design, cities, physical & social interaction, play

Leapfroglog design, cities, physical & social interaction, play

Posts Tagged ‘books’

Books I’ve Read in 2009

This is the last list I’ll be posting on stuff from 2009, I promise. After this it’s all about looking forward. I’ve been tracking my reading on aNobii for some time. Here’s a list of the books I’ve found particularly worthwhile, ordered chronologically. My three absolute favorites are marked in bold. Faith in Fakes, Umberto [...]

Jane Jacobs and London’s Old Street Area

I’ve been reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities at a leisurely pace since october or so. (A tempo that seems to suit the book fine. Jacobs makes me want to slow down and see.) I came across this passage during a session with the book this weekend and something about a recent [...]

What I’ve Been Up to Lately

You might be wondering what’s been going on at the Leapfrog studio lately, since I haven’t really posted anything substantial here in a while. Quite some stuff has happened — and I’ll hopefully get back into posting longer articles soon — but for now, here’s a list of more or less interesting things I have [...]

Playing With Emergence Is Like Gardening

It’s been a while since I finished reading Steven Berlin Johnson’s Emergence. I picked up the book because ever since I started thinking about what IxDs can learn from game design, the concept of emergence kept popping up. Johnson’s book is a pleasant read, an easy-going introduction to the subject. I started and finished it [...]

Chris Crawford on Design Suggestions

I have a considerable amount of books with dog-eared pages lying around the office. One such book is The Game Design Reader, which contains a large and varied collection of essays on (yes) game design. This book probably has the largest number of dog-ears. Partly because it is quite thick, but also because it is [...]

Sketching the Experience of Toys

“Play is the highest form of research.” —Albert Einstein1 That’s what I always say when I’m playing games, too. I really liked Bill Buxton‘s book Sketching User Experiences. I like it because Buxton defends design as a legitimate profession separate from other disciplines—such as engineering—while at the same time showing that designers (no matter how [...]

Second Order Design and Play in a Pattern Language

According to Molly, architects hate Christopher Alexander’s guts. Along with a lot of other interaction designers I happen to think his book A Pattern Language is a wonderful resource. It has some interesting things to say about designing for emergence—or second order design—and also contains some patterns related to play. So following the example of [...]

Spectra of Learnability

They gave us Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things1 to read in interaction design school. I remember reading it and—being young an cocky—finding it all very common sense and “Why do they ask us to read this stuff?” And so on.2 I am rereading it now, in the hopes of sharpening my argument for [...]

Notables in the Overlapping Area of Interaction and Game Design

With the Euro IA Summit soon approaching and my presentation more or less done, I think it might be a good time to post a list of people I’ve found inspiring while working on it. These are all persons who one way or the other are working in the overlapping area of interaction and game [...]

UX Designers Should Get Into Everyware

I’ve been reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware on and off and one of the things that it has me wondering the most lately is: are UX professionals making the move to design for ubiquitous computing? There’re several places in the book where he explicitly mentions UX in relation to everyware. Let’s have a look at the [...]

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