Why do I blog this? Giving lectures here and there about user experience, it’s good to have such kind of examples to show the tendency people have to repurpose standard artifacts for other needs.
… or you can spot where you are based on a location people made clearly visible through touching a paper-based map… seen in Paris last week-end.
Some examples of game interfaces encountered at a fun fair in Nantes last week:
Why do I blog this? Fun fair and amusement park offer peculiar kinds of constraints for interaction design: noisy environment, presence of a crowd, cash-oriented money, balancing success and failure with regards to the reward at stake (toys, etc.) The crafting of sound user experience in this context is intriguing and lead to solutions as shown above.
It would be good to spend some time and observe more people’s reactions when using these huge buttons and joysticks. That being said, fun fair interfaces and amusement parks experiences seems to be a forgotten realm in human-computer interaction. Apart from research about amusement rides, I haven’t seen may occurrences of such endeavor. That can be an interesting lead for future projects.
A strikingly interesting author, japanese manga author Yuichi Yokoyama has an interesting perspective on the near future:
“Matiere: Are you interested in Science Fiction?
Yuichi Yokoyama: I was impressed by Tarkovski’s films, Solaris and Stalker and also by Kubrick’s 2001, a Space Odyssey. I also like TV shows about aliens and prehistoric times… If one sees Sci-Fi in my stories, that doesn’t bother me, but it’s not specifically my intention. I’m not trying to write stories that are set in the future, but rather to write stories which are delivered from references to any given epoch or time. If the history of the world had turned out differently from what we know today, men would live according to different sets of values and different aesthetics. The culture of that world would probably demand that people not wear shoes or always cover their heads and never show their true faces. It would be a civilization completely alien to ours. Tomorrow’s world takes root in our present time, and is always connected to it. That’s why it doesn’t interest me to depict the world of the future. Two of my stories, entitled “Dress-Up” and “Travel” show characters with no hair on their heads. And yet these characters are not old men with bald heads. They are young people who shave their hair off. In the civilization portrayed in those two comic strips, that’s the way things go: it’s maybe part of the fashion to pretend to be old. I draw characters whose aesthetics are different from ours.“
It took 20 years to (finally) see a patent for self-lacing shoes. The Nike prop from Back to the Future 2 has indeed been shown in 1989 (with a non-automatic lacing version released as a collector in 2008).
People interested in rather low-tech solution can also have a look at this arduino-based version with utterly swell strapped micro-controllers and motors to a pair of Jordans.
Why do I blog this? Of course this is old news for the interwebs, but I find it interesting to collect examples of product featured in speculative movies that find their way to real artifact or intermediary artifacts such as patent. It’s a good way to trace the evolution of product ideas from a Los Angeles studio to a huge server farm at the World Intellectual Property Organization near my apartment in Geneva. The fact that it took 20 years to see this move is intriguing too.
The ambivalence of warning signs in terms of performativity. Once again, The Simpsons are spot on.
(Picture found here)
Working on the game controller project book, we’re building various charts of joypad evolution. What’s interesting is that we’re definitely not the sole persons doing this. Over the recent months, there’s been several other relevant visualizations, that I compiled in this blogpost.
Obviously, the first that caught my eyes several years ago is the following one by Sock Master:
Then, more recently by incontrol and Steve Cable:
Or these two, focused on game controllers, beyond joypads by Pop chart lab:
I also found this others one, slightly less visual:
Why do I blog this? We try to differentiate our representations, so it’s good to see how others are proposing relevant visualizations. In our case, we’re creating a family tree for each of the joypad characteristics (d-pad, shape, action buttons). Which, hopefully, will highlight the complexity of the gamepad evolution.
Pixels Per Person by Carina Ow is an inspiring design project that looked at how to give a tangible existence to the public WiFi network in the city of Geneva:
“In images, WiFi connections are usually represented as a series of fluctuating waves derived from signal strength indicators that fall and rise according to the strength of the WiFi connection. This inspired the creation of a system that would not stay static, but would instead be in a state of constant motion. To represent this idea, each installation takes the form of a dynamic OLED surface modelled differently each time depending on the characteristics found on site. Organic LEDs (OLEDs) were specified for surface of the installations because they work both in the light and dark, and can therefore contribute to the spatial quality of the installation site at night.
(…)
The graphical system is designed as different configurations of these pixels forming pixel images derived from classic Wi-Fi signal motifs. Depending on the total number of users connected to the network, the image will change to reflect the network traffic, i.e. the more users, the more pixels used in the composition of the image. The pixel images morph between themselves in a pre-defined transitional animation.“
Why do I blog this? Because of my long-time interest in representation the digital envelope of urban environments. This project is intriguing as it represents WiFi usage and aims to induce a sense of participation and ownership in the users.
It’s back to school days here, pencils are being sharpened, wireless notebooks being bought… and new courses are being prepared.
This year will have a decent share of teaching in various institutions. I am currently preparing some fresh material for the following courses
And of course there will be more punctual interventions in other places about similar topics.
Read in No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration by Patrick Novotny:
Why do I blog this? Collecting material about cyberpunk for an upcoming interview about the connections between science-fiction and interaction design. The creolization meme seems important but, for some reasons, I don’t know (yet!) how to articulate its role. More material needed to understand the implications.
Comprendre les échecs pour innover
Comprendre les nouveaux espaces numériques 
