I have seen a number of posts and comments that grapple with the notion of “breakdown,” and I thought it might be constructive to clarify something. “Breakdown” in everyday English is a bad and destructive thing. “My car broke down.” “He had a nervous break down.” The phenomenological notion is derived from this, but as…
What: A Special Presentation Who: Stelarc When: October 24, 2007 @ 7:30pm Where: Fine Arts Building Room 015 “Stelarc, one of the world’s most innovative artists, has been performing and creating multidisciplinary projects internationally since the late 1960’s… his goal has been to look at the body as a tool that can be enhanced by…
Recently, Heidegger’s concepts of present-at-hand and ready-at-hand have been mentioned in readings for both Jeff’s class and Erik’s class. I find the implications of these concepts interesting for interaction designers and want to examine them further. A fundamental question for an interaction designer being introduced to these concepts is: Should products be designed to be…
Read more Present-at-Hand & Ready-to-Hand in Interaction Design
Building on a topic Christian brought up earlier in his blog, I’d like to share an amusing experience of computer-age politics that I had today. Earlier, I got an email from an environmental group, called the National Resources Defense Council. In it, it accused Toyota of violating its own “green” image, because it is lobbying…
The Consumerist reports that Target has started selling David Bowie themed clothing designed by Keenan Duffy. Hooray! Bowie has inspired Duffty since childhood and, through his music, taught the designer to experiment across different creative mediums. Duffty applies this lesson to his eclectic encore collection that debuts on October 14 at most Target stores and…
Like Kayce, i was taking in the cultural nuance this weekend that is MTV. Actually, i happened upon the MySpace/MTV Political thingamajig on Friday night, and was only able to stomach the first 10 minutes or so. John Edwards was the focus, but my dislike of the forum had little to do with the candidate.…
I started to think about how different theories constrain and open up the space for design but got caught up in trying to sort out how exactly these theoretic traditions (rationalism/cognitive science, phenomenology, activity theory) are similar and different. It would be nice to have some sort of philosophical foundations of HCI cheat sheet. Here…
On Tuesday, we mentioned the notion of needing flexible models of creativity, or any complex reality, in order to create designs with strong HCI foundations (I think). I decided to try to apply this to word processors. Before the age of word processors, most of our papers were written on plain sheets of ruled white…
I wrote a last minute paper for the CHI workshop on Secrets and Lies in Computer-Mediated Interaction: Theory, Methods and Design . Here’s the abstract for the paper I submitted. Deception in massively multiplayer online role playing games is a complex and nuanced issue. Anonymity and the deceptive behavior it enables are required to facilitate…
Read more Magic Circle or Firewall: Phenomenology and Game Security
“Movement brings us volume and volume suggests life.” Human response to change, or our embodied reaction within Δ time, is what makes movement so powerful and film such a vivid experience. The dimension of time necessitates that we make use of our memory in a different way. When we look at an image, we reflect…
Interaction Culture 