Lighweight QR code (as suggested by Paul Baron)? Game of Life (as suggested by Matt Jones)? or simply a red hand-drawn crosswords structure… as this kind of artifact fascinates me recently. I wonder if some people already thought about crosswords generated by game of life algorithms (beyond this.
Why do I blog this? I’m just mesmerized by the visual proximity between crosswords, QR codes and Game of Life rendering.
The interview about SVK by Berg London is insightful but I was fascinated by this quote:
“I think the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life – that it’s something inventive, hopefully something that has some cultural importance – but mainly to have fun, make stuff y’know? When you can make that kind of thing achievable, when it gets some kind of independence from the client work so you can do it yourself, that’s really interesting.“
Why do I blog this? this is exactly the sort of direction we are trying to aim at.
Currently working on a project about the user experience of 3D on mobile displays, I am fascinated by these two projects that came up in a discussion with Etienne yesterday:
“Designed specifically for iPhone and iPod touch, the MY3D Viewer lets you experience 3D games and 360-degree entertainment in a brand new way. Simply insert your device into the viewer to enjoy a variety of 3D and 360-degree-enhanced apps, many of which are free from the App Store.
The MY3D Viewer includes four adapter trays sized to fit iPhone and iPod touch devices. Your device quickly snaps in and out–no wires or batteries are required.“
Sensor Girl, an old stereoscope customized for iPhones by David-Olivier Lartigaud. This project has been shown at Mode:Demo (Lift Experience 2010):
“SensorGirl is an artistic experimental application that aims to question the new interactive relationship a user can have with represented objects on nowadays mobile screens. Embedded sensors like accelerometers and gyroscope are opening new modalities of interaction with images : the user’s hand changes the screen physical orientation which can be used to interact with the represented object without any third party device. The screen itself and its relative state can then be directly connected to an object image, linking both in a new way that common controllers like mouse or joysticks don’t permit on usual, non-mobile screens.“
Why do I blog this? I’m accumulating examples of curious experiments like this for a project and wonder about people’s reactions, the design possibilities and the value of 3D in mobile context.
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.
The ambivalence of warning signs in terms of performativity. Once again, The Simpsons are spot on.
(Picture found here)
This piece in The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal deals with an interesting case in technological evolution: the stabilization of a technical objects, which in this case in the so-called graphing calculator.
The column wonders about the reasons why graphing calculators such as TI-83 did not change that much, unlike teenager gadgets. Some explanations the article surface:
“First, for high school level math classes, the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus are essentially perfect. After all, the *material* hasn’t changed (much), so if the calculators were good enough for us 10 or 15 years ago, they are still good enough to solve the math problems.
Second, standardized test companies only allow a certain range of calculators to be used. If they got too powerful or complex looking (seriously, the aesthetic is part of it), they could be banned, hurting their sales. Horizontally oriented calculators have been banned by the SAT, even if they have near identical functionality to vertically oriented models.
Third, and this is probably most important, teachers tend to recommend a particular calculator or set of calculators, and the more of their students using the same tool, the easier it is to teach them. That puts a drag on the change in tools because the technological system in which they are deployed militates against rapid change“
Which leads the author to the following conclusion:
“ Some technologies don’t change all that quickly because we don’t need them to. Much as we like to tell the story of The World Changing So Fast, most of it doesn’t. Look at cars or power plants or watches or power strips or paper clips. The changes are in the details, and they come slowly. But that’s ok. More change isn’t necessarily better.“
Why do I blog this? An interesting example of a technical object that seemed to reach a certain plateau. An example to keep up my sleeve for my course about interaction design and technological evolution.
Locative media remained the stuff of demos and art-technology festivals until 2008 when Apple released the GPS-enabled iPhone 3G. Paradoxically, the mass realization of locative media seems to have taken the wind out of its sails as an art form. Although courses on writing apps proliferate in art and architecture programmes, the promise of locative media seems to remain just that: a promise, its transformational ambitions forever enshrined in William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), a novel which, tellingly, was set not in the future but in the recent past.
Why do I blog this? The quote echoes with my feeling and it’s the second time this week that I encounter such comment about locative media. I actually don’t know what it means about the use of this technology but I guess we’ll see pretty soon how users repurpose such devices and services to their own context and interests.
An interesting quote found in a NYT piece about Berg London:
“Historically, design has associated itself with utility and problem-solving, but we prefer the landscape of cultural invention, play and excitement,” Mr. Schulze said. “When technology is infinitely complex, and our attention increasingly finite, producing something you can act on and observe at a human and cultural level is hard.”
Interesting perspective by Leila Takayama on Kicker studio’s weblog:
“What are 5 things all designers should know?
1. People respond to many interactive technologies in ways that they respond to people, even when they won’t admit it or can’t recognize it. (See: The Media Equation)
2. There is often a gap between how people reflectively talk about an interactive product and what they actually do in the moment of interacting with that product. Know which of those matters to you.
3. What is perceived can be more important what is objectively true when it comes to how people embrace and engage with interactive objects.
4. It really does not take much for an interactive product to seem like it has its own agency and apparent intentions. (See: Heider & Simmel demonstrations)
5. Under promise and over deliver on user expectations.“
Why do I blog this? Simply because it’s an informal summary of various points that echo with my perspective.
Laurent Bolli gave me my “tweetbook” copy. It’s basically a book with the content I’ve put on Twitter for few months. Tweetbook is a print-on-demand platform made by bookap that allows to archive your Twitter feed into a beautifully printed and bound book. The project was presented at a nice exhibit called “Objet(s) numériques” at Le Lieu du Design in Paris.
As described on bookapp’s webite:
“The booklet gather biographic material and give a documentary dimension to the flow of micro-messages. In order to create one’s tweetbook, the author enter his or her Twitter ID on an vending machine and the book is automatically produce. The corresponding opus can also be sent by email (PDF) or printed on demand, as a sort of “express autobiography”“
Why do I blog this? An interesting experiment to turn digital material into a physical instantiation. Interestingly, there’s more than the tweets: tag and people indexes, basic stats and visualizations also reveal some information about your content production:
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