Below please find links to the paper and slides that I presented at CHI2009 in Boston on “Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics.” It was a great experience for me, and I hope this paper and these slides help us move HCI’s cultural agenda forward! Paper (ACM digital library, subscription required) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1518701.1519063 Slides (PDF, 13 MB, no…
Readings: Going Off on Your Own Continued from Part 6 of the Interaction Criticism series, which starts here. Acknowledgment: Many of the ideas and readings cited throughout this series and particularly in this post reflect the research and contributions of my colleague and spouse, Shaowen Bardzell. I certainly have enjoyed composing this series of posts,…
Four Directions in Academic Design Criticism In Part 5 of this series (which more or less begins here), I sampled writings about designs from various design magazines to show examples of ways that people write about design. In it, I showed that people actually talk about design in some very diverse ways, and yet each…
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)
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…
For my paper, I’ve been looking at tagging on sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr. Lots of interesting design opportunities here (e.g. vocabulary problems, identifying communities of practice, adapting to site navigation). One thing I found particularly interesting was how much you can learn about someone from their tag cloud (and how eager some people are…
I have a bit of a rambling story to share with the Interaction Culture crew today! As some of you know, I’m immersing myself in postmodern and poststructuralist theory. While google searching for some images describing postmodernism I came across the following comic. Note: I know the comic is too big to fit in the…
For my capstone, I aim to create a website that helps dorm residents become more aware of and reduce their use of electricity. To do so I plan to hold an energy-saving contest and then display real-time data from electric meters on the site. My inspiration comes from a project done at Oberlin College: http://www.oberlin.edu/dormenergy/…
So…here’s the short version: A structuralist/semiotic analysis of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in the game BioShock and how signifiers are decoded by users and how user experience is affected by whether or not they pick up on dated references. Part of what makes BioShock such an incredible game is the setting/environment and sound is a…
Manivich says that “Although more complex types of interactivity can be created by a computer program that controls and modifies the media object at run-time, the majority of interactive media uses fixed branching-tree structures.” He goes on to claim that we can choose one of two perspectives regarding the use interactive media: (i) Author “…the…
Read more Q: What is the difference between authorship and use?
Interaction Culture 