I read an interesting article on Slashdot today: Academic Games Are No Fun. Apparently, well into a $250K MacArthur grant, the IU Telecommunications Department-based creators of the MMO “serious game” Arden, The World of Shakespeare, have learned that (1) a game needs to be a game, and (2) games need to be fun. I can’t…
I have a final paper question that I had planned to discuss with Jeff in person, but I’ve decided to make it a blog post instead – just in case anyone else is struggling with the same question. Topically, my paper seeks to analyze the editor UI’s of three popular 3D modeling programs (3dsmax, Maya…
Software
Recently, in lecture, in another class, one of my professors (a very cool and intelligent one IMHO) was venting a little steam about how people commonly over- and mis-use the term “experiment” to describe what he refers to as “experiences”. Experiments, as he described them, take place in a completely controlled environment, in which there…
Worst case scenario: Ethnomethodology fails because you can’t dive into the users’ culture for a year and even if you could, first you’d have to acquire all of their special training, education, experience, etc. Ethnomethodological phenomenology fails because you might ask the user the wrong kinds of “why” questions, or ask them the wrong way,…
[Marty] My name is Marty … and I’m a pre-wirter. [Group] Hi, Marty! [Marty] I guess I’ve been a pre-writer for some time now, I just didn’t know it. At least not until Jeff held the mirror of truth up to my face. Even though I think I already know what I’m doing, I plan…
I’m a big fan of Takeo Igarashi’s work in creating interesting and accessible ways for people to participate in traditionally complex, digital, visual creative processes. Over the past few years, he’s developed some very unique “hands-on” interfaces for things like modeling, animating and texturing 3D objects, 2D deformation animations, and so on. While he tends…
Dave’s Realism in HCI post reminded me of an experiment that I saw when I visited Bill Buxton’s Alias research lab a few years ago. Buxton has worked for years with the use of computers to sketch and visualize things in 3D, but he shares the concerns that Dave, et al, voice in that earlier…
While we were discussing our Dourish reading and the necessary and implicit philosophical assumptions that people make when they design tools, I re-remembered a quote by John Maeda that I’ve mentioned before. Maeda says that when we do design with tools, we live in other people’s dreams. The idea being that those tools were themselves…
All of this talk about realistic and expressive language, constructing meaning, subjectivity and so on, got me to thinking about how plastic reality can be when we depict it visually. For instance, in this painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, he has intentionally elongated the proportions of the subject in order to achieve a more…
Interaction Culture 