picture is about will be different. I like jets so to me it's about jets. For those who are into land formations or farms perhaps the picture is about the fields in the background. As I focus on the jets the fields fade whereas for the field lovers the jets fade. Definitions of what one sees vary even when looking on the same thing because we see what we want to see depending on what we want to accomplish regardless of how correct the interpretation, and that my friends is what I believe to be top-down visual perception's vibe.

Photo from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/F-16_and_F-16XL_aerial_top_down_view.jpg

Quote from: http://gazzaleylab.ucsf.edu/topdown-background.html