-
Ik heb Luis gisteren zien spreken op de HAN. Was vermakelijk en leverde wel wat interessante ideeën op voor feedback loops in algoritmisch opgebouwde sites. Daar volgt nog een post over.
-
“At Nokia, we have an internal market for ideas. There could be someone in Nokia who wants research, and they will come to us.” — That’s a cool environment for a user researcher to work in, I think.
-
“The prevalence of social networks and community sites is eroding our ability to keep ourselves to ourselves. In order to ‘take part’ you need to give a lot away and if you don’t play you could be conspicuous by your absence.”
-
Notes by Joshua Kauffman on Matt Biddulph’s talk about the internet of things; building bacteria in 2nd Life and using Arduino as a rapid prototyping tool for tangible computing.
Author: Kars Alfrink
Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.
Packing for the IA Summit
Just firing off a quick post while packing for the IA Summit. Tomorrow morning I’m taking off on my flight to Vegas. For anyone curious about my doings while in the states, your best bet is Jaiku1. SMS-ing the occasional update should be affordable and won’t take too much time. No live blogging I’m afraid, I will be taking plenty of notes2 and promise to do a proper write-up when back.
1. Although all the crazy Americans are hooked on Twitter like an addict on crack, so to keep up with what’s going on there I’ll need to switch between two presence apps. Grumble.
2. A fresh squared Moleskine pocket notebook is ready for action.
links for 2007-03-21
-
A nice review of a new scientific paper management tool developed for Mac OS X by two Dutchmen and poised to win some awards.
-
Fun short interview with the guru of flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He points to some interesting ways web sites can be improved to induce flow (guiding users and giving more feedback amongst them.)
-
Excellent post by Kathy Sierra summing up three important reasons Twitter (and other rich presence services requiring continuous partial attention) might be harmful. These services certainly challenge the ability of the user to *focus*.
Albert Heijn RFID epiphany
I was standing in line at the local Albert Heijn1 the other day and had a futurist’s ‘epiphany’. I had three items in my basket. The couple in front of me had a shopping cart full of stuff. I had an empty stomach and was tired from a long day’s work. They were taking their time placing their items on the short conveyor belt. The cashier took her time scanning each individual item. The couple had a lot of stuff and only a few bags to put their stuff in. Did I mention this was taking a looong time?
I wasn’t being impatient though, I used the time to let my thoughts wander. For some reason my associative brain became occupied with RFID. Many of the items in the Albert Heijn shelves have RFID tags in them already. They use those to track inventory. Soon, all of the items will be tagged with these chips. That’ll make it easy to restock stuff. But it occurred to me that it might make the situation I was in at that moment (standing there waiting for a large amount of items to be moved from a cart, scanned and packed in bags to be placed back in the cart again) history.
Imagine driving your overflowing shopping cart through a stall and having all the items read simultaneously. If you’d wanted to get rid of the friendly cashier you could put automatic gates on the cash register and have them open once all items were paid for (by old-fashioned debit or credit card or newfangled RFID enabled payment token). Walk up to the gate, swipe your token past a reader and have the gate open, no matter how many items you have with you.
No more checking the receipt for items that were mistakenly scanned twice (or not scanned at all, if you’re that honest). No more waiting for people with too many stuff in their cart that they don’t really need. And no more underpaid pubescent cashiers to ruin your day with their bad manners!
Actually, would that ever happen? It would take a large amount of trust from everyone involved. There is a lot of trust implicitly involved in the whole exchange. Handing your stuff one after the other to an actual human being and having that person scan them is a very physical, tangible way to get a sense of what you’re paying for, and that you’re getting your money’s worth. With completely automated RFID-enabled shopping, that would be lost.
It’s a banal, pedestrian and simple example of how this stuff could change your everyday life, I know, but something to think about, nonetheless.
1. Albert Heijn is the largest super market chain in the Netherlands.
links for 2007-03-20
-
“However, market research, no matter how thorough, can never substitute for front-end user research, and we need to make the distinction clear to our clients and articulate the value of both.”
-
“Interaction Design grew out of the meeting of digital and cultural worlds and the need to make computers more useable, it will be interesting to see what other forms of design will emerge over the coming years.”
-
“At CERN they developed an open system that passed power to its users as not to preclude innovation. […] we don’t know what will be created next week, next month or next year because we can’t see the ‘Issues’ that need to be resolved […]”
-
Saffer thinks Twitter’s bad because it encourages antisocial behaviour and ugly because it doesn’t allow you to determine how much you want to read about your contacts. The last is nicely implemented on Jaiku.
-
Merholz prefers his personas without user typology because it decreases the ability of the reader to have empathy for them.
IA Summit 2007 — one week to go
While we’re on the topic of attending events: I’m lucky enough to attend this year’s IA Summit. It’s all the way in Las Vegas (a long flight from my humble country) so there’ll be plenty of jet lag to cope with. Also it’s just the conference for me, no time to attend the pre-conference workshops (which is a shame really, because there’s plenty of interesting stuff). Regardless, I’m looking forward to experiencing the mothership conference after two years of being at the Euro IA Summit and meeting lots of new interesting people. Perhaps I’ll see you there?
Reboot 9.0 is here
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!
links for 2007-03-15
-
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?
-
Another Spore video! This one has Will Wright talking you through the game. It was taped at SXSW.
-
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.
-
“There’s nothing stopping us from conceiving of games and from having exercises like the game design challenge,” — well maybe there is: brash commercialism.
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Some nice pointers for bloggers and would-be bloggers. Took away some useful stuff such as the greatest hits list.
-
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.
-
Twitter seems to be reaching critical mass. Mayfield takes a look at some of the unique properties of Twitter and other mobile social software.
-
A recap of GDC on the virtual worlds blog Terra Nova. They’ve noticed Sony’s assault on Second Life too…
-
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
-
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.
-
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.