The Interactive Telecommunications Program is a pioneering graduate center for the study and design of new communication media forms and applications. ITP is internationally recognized as a unique and vital contributor of new ideas and talented individuals to the emerging professional and artistic worlds of new media (ie, multimedia, computational media and networked media) and Physical Computing.
I came to this link via annotatespace, a thesis project at the ITP, developping experiental forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations. This project just started, but I will keep an eye for it…

Vindigo is a personal navigation tool?tell it where you are or where you’re going and it can find the nearest and best places to eat, shop, and play.
Vindigo knows about every great restaurant, bar, movie, and store in your city. To learn more about Vindigo, take this quick tour (click the next button to begin).

Anthony Ramos does a pretty good thing with his design interact page. They have their site of the week as well as a good insight in their design process, shown with the kiosk design for the emp museum. DonÅ0Ö7t miss the detailed insight in the design process on the following pages.
Interesting, what happens if web designers do kiosk systems and com to the conclusions that buttons are bigger (touch) and the global navigation should be on the bottom of the page;-))

User or Consumer? Bringing together HCI and Marketing at CHI
This conference (the organisers are accepted as a CHI Special Interest Group) is about bringing together usability and marketing. User and consumer are called to be the same subject - but mostly still from different worlds.
I think they might have some interesting thought, but I think they do not deal with the user becoming an active creator, a do-er (does this word exist? from usage to doage?).

Experience Design
In the following I will quote a statement of Terry Swack, who is a chairperson at the AIGA Experience Design Community for Interest in the AIGA List at yahoogroups:
“The history of this community’s use of the term ‘experience design’
Clement and I started the Advance for Design in 1998 specifically to find, describe and build a *community* that we felt we were representative of, but didn’t yet exist in a tangible way.
In Santa Fe in 1999 the group arrived at this term *to describe the community* because it was the most important element of the work common to all attendees (ie, we all cared deeply about users’ experiences).
In Telluride last summer we clarified and agreed that the term refers to a *community of practice*, not a field and especially not a single type of practioner.
The term has been out there the better part of two years. Many folks have since used it with great success to describe the broad range of knowledge and the many types of practitioners who work together to design effective, user-centered solutions to achieve business goals for clients.
The people with whom we work (outside the experience design community of practice, ie, clients, business professionals and technologists) have paid attention and begun to understand what we mean. It would be confusing communication and inappropriate at this point to say ‘never mind, only kidding… we’re withdrawing that term…what we really meant was ‘x’.’ For better or worse, it’s something we have to work with. It’s purpose is to be easily recognized and understood as representing the people and knowledge in this community.
So now is the time to get really clear about what we mean and then forever after be consistent in our communication! We are planning the next summit meeting (more info to come soon) to put the issues of terms, meanings and messages to bed while we move on with accomplishing our longer-term goals –to continue to build and advocate for a community of design practitioners who are challenged to design for a world that is increasingly digital and connected.”
So far for this description-it reflects a very vivid discussion in the above mentioned group.

They have a fast and nice flash intro - and if you arrived in their main menu, you will find a somehow familiar way of navigation paradigm (known since yugop with hos former site) - but adapted for a well-known apperance of a menu. You have to use it, to feel the behaviour to judge it. This is good. I think it is not “usable” because we are stuck to other paradigms. But it is necessary to open our eyes for new ways of perception, interaction…

What if we told stories on the web the way Amazon sells books? Storytelling on the web demands its own vocabulary and strategies ? indeed a whole new way of thinking. The web site that does the best job of telling stories in a web-appropriate way is also the most successful: Amazon. So blow up your old notion of “story.” See what happens when you apply Amazon’s user-savvy approach to typical news events (via Xblog). ItÅ0Ö7s more than plastic.com - are there other ones (to come)?

Microsoft is building User-Centric Experiences. With HailStorm, they give the user full control of a whoel bunch of data (profiling the using) whereever a user is using whatever system. The system is omnipotent and omniscient, my digital alter ego: myAddress,myProfile, myContacts, myLocation, myNotifications, myInbox, myCalendar, myDocuments, myApplicationSettings, myFavoriteWebSites, myWallet, myDevices, myServices, myUsage, mySoul (ok, kiddin). Can you stand more “my”?

Scenarios as a design method: Cooper ( Interaction Design

I think the methodical development of scenarios are a very good way to develop creative solutions for user centered design. Cooper Interaction Design and IDEO (unfortunately you donÅ0Ö7t find a scenario on the website) are two design companies that both do explicitly user-centered design and give the human factors research a very high significance. In detail, they use different methods, of course.