In dialog surrounding the reviews of a recent paper a colleague and I submitted, one of the reviewers, resisting our call for a greater emphasis on criticism in interaction design on the grounds that psychology already does it, asked the following question: How can you prevent the “anything-goes-subjectivism” when the judgments are not objective? This…
I have mixed feelings about posting this video, and WordPress won’t let me paste the object/embed code–not sure what’s up with that, so here’s a link instead: http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/ifc/2008/01/23/sundance_newfrontier/index.html It is supposedly a work of “multimedia art” (in the words of the usually hip Salon.com), shown at the usually hip Sundance, which shows how virtual sweatshop…
Read more Lame and Obvious Multimedia Art or Novel Ecommerce Prototype?
Holy transcoding, Lev! One of the interesting recent developments in Second Life fashion is the increasing extent to which programming and automation are a part of virtual dress-up. An interesting example of this is a line of clothing from one of Second Life’s greatest and oldest design houses: PixelDolls. What initially caught my attention was…
Read more Wearable Computing: Automation and Fashion in Second Life
I’ve been reflecting recently on the Johnny Chung Lee phenomenon. As probably anyone reading this already knows, Lee is the Ph.D. student at CMU whose work in HCI has gone viral. For example, his head tracking trick for the Wii has been viewed on YouTube, as of now, 1.6 million times. What has struck me…
Read more CHI Vs. YouTube: Two Paradigms of Influencing the Field
World-renowned violinist (and IU alumnus and professor) Joshua Bell agreed to a Washington Post stunt to offer a 40 minute solo concert in a DC-area subway station, to see if any of the DC commuters noticed the greatness around them. The Post did a long and thoughtful write-up, after filming the whole thing, and they…
I was reading a book on film theory, French Cinema: A Student’s Guide (Powrie & Reader, Oxford University Press, 2002; currently out of print in the USA), and I found a chapter that I really wish I had assigned to this class (there is always next fall, right?). The chapter contains a very handy description…
I’d like to thank all members of the class for participating in this blog during our class. As I mentioned, I intend to keep it alive going into the new year, and you are welcome to continue contributing (and I hope people will!). I wanted to close with a few random notes and announcements. I…
I meant to mention this in class, but I wanted to share a few thoughts on how to structure (or sequence, or arrange into a syntagm yayy!) a critical essay. A scientific paper in our field typically has the following structure (and you are welcome to use it in this class, if it makes sense…
Here is an article that I meant to share with all of you sooner. It is a framework for critiquing interfaces, from Bertelsen & Pold. You may find it helpful as you work on your papers. From a philosophical standpoint, I have some issues with it. But from a practical standpoint, I’m really glad it’s…
I feel completely absurd writing a blog post to introduce poststructuralism, and indeed, I am *not* doing that here. Rather, I will do two things. I will try to restate the summary I made at the end of class today, and I will refer to the wikipedia entry on poststructuralism, which I think is not…
Interaction Culture 