Just received an email from Thomas that the next Reboot is here. Release 9.0 is themed human? and promises to be another inspiring event. They have a new website up (running on the Dutch anyMeta) where I just added my profile. If you consider yourself a practical visionary and love the internet — make sure you’re there!
Month: March 2007
links for 2007-03-15
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Gah! This is the first time Flickr introduces a feature I don’t like. Collections that can be nested up to 5 levels deep… An IxD’s nightmare — haven’t they ever heard of file piles being superior to hierarchies?
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Another Spore video! This one has Will Wright talking you through the game. It was taped at SXSW.
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A news item on how at the GDC it was obvious game designers & developers are paying close attention to the social software revolution taking place on the web.
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“There’s nothing stopping us from conceiving of games and from having exercises like the game design challenge,” — well maybe there is: brash commercialism.
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Er is volgens mij geen verband tussen de opkomst van web 2.0 en UX, het lagen van usability, UCD en UX vind ik onlogisch, UX is niet hetzelfde als XD, Morville’s honingraat wordt verkeerd uitgelegd en UX moet wél het doel zijn van ieder project!
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Alexandra remains aggravated by RCA’s move to rename its IxD course to Design Interactions. I prefer having a narrow, exact definition of IxD (to prevent the IA effect) but at the same time want to be able to branch out into a wide range of areas.
links for 2007-03-13
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Stowe Boyd agrees with Ross Mayfield that Twitter is “going nuts”. I’m not sure I like Twitter, I feel it’s too disruptive/intrusive. At the moment, I prefer Jaiku.
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A whole bunch of videos of the upcoming Spore. Every clip I see continues to amaze me. Progress is still being made, but the richness of the game can be clearly seen here. Great stuff.
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Molyneux proves he’s one of the top game designers again with his work on Fable 2. Evoking new, real emotions never felt before in games.
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O’Reilly discusses a new semantic web initiative, this one crossing wiki principles with a relational database. It’s a cool tech demo but the question remains if people are willing to invest time in keeping it up to date.
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Some nice pointers for bloggers and would-be bloggers. Took away some useful stuff such as the greatest hits list.
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Over hoe Randstad energie steekt in een uitzendbureau in 2nd Life. Voorbeeld van hoe het ook kan: als bedrijf daadwerkelijk de interactie met de virtuele wereld opzoeken en waarde toevoegen in de wereld.
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Twitter seems to be reaching critical mass. Mayfield takes a look at some of the unique properties of Twitter and other mobile social software.
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A recap of GDC on the virtual worlds blog Terra Nova. They’ve noticed Sony’s assault on Second Life too…
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Another look at Freebase, Ziade has it right when he says: “the crux of it, […] is usability. For something to take off, it must provide some sort of immediate, conceivable value to the masses upon touching it.”
links for 2007-03-12
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A movie of Sony’s new virtual world for PS3 players. Echoes of Second Life here; the demo leaves me wondering what the added value is of a virtual world that mimics the real one so accurately it becomes boring… Via Jacco.
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First part of a two part demo video that shows how an expertly simulated do in the game Fable 2 can evoke real emotions in a player. Great stuff! Via Jacco.
links for 2007-03-11
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Resources about systems thinking for designers.
links for 2007-03-10
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Playable version of flOw, a game consciously designed to induce, well, flow. It features adaptive difficulty levels and is coming to the PS3.
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“gSyncit for Microsoft Outlook keeps Microsoft Outlook and your Google calendar in-sync.”
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Some very useful guidelines for designing location aware applications.
Harmonious interfaces, martial arts and flow states
There’s been a few posts from the UX community in the recent past on flow states (most notably at 37signals’s Signal vs. Noise). This got me thinking about my own experiences of flow and what this tells me about how flow states could be induced with interfaces.
A common example of flow states is when playing a game (the player forgets she is pushing buttons on a game pad and is only mindful of the action at hand). I’ve experienced flow while painting but also when doing work on a PC (even when creating wireframes in Visio!) However, the most interesting flow experiences were while practising martial arts.
