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If there's one thing neuroscientists are notorious for, it's arguing over brain regions and mechanisms! One month, someone will say 'we've located, ya know, FFA area.' The next month, a new article will come out saying 'No no, actually it's not 1 area, it's more like 6!
Prof. marty Sereno
It has been said that the brain is the most complex structure known to man. Jeff Hawkins gave the analogy of our understanding about the brain being like a giant puzzle- a puzzle with no guiding picture and where you receive 'new' puzzle pieces every week in the mail. Some pieces replace pieces you already have. How can we expect to teach each other about the brain in an effective way?
The challenges with studying the brain include multiple sources, newly updating information from current research, visualizing relationships, and highly-esoteric language with which scientists use to describe structures and mechanisms. We wanted to provide a social learning/teaching platform for a wide range of interested people (students/scientists/curious citizens).
We started by devising a requirements-list of features and behaviors and then began to research possible avenues. After a few days of divided research, we were better prepared to design a timeline of delivery, whereby every week we would have the next stage of release. In this timeline of delivery, we included a strategy to split off into pairs. One pair would work on the flash development and it's communication with the back-end, and the other pair would work on AJAX functionality and front-end behavior and layout. Then these two pairs dove-tail near the final 2 weeks to finish production and perform testing and redesign. The testing was rather quick and dirty and completed on a more informal basis to find the major usability issues with the application. You can find more about the project strategy in the PowerPoint presentation (given 2nd week).
I designed a mockup that included the basic location of our main design elements. We used these to divide our work and build our deadlines.
The final product was a web-based application. It was an integration of several complex components; an attractive vector-based Flash brain that behaved similarly to Google Maps. You could drag it, zoom in and out, and the lobes even glowed when hovered over by the mouse. This Flash brain allowed a user to place a marker anywhere on the brain, and edit it's name and information. These markers were given layer and size properties. For instance, if your are specifying a large brain area like V1, vs. a smaller one like Broca's area. In this way, it allowed for a complex infrastructure of user-specified anatomical mapping of brain areas and mechanisms.
There was a Dynamic HTML search column on the left. As the user typed in a string to search for, with ever letter entered, buttons would appear directly below. We thought search should be an important tool for studying the brain quickly and effectively.
There was an associative image slot on the right of the brain. This component did an AJAX call to Yahoo! Images and displayed images that matched the inspected brain area on the fly. Also, you could use these images to link to other informative sites, and if you hovered over one, it would show up larger beneath the thumbnails.
Lastly, there was a Wikipedia Article content section below the brain that would display relative Wikipedia information on the inspected brain area. This was the most difficult to use since there was no Wikipedia API for us to use and we had to spend a lot of time writing clever parsing algorithms for the finicky Wiki string content.
When all was said and done, we had a working application that quickly and engagingly provided for search, visualization and manipulation, image display, and encyclopedia information.
There was only so much we could do in our short time working on Cortext. However, other things we wanted to improve are:
- We wanted to convey the Wikipedia content better. As it existed upon project termination, it was all, or at least mostly, below the fold. Some users didn't realize there was more stuff to be seen because they got distracted by the pretty Flash brain, and didn't realize the informative 'pulp' was actually down further.
- Aesthetics were something that were designed for at the last minute. We didn't get a chance to really incorporate all of our components into a pleasing look and feel.
- How do you moderate images or marker information/titles? A user could potentially (and usually did after they realized how hilarious this could be) add a marker to the brain and call it a banana. Consequently, there would now be a place marked on the brain called "banana," and when the user clicked it, sure enough- pictures of bananas and Wikipedia content about bananas would be presented. To be considered a serious learning/teaching tool, issues like this would have to be moderated. But, until then, it's pretty fun!
