design, cities, physical & social interaction, play

Leapfroglog design, cities, physical & social interaction, play

Posts Tagged ‘toys’

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Toy-Like Nature of Social Media

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a while: I think a lot of social media are like toys. I think what we see with people (adults!) using them is a lot like the open-ended play we know from playground games in school. A lot of these games are about exploring (the possibilities [...]

Surprises in Animal Crossing: Wild World

So I’ve been playing AC: WW for over a weeks now and I must say it has lived up to my expectations. It’s a cute and quirky game that does not follow conventional game design rules. There is no way to die, no (real) way to loose or even win. In a sense it’s more [...]

Hyper Captain Gundam

Step 9 complete – Hyper Captain Gundam Originally uploaded by Kaeru.Yay! Vandaag lekker mijn Hyper Captain Model kit in elkaar gezet. Dikke pret. Een fotoverslag van de bouw vind je op Flickr.