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…
EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry) is, as its name suggests, a conference about the implications and uses of ethnography in industry. I was a little surprised (and pleased) that about 80% of the presenters and participants were from industry, and only about 20% were academics. Intel, Microsoft, and IBM are very well represented here, as…
Here is an excellent question from Jimmy about the writing process buried in some comments, and I am just reproducing my answer here (slightly edited) so people don’t overlook it. Just curious…when you write, do you make a clear distinction between pre-writing and writing? Do you say, “ok, i’m done with prewriting..let’s start writing.” I…
This is a response to Andy’s post, in which he asks some thoughtful, tough questions about writing and prewriting. I responded at length, and I didn’t want people to miss it, so I am reposting here. * * * * * * Excellent post with some thoughtful questions (the best kind!). Let me respond to…
While we are on the subject of visual languages, I thought some of you might be interested to see that IU has visual identity guidelines: http://visualidentity.iu.edu/index.shtml Interestingly, under the new media category, there are a bunch of PowerPoint templates. I’m hoping they’ll replace the whiteboard in our classroom with a redboard, so my lectures can…
Something interesting happened today: some random stranger submitted a comment to one of our posts (either that, or a classmate posted a comment using a false name). It’s in my moderation queue, and I’m not sure what to do with it, so I thought I would ask the class. Your choices are: (a) Keep the…
OK, I’m just back from the UK and see I have a lot of posts to catch up on. I see Hyewon is picking on me, but I’m ready for it. 🙂 A few notes about this week’s readings: The Barnard reading is not online because you should have the book! Let me know ASAP…
In both major readings for next week’s class, the concept of “materiality” looms large. In Lowgren & Stolterman, the first several pages talk about materiality–for instance, the notion that a carpenter knows that wood (his material) has special characteristics or “qualities”: wood can be cut into useful pieces (i.e., it can be shaped) but it…
Read more Materiality and Qualities (A Prelude to Next Week)
If anyone in this class is interested in playing around with Second Life’s building and scripting tools, or if you know what you are doing and need a sandbox, I have some virtual property on which you can do so. If interested, contact Parker Pennell in Second Life (that’s one of my avatars), and she…
G. Smith concludes her Forward to Designing Interactions by saying that interaction design as a field has solved one set of problems, and it now needs to move onto a new set. However, after twenty years of drawing on existing expressive languages [e.g., film, typography, icons], we now need to develop an independent language of…
Interaction Culture 