Let’s imagine that using high-tech digital imaging techniques, you determine that I am in the background of that picture of Michael Phelps. You contact him and he agrees to give you a signed affidavit affirming that not only was I at the party, but that I supplied the illicit drugs and paraphenalia in the photograph. You decide to use the affidavit to blackmail me into giving you an A for the semester. I’m over a barrel, what can I do? It’s very important to keep the affidavit safe for the rest of the semester because if I get my hands on it, your whole scheme blows up (let’s pretend that you cannot scan it, take a picture with your phone, have it tattooed onto your body or any other modern-day solution to the problem). Based on your reading of Soloway and Winograd (1986), where would you hide the affidavit so that it will remain safe from, but so that you will be able to find it in May?
If you cannot imagine such a low-down and dirty scheme, think of a time when you were temporarily unable to locate an object that you had hidden on purpose (not lost, but hid on purpose). Where was it when you found it? How did your experience match up with the conclusions drawn by Soloway and Winograd (1986)? Was the object in a location that S&W would have predicted to be difficult? Having read this article, what is one place that you would consider to be a 'good' hiding place? That is, where will you hide a valuable the next time you need to hide one?
Submitted by Matthew Schulkind
on Tuesday, 2/3/2009, at 9:56 PM