September 2, 2007

You are browsing the site archives for September 2, 2007.

Before I begin, grrr at having to write this blog twice because it didn’t save the first time. I’d have an angry emoticon here, but I can’t find one… which oddly enough is also making me mad at this time. Actually, this point directly relates to the article “Designing for Everyday Life” by Gilliam Smith.…

Read more Designing for Every Day Life

When Jeff was talking about how early film was just a single uncut scene (the factory workers leaving for the day) and the revolution of film through montage, I thought about how, interestingly enough, we’ve almost come around back to the beginning. Maybe only among the super nerdy film circles, you’ll hear about how blank…

Read more Uncut to Montage and Back Again

I was struck quite forcibly by G. Smith when she said that the fifth imperative was to design for sociability.  She follows this up by saying, “When IT systems fail to support the social aspect of work and leisure, when they dehumanize, and de-civilize our relationship with each, they impoverish the rich social web in…

Read more Designing for Sociability

There is a theme in the “What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory?” reading that I just can’t get through. It states that “culture tends to be opposed to the material, technological, and social structural” (Smith). We didn’t get a chance to discuss this reading in class, and maybe I’m going beyond (or completely missing)…

Read more “What is Culture?”

I personally have little experience with online social networks and games. This first week of classes, I have been fascinated by the relationships between students and professors on networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Second-Life. At first, I was excited by the possibility of connecting with a professor or mentor on a level that didn’t exist…

Read more “I thought we were friends.”

As Gillian Smith points out, Interaction Design has drawn heavily on the ‘existing expressive languages’ of non-digital mediums. She breaks these traditional languages down into 4 ‘dimensions’: 1 – words and literature, 2 – painting, graphic design, iconography, 3 – product design, 4 – film and TV. I agree that much of interactive design to…

Read more towards a truly compelling language of interaction

As a caveat to my post, let me state that I haven’t studied the HCI literature in 6 years. I’ve been out in the ‘real world’ where I had great expectations of utilizing research, data and other such academic treasures to shape my everyday works…. alas, I had time lines, lack of resources and small…

Read more Expectations

When Gillain Smith discussed Interaction Design, she mentioned the phenomenon that function and usability is not the only thing designer should consider nowadays. People view digital artifacts as a way to sociability. Here are some parts of her words. “A computer begin to shape everyday life, we’re interested not only in what this technology can…

Read more From Usability to Sociability

Is there any interest out there in taking up the practice of liveblogging the course lectures? Entering the lecture material into the blogstream will give us an easy method for continuing course discussions as well as opportunity to reflect on lectures while increasing the size of our course related blogosphere. Given the number of people…

Read more Lecture Liveblogging