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Resources about systems thinking for designers.
Author: Kars Alfrink
Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.
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).
links for 2007-03-02
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Malcolm Gladwell uses the Enron case to illustrates the problems of information abundance and how problems nowadays are more often enigmas in stead of puzzles.
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“[…] the Last.fm guys mentioned Last.tv during their presentation at The Future of Web Apps.”
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A deck of PowerPoint slides that goes with Jyri Engeström’s Reboot 7 talk on object-centered sociality. Luckily includes some explanatory notes.
links for 2007-03-01
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A new way to style images using Flash and JavaScript while remaining accessible…
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Nieuwe minister van onderwijs Ronald Plasterk blijkt een Apple gebruiker te zijn (via Alper).
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Ah jeez, this panel sounds good. There’s still a small chance I might be going to the summit. If I do, this is one panel I’ll attend…
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A new tool for IxD’s and IA’s has launched. It’s a Visio add-on for creating flows, sitemaps, wireframes and such. Need to give this a try.
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Post by Gladwell on the way perceived difficulty can divide in- and outsiders.
Spatial metaphors in IA and game design
Looking at dominant metaphors in different design disciplines I’m in some way involved in, it’s obvious to me that most are spatial (no surprises there). Here’s some thoughts on how I think this is (or should be) changing. Information architecture tends to approach sites as information spaces (although the web 2.0 hype has brought us a few ‘new’ ones, on which more later.) I do a lot of IA work. I have done quite a bit of game design (and am re-entering that field as a teacher now.) Some of the designers in that field I admire the most (such as Molyneux and Wright) approach games from a more or less spatial standpoint too (and not a narrative perspective, like the vast majority do). I think it was Molyneux who said games are a series of interesting choices. Wright tends to call games ‘possibility spaces’, where a player can explore a number of different solutions to a problem, more than one of which can be viable.
I don’t think I’m going anywhere in particular here, but when looking at IA again, as I just said, the field is currently coming to terms with new ways of looking at the web and web sites; the web as a network, web as platform, the web of data, and so on. Some of these might benefit from a more procedural, i.e. game design-like, stance. I seem to remember Jesse James Garrett giving quite some attention to what he calls ‘algorithmic architecture’ (using Amazon as an example) where the IA is actually creating something akin to a possibility space for the user to explore.
Perhaps when we see more cross-pollination between game design and information architecture and interaction design for the web, we’ll end up with more and more sites that are not only more like desktop applications (the promise of RIA’s) but also more like games. Wouldn’t that be fun and interesting?
links for 2007-02-28
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Jason Echols describes nightly restlessness I have quite often. The only cure is indeed turning on the light en jotting down what’s dancing around my brain.
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Saffer read a preview copy of a new book on mobile UX design and finds it lacking. I guess I’ll stick with the heavier mobile IxD book.
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Comparison of tagging on Amazon and LibraryThing. Includes some great analysis of why tagging only works when there’s a ‘selfish’ motivation for users to do so. Great stuff.