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,…
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)
Awhile back I somehow got into a conversation with someone (I can’t remember who at this time) and he brought up a study he had read or heard about where an experiment was conducted on monkeys. I’m reiterating his reiteration of what the experiment was, so forgive me if it’s not accurate. Essentially monkeys were…
I did a structural and phenomenological analysis of Facebook’s people tagging feature. Just today I was able to create a semi-coherent argument from the analysis. I am curious what you all think of this: My overall thesis for the paper is that the way that a social networking community (Facebook) is designed fundamentally changes the…
Read more Does Facebook’s design change the way we take photos?
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…
I was looking at some portfolio sites for inspiration and came across this one, which I realized is a great example of Manovich’s principles of new media. Notice the lighting effects and smooth cinematic transitions–evidence of transcoding from the language of film. The extensive interface options are a perfect example of the logic of variability.
I think I would like more think about things in structuralism approach. And from this account, I thought, there is no totally new things or innovative things. Hypothetically, human have 100 English words in total to compose a sentence in order to describe an object. Based on the permutation and combination, there are definitely limit…
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…
I think more about my paper and try to narrow down the topic today. For now, the rough title is: Design mobile phone faceplates: appearance as experience and interaction. In this paper, I would like to focus on how mobile phone faceplates improve user experience. Mobile phone faceplates in Asia are designed by the following…
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?
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