The interesting bit is that the flow happens when performing techniques in partner exercises or even fighting matches. These are all situations where the ‘system’ consists of two people, not one person and a medium mediated by an interface (if you’re willing to call a paint brush an interface that is).
To reach a state of flow in martial arts you need to stop thinking about performing the technique while performing it, but in stead be mindful of the effect on your partner and try to visualize your own movements accordingly. When flow happens, I’m actually able to ‘see’ a technique as one single image before starting it and while performing it I’m only aware of the whole system, not just myself.
Now here’s the beef. When you try to translate this to interface design, it’s clear that there’s no easy way to induce flow. The obvious approach, to create a ‘disappearing’ interface that is unobtrusive, minimal, etc. is not enough (it could even be harmful). In stead I’d like to suggest you need to make your game, software or site behave more like a martial arts fighter. It needs to push or give way according to the actions of it’s partner. You really need to approach the whole thing as an interconnected system where forces flow back and forth. Flow will happen in the user when he or she can work in a harmonious way. Usually this requires a huge amount of mental model adaptation on the user’s part… When will we create appliances that can infer the intentions of the user and change their stance accordingly? I’m not talking about AI here, but what I would like to see is stuff more along the lines of flOw.
links for 2007-03-09
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Saffer bemoans the level of current design school students. The can think, but they can’t make or do. Is Dan getting old, or are US design schools indeed loosing their way?
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Nicolas Nova’s notes on Geoware (a locative media conference). Most noteworthy is the claim that location should be more implicit in stead of explicit.
links for 2007-03-06
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Collega Iskander reviewt TV-killer Joost en komt tot de conclusie dat het technisch allemaal wel kosjer is, maar vooral nog aan wat virtuele warmte ontbreekt.
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Alper says goodbye to Twitter and joins Jaiku. Welcome!
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This great piece by Jones almost reads like a manifesto (or at least, I’d like it to be). Lots of good stuff here on hackers, playgrounds/sandboxes, gaming, flow and urban environments. Lots of parallels to my own fascinations!
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Dimon claims to be on the brink of discovering the holy grail of interface design documentation.
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Porter warns against using IA as an approach to design because it focusses on information not activities. I agree design should focus on user goals, I don’t agree this is why IA is dying. I think that as an UX design activity it will remain valuable.
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Elaborate description of the Generation C trend that involves Content, Creativity, Casual Collapse, Control, and Celebrity. Basically people massively creating arts and crafts using cheap and abundantly available tools.
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O’Reilly points to Threadless.com as an other example of generation c creating and producing products on their own terms. For what? Mainly reputation it seems.
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“Een bundel met daarin meer dan 30 bijdragen met het thema ‘horror’ van de meest afschuwwekkende tekenaars en enkele zieke, zieke schrijvers.” Hell yea! Via Edgar.
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Een borrel voor web 2.0 freaks in Den Haag… waarom was ik daar niet bij?! Een volgende borrel zal ik eens kijken of ik langs kan droppen.
links for 2007-03-03
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Simon Oliver discusses a presentation by Brian Eno and Will Wright on generative content. Really should take a look at this (it’s not clear what the long now angle is on this talk, though.)
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Gruber digs into a bunch of replies to Steve Jobs anti-DRM piece and comes across as Jobs’s personal blogging bodyguard. Some good points on DRM and the music industry here, though.
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Land in Second Life in de vorm van Nederland, schijnbaar neergekwakt door ING. Wanneer houdt die onzinnige Second Life hype eens op?
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Cool typographical animation using some dialogue of one of my favourite films.
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Useful resource for WordPress users looking for a new theme. Instantly try out themes and filter them on a number of features.
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Old set of notes on Rashmi Sinha’s talk at the 2006 IA Summit on social information architecture.
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Classic short film demonstrating similarities between inner and outer space. Had to look this up for a post I’m writing on Spore because it inspired Will Wright to design that game. Google must’ve been looking at it when creating Google Earth!
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Some weird research done by the UK’s MOD on remote viewing. The PDFs are a treat to browse (despite the huge amounts of blacked out material).