Thursday, March 29

Interactive Telecommunications Program/Information
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...
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Tuesday, March 27

Design Interact: Insights
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. Don¥t 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;-))
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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?).
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Monday, March 26

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.
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Sunday, March 25

CreativeEdge
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...
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hypergene | amazoning the news
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). It¥s more than plastic.com - are there other ones (to come)?
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Friday, March 23

User in Control or under control
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"?
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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 don¥t 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.
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Thursday, March 22

i-pot: an internet appliance

In this week¥s alterbox about stationary mobility Nielsen pointed to the i-pot, an Internet-enabled hot pot that dispenses boiling water for tea. But in addition to boiling and dispensing water, i-pots send usage statistics to a website that tracks users' tea-drinking patterns. Caregivers can monitor a user's well-being by watching for breaks in their tea-drinking routine, which are indicated in twice-daily email reports or by checking a website.
This reminds me on the presentation by Chris Pacione Healthcare You Can Wear ath the Doors6 Conference on Lightness where Chris showed the concept of his company BodyMedia. And there will be more. A good book to read about this context is Information Appliances (edited by Eric Bergman).
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Tuesday, March 20

Chat Circles
A very advanced MIT project - now in version 2 available. Chat Circles is an abstract graphical interface for synchronous conversation. There are two interfaces: In the chat interface color and form are used to convey social presence and activity, and proximity-based filtering is used to intuitively break large groups into conversational clusters.
The system also features the integrated history interface, which visualizes archival Chat Circle logs. The goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions.
(Attention: Not yet available for MAC users, but you can see screenshots!)
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Professor Seymour Papert
It¥s not only LEGO Mindstorms (named after Paperts book) that made me think it might be of interest to (re-)visit his pages and think about his theories...
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Sunday, March 18

Macromedia - Flash: Usability Tips
Based on recommendations from top Macromedia Flash designers, developers, and usability experts we've collected the top ten tips for creating usable Macromedia Flash sites.
If you don¥t like those rules (they are very common, as any top-10-ranking is), you can take part in the Usability Contest. Hurry up-there is a deadline at the end of march!
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What are Web standards and why should I use them?
Interestingly enough, Microsoft set a link to webstandards.org. Besides their goal to unifythe standards (beyond the w3c-consortium) they have a good faq about the web standards.
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Advance for Design: Resources
Again: Experience Design. The discipline of Experience Design is a combination of several fields, most with rich histories and many relevant resources. On this site, teh AIGA team has broken these into several sections. But the definition of "Experience Design" is still blurry - you don¥t prepare a meal just by knowing its ingredients - it¥s about the recipe. I don¥t look for recipes, but for ideas of models, relationships between disciplines etc.
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Thursday, March 15

AIGA : Draft curriculum statement for experience design
This draft curriculum statement for experience design of Meredith Davis, North Carolina State University is about Designing Experiences, not Objects. See also the general thoughts& definition of "Experience Design" at the aiga site: Experience design is the way in which meaning is communicated in the network society, where no point of contact has a simple beginning and end, and all points of contact must have meaning embedded within them...
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Wednesday, March 14

be a zed pilot
We are so far away from usable concepts for additional services for mobile phones:See what "zed" offers as a translation service:

Einfach das keyword WORT plus den gesuchten Begriff, die Quellsprache und die Zielsprache per SMS an die zed Servicenummer 72772 schicken.
Schon wenige Augenblicke sp”ter [unglaubllich! fast wie bei hexaglott!] sendet Dir zed per SMS Deine gesuchte Ðbersetzung.
Bei Quell und Zielsprache kannst Du [wow! ein wirklicher Service] auch die Abk¸rzungen der jeweilige L”nder verwenden:
D”nisch, Holl”ndisch, Englisch, Franz–sisch, Deutsch, Italienisch, Spanisch, Portugiesisch, und Schwedisch.

Beispiel SMS:
WORT VOGEL DEU ENG an die zed Servicenummer 72772 schicken.
[back to the command line interfaces...]

SMS von zed an Dich:
"bird"

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Tuesday, March 13

SIGCHI Curricula in HCI
ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction Curriculum Development Group : This publication is a report of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Curriculum Development Group.
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Monday, March 12

InteractionArchitect.com
Welcome to InteractionArchitect.com, the knowledge base on designing usable and useful interactive systems.
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Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net
This is a collection by Mikael Ericsson of information related to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
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Instructional Systems/Cross Cultural Communication/Knowledge Transfer
Elaine Winters is working as aÝwriter andÝinstructional designer - what has provided many opportunities to pursue, both personally and professionally, the less traveled path.
She had the good fortune to live and workÝbeyond her country of origin.
This has provided the opportunity to see, and try to understand, howÝothers view the world, enchancing her professional life as well as her personal perspective on the world.
You will find an interesting story about the seven styles of learning.
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Aesthetics and Usability Advanced topics in User Interface Design: "From being a specialist tool for professionals the computer has now become part of everyday life, like buildings. ... The Roman architect Vitruvius said buildings should have firmness, commodity and delight. By this principle, human-computer interfaces should be robust, useful and pleasurable. Their design should be as much an art as a science. ... But one need not have the creation of an artwork as one's primary goal in order to use the techniques of art. Far from being opposed to function, the aesthetic is part of function. A well designed artifact is by definition a pleasure to use, an ill-designed one awkward and annoying, a cognitive pea under the mattress, diluting our concentration. Aesthetic connotations, moreover, are inevitable: there is no such thing as 'neutral' design"
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jjg.net: a visual vocabulary
A visual vocabulary
for describing information architecture and interaction design.
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Noise Between Stations Web Site
This site of Rozorfish¥s Victor Lombardi gives an insight in auditory components of web sites as well a statement on pattern languages for interaction design. Don¥t miss the theme song!
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