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Not safe for work, but pretty interesting: an interview with the guy / girl who set up a museum in SL exhibiting screenshots of avatar’s privates.
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Joshua Porter points out that a lot of stuff that’s known under the name of web design is actually more like web development. Designing for the web should be about designing for end-users not (like development) about solving technical problems.
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Colleague Peter contemplates on what happens when you add process attributes to patterns. This could potentially be a very powerful way of doing bottom-up planning.
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A first look at the future internet of things. Questions the prevaling optimism around the new sociality between objects and humans. Good even handed criticism.
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About the educational value of games: “[V]ideo games are [not] good teachers, but […] playing good video games is often good learning”. Also contains some interesting thoughts on games being at the fore front of IxD.
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Dan Brown describes how he went about changing a company’s attitude towards content management and a new CMS. Short but sweet, nice and practical.
Month: September 2006
I’m a European IA
Tomorrow I’m off to the 2nd European IA Summit. This year’s conference will be held in Berlin. That’s great because I’ve never been there until now. I’m planning on doing some mind mapping of talks (inspired by Lars Plougmann) so keep an eye on the Flickr photostream during the weekend. Of course, I hope the organization has managed to get some open WiFi going (last year that was a bit of a problem). Convenient power sockets would come in handy too… See you there, or see you later!
links for 2006-09-27
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Almar van der Krogt asks in what ways we can allow users to change the space of a site, similar to sliding doors in Japanses houses.
links for 2006-09-22
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Een kort verslag van de HKU fac. KMT eindexamenexpo. Ik kon er niet bij zijn, wat me spijt als ik deze interessante projecten zie. Volgend jaar beter. Via Iskander.
links for 2006-09-15
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Overview of the Dutch Game Days’ conference. Some content is sloppily produced but it still looks promising, I might attend.
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Glowing review of Dan Saffers book in interaction design. Regardless, the book comes accross as too broad and shallow for my tastes.
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In depth and critical review of Saffer’s book on IxD. The reviewer has clearly read the book from cover to cover and gives some even handed criticism.
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Impressive photoseries by urban explorers. Lots of deserted building and industrial chique goodness here. Via Bart.
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Another co-created marketing experience. This time it’s Mini that seems to be getting it right. Via Peter.
Finito
Just now I finally finished tagging the last few photos taken in Venice. The whole set of Lieke’s and my vacation in Italy is now online. Total number of photos we ended up selecting is a whopping 411. You can start at the first new one since the previous update over here.
Plenty of pretty shots in this update, my favourite is probably this one:
Enjoy!
K-141 АПЛ Курск
Sometimes you learn something strange while tagging vacation shots. At least that was the case with this photo I took in Venice:
Looking for some proper tags I Googled “K-141” and found a Wikipedia article on the Russian submarine Kursk. I pulled out the proper Russian text to use as tags but was puzzled about the reason behind the stencil.
I decided to let my direct colleagues in on the mystery and mailed it around at the office. Soon after, Peter pointed out that the same stencil art was blogged at zombizi zero-six and Wooster Collective.
Quite entertaining, but it gets even weirder. He pointed out this link, which apparently proves the stencil spree was part of Russia’s presence at the 51st Venice Biennale…
Bart rightly pointed out that it’s strange they didn’t get caught doing it. I mean: wouldn’t it be easy for the police to hold the Russians at the Biennale responsible for this blatant act of “vandalism”?
Anyway. You learn something new every day, don’t you?
Where are the good European IxD schools?
Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path wrote an introductory piece for budding interaction designers. Five years ago, Robert Reimann of Cooper did the same. Both are nice overviews for novices and especially the parts on a designer’s temperament are entertaining to read.
Saffer fails to mention any good IxD schools outside of the US and UK. Which is a shame for all of us European designers. Reimann mentioned Ivrea’s now defunct IxD institute.
I’d like to start by pointing to my courageous little country’s Utrecht School of Arts, which has been teaching IxD for 15 years now (!) and today offers both BA and MA programs. They’ve recently branched off into game design, which has been quite successful.
Full disclosure: I was a student at the same school from 1998 – 2001 (BA IxD, MA Game Design) and am now teaching a course in mobile game design.
Any other good IxD schools in Europe that you know of?
Update: discussions on Saffer’s post on the IxDA’s maling list here and here; overview of IxD education (mostly in the US) here.
eDay preview (open.info.nl)
“Nederlandse online marketing lijkt steeds meer open source marketing te worden. Lezend online en werkend in meatspace kom ik steeds meer marketeers tegen die de idealen van de open source beweging (al dan niet bewust) omarmen. Dat maakt deze open standaarden aanhanger blij natuurlijk.
Info.nl staat volgende week met een stand en een workshop op eDay. Hoe zit het met dit marketingevenement? In hoeverre onderschrijft het de ontwikkeling naar open source marketing? eDay werpt een blik op de trends “voor de komende twee jaar” en belicht het thema ‘creativiteit’ als “strategisch bedrijfsinstrument” en “consumer trend”.”
links for 2006-09-07
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Great example of co-creation at work in financial services. This post describes Garanti Bank’s Flexi Cards, which aren’t just visually customizable; the underlying services can be tweaked by the customer’s heart’s content too. Via Iskander.
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Heathcote argues for the allowance of multiple accounts or devices per user in online services. Makes some good points on how people use these to say something about the context of their content or identity.