Last week, I conducted some user studies to learn about music libraries. One of the participants commented on how cool mix tapes were yet how rarely he creates playlists in iTunes. I started to wonder about the differences between old and new music media formats. In particular, I was interested in the differences between mix…
Read more mix tapes vs. digital playlists (mediation, meaningful objects and sign values)
Jenny Brown sent around a link to this website. I believe it does a nice job illustrating many of the aesthetic concepts we struggled with yesterday (especially hypermediation!). http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf p.s. if it is illegal to post this link for some reason, I take full responsibility for it and ask you to forget that I mentioned…
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…
In the wake of our discussion on Representation and Speculation approaches in HCI, I thought I would write a short post to pose a question. Granted that these categories aren’t exclusive, where do techniques such as personas and scenarios lie on this continuum? Personas are a common technique used in user-centered design and indeed do…
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?
I’m in an informal reading group with some of the gang from complex systems, cog sci, and linguistics. One of the papers we’re reading for today really illuminated – in an HCI/d way – the talk Jeff was giving yesterday about the shared collective space of intention, meaning, and understanding. Since I know Dewey and…
I502 started with the question of how can we (as interaction designers) design compelling experiences, such as those we experience when watching compelling films. Reading dewey caused me to step back and reflect on the very experiences we design and intend to design. When I see the term “experience design” used, it often seems to…
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
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…
…anew genre I hadn’t thought about. via http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/fictional_computer_interface_design_8346.asp
Interaction Culture 