Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design - Softcover

Mijksenaar, Paul; Westendorp, Piet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556709625 ISBN 13: 9781556709623

Publisher: Stewart Tabori & Chang, 1999

Synopsis

Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design displays an entertaining array of the most ingenious, stupid, beautiful, and horrible visual solutions that instruction designers and illustrators have invented to help us handle modern technology and everyday products.

These works of art show us how to floss out teeth properly, where to insert the printer cartridge, which button to press to transfer a phone call, how to use chopsticks, how to open a milk carton, and how to exit the plane in case of an emergency landing. Open Here also includes a diverse sampling of images: the finest cut-away drawing of a truck's diesel engine, a revealing expanded view of a model airplane, and detailed full-color photographs of a sewing machine in a 19th-century manual.

Open Here also includes an overview of the basic elements of visual instructions: the baffling yet remarkable drawings, cartoons and symbols that tell us where to cut, where to twist, how to repeat, and also how not to do all of the above.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Mijksenaar is designed the signing system for Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, New Ark airport in New Jersey and JFK in New York City. He is a professor of Visual Information design at the University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands.

Piet Westendorp is a researcher at the Delft and Eindhoven Universities of Technology in the Netherlands, where he specializes in technical communication.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Congratulations on your purchase of "Open here: The Art of Instructional Design." We're sure you will appreciate it. But before using this book, please make sure you have studied its contents carefully.

"Open here" has been designed and manufactured to the highest standards. It will show you around your daily Kafkaesque life of incomprehensible technology, frustrating packaging, do-it-yourself disasters-and the Visual Instructive Esperanto that should help you out.

"Open here" is for all those who appreciate everyday art with a lowercase "a." It is also meant as a source of inspiration for those who produce such art, to help them find smart-or shrewd-solutions to the communication problems they face when they have to tell us where to look, how to twist and what not to do. "Open here" presents designers and illustrators with the ideas and clever tricks of their professional predecessors and colleagues.

This book reveals how much we depend upon visual instructions in daily life. We consult maps, schoolbooks, traffic signs, training manuals and scientific illustrations. In "Open here", we focus on the visual instructions that help us to solve the most basic problems of each day: how to open a child-proof bottle of aspirin, make a reduced-sized double-sided photocopy, listen to voice mail using a mobile phone, program the microwave oven to turn on automatically and have dinner ready when we arrive home. This book contends that products definitely do not speak for themselves and that It's only getting worse. It also surveys a wide range of solutions that designers and illustrations can employ in creating visual instructions: mediums they can use, concepts they can apply and various ways they can communicate to different target groups. The book then looks at inventive instructional elements in detail, more or less in the order they should be produced and used, form warnings and identification of parts to composition and connections through the movements and sequences that must be performed and finally, the successful results: a VCR that works!

About this edition

• Publisher: Stewart Tabori & Chang
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1556709625
• ISBN 13: 9781556709623
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 142