For Jeff or his Avatar
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…
Magic Circle or Firewall: Phenomenology and Game Security
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…
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Lecture Liveblog: 10-11-07
We are always already on philosophical foundations and deploying those philosophical systems in our systems and interactions. Philosophical foundations determine the limits of what can be done. Hierarchical menu structures assumes that the world is hierarchically structured and relationships can be reduced to a static mapping. Produces interfaces like Windows Explorer. Breakdowns like “was this…
Lecture Liveblog: 10-9-07
Driveway Hockey begins this Saturday! Search for the Facebook group “Driveway Hockey” for details. [Update]: Minor edits made. Also, some HTML errors were fixed *cough* –JB Phenomenology and structuralism are approaches to understanding something, they are not embedded in an object. A film is not inherently phenomenological, but it can be interpreted phenomenologically. User centered…
What would Heidegger say?
In this situation of throwing-ness how aware is this person of the hammer (or the nail)? http://justvidclips.com/view/51/hammer-guy-very-cool-juggling-video-/
Who spilled the realism in my formalist pie?
I was playing Metroid Prime 3 today and felt inspired to mentally butcher realism and formalism into this post on realism in video games. Formalism is probably at the heart of most video games. Creating mythical lands of the unreal for people to play in is not exactly a realistic representation of the “real world.”…
Lecture Liveblog: 10-2-07
Theory Axis of Time [Bardzell’s Scientific Visualization Series] “Dumb as Rocks” -> Stress Level Increases -> Apex Point -> Stress Level Decreases -> Ability to Use Theory Increases Macrotheories Ex.: Marxism Massive phenomena (economy, ideology, classes, etc) that are collectively associated with culture. “top down” view or explanation Microtheories Ex.: Goffman Look at individual people.…
Structural Analysis (Sort Of and Not Really)
Spending a week in a place where I do not know a word of the language (even if it it doesn’t really matter from a tourist perspective) and many hours in flight with bad (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer bad) movies as entertainment gave me some motivation and time to think about phenomenology…
Chicken or Egg: Phenemenology and Structuralism
Warning: Incoming blog post fueled by jetlag and sushi. I find myself occasionally questioning the “philosophical” history of phenomenology and structuralism. By philosophical history, I mean determining which idea “comes first” and helps create the other in some thought experiment that hopefully simulates the complexity of our actual thought processes. As an example, lets look…
Interaction Culture 