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Bill Buxton corrects and adds to the history of touch screens as presented in Dan Saffer’s book. Some interesting bits on the iPhone’s precursor Simon here. We need more interaction design historians.
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“…an obsession with the new and original, without a deep literacy and appreciation for the past, leads to a path of missed opportunities.” Buxton comparing the Vanity Kodak with the iPod Mini.
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“Barcode Beats is a system that converts barcodes into music through an interpretation of the numbers on the barcodes.” Jonas Löwgren, — professor at K3 in Malmö — told me about this project. It was done as part of the master of interaction design. I really like the fact that this is a tool, it leaves meaning-making to the users. It is playful and encourages creative action.
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Interesting post by Dan on foundational concepts for a multi-touch OS. I’m surprised there’s nothing related to collaborative work on one screen, which I would say is a prime opportunity for this type of system.
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“RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500).” Saw this at the fablab in Utrecht today. What a crazy idea, imagine how disruptive this will be once it hits the main stream?
Author: Kars Alfrink
Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.
links for 2008-12-16
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(Dutch) Verslag van een brainstorm die ik als expert heb bijgewoond en waarvoor ik één van de casussen mede heb opgesteld.
What I’ve been up to lately
You might be wondering what’s been going on at the Leapfrog studio lately, since I haven’t really posted anything substantial here in a while. Quite some stuff has happened — and I’ll hopefully get back into posting longer articles soon — but for now, here’s a list of more or less interesting things I have been doing:
This happened – Utrecht
We had our first This happened – Utrecht on November 3. I think we succeeded in creating an event that really looks at the craft of interaction design. I’m happy to say we’re planning to do three events next year — all at Theater Kikker in Utrecht — and we’ve got lots of cool speakers in mind. If you want to make sure you won’t miss them, subscribe to our newsletter (in Dutch).1
Teaching
My students are nearing the end of their project. They’ve been hard at work creating concepts for mobile social games with a musical component; they came up with 20 in total. Now they’re prototyping two of them, and I must say it’s looking good. They’ll have to present the games to the project’s commissioner — a major mobile phone manufacturer — somewhere the beginning of January 2009. I hope to be able to share some of the results here afterwards.
Office space
Since December 1 I am a resident of the Dutch Game Garden’s Business Club. That means I now have a nice office smack in the centre of Utrecht. The building’s home to lots of wonderful games companies, some, like me, operating on the fringes — like FourceLabs and Monobanda. If you’re curious and would like to drop by for a tour, a coffee and some conversation, let me know.
Brainstorm
I was invited do help compose one of the cases for the ‘Grote Amsterdamse Waterbrainwave’. A one-day brainstorm in which 45 students from various institutions were asked to come up with water-related innovations that would make the Netherlands a significant global player once again. It was organised by the Port of Amsterdam, Waternet and Verleden van Nederland2. I also attended the day itself as an outside expert on games and the creative industry in general. Read a report of the event at FD.nl (in Dutch).
Book
Dan Saffer’s book Designing Gestural Interfaces has been published by O’Reilly and is now available. Turn to page 109 and you’ll find a storyboard by yours truly used for illustration purposes. That’s the first time any work of mine is featured in print, so naturally I’m quite proud. I have yet to receive my copy, but got a sneak peek this weekend and I must say it looks promising. If you’re a designer needing to get up to speed with multi-touch, physical computing and such, this should be a good place to start.
That’s about it for now. There’s a lot of exciting stuff in the works, the outcomes of which I will hopefully be able to share with you in 2009.
- The creators of This happened in London have been nominated for a best of the year award by the Design Museum, by the way. Well-deserved, I would say! [↩]
- A cross-media campaign aimed at increasing awareness of Dutch national history. [↩]
links for 2008-12-12
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“Based on events like EIGF, this seems to be the case, at least amongst Molyneux’s generation of industry veterans. Bedroom-programmers-done-good, pioneers to be sure, but not able to form a critical appreciation of what they are doing or have done beyond the commercial impact.” Very similar to my experience attending Molyneux’s session at this year’s GDC. Underwhelming.
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My friends at User Intelligence, with the help of a worldwide network of UX consultancies, evaluated parking meter usability around the globe. Turns out the ones in Amsterdam are the worst offenders (and charge the highest fares). Hmmm…
links for 2008-12-11
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Another Jonathan Harris piece. This one features lush 3D graphics and touch interactions.
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“Coup is a moderately multiplayer game of high chivalry, quarreling aristocracy, and gruesome backstabbing.” On of the games developed as part of IPerG.
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The latest game by Daniel Benmergul is experimental indeed. It’s particularly interesting to compare this game with previous efforts and see how mechanics have evolved and have been combined. True craftsmanship.
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Simon Oliver’s upcoming game for the iPhone and iPod Touch looks like one of the first titles to fully exploit the capabilities of the platform. High production values as well.
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A newspaper piece on personal informatics. Huh. I guess this has hit the mainstream.
links for 2008-12-10
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Koster muses on Taleb’s concept of the ludic fallacy. He worries that games are not preparing people to deal with black swans. This needs to change, if games are to become teaching tools. “Rather than just bemoan this, I’ll instead issue the challenge: what is the fun game that features black swans, phase transitions, and the catastrophic 100-year flood? How do you sculpt a system that does this without chasing away the newbies?”
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Winner of the EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards 2008. Nice to see a multi touch application that does not cater to geeks or the jet set. Certainly an impressive effort considering this is a student project.
links for 2008-12-09
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“StillAliveDS is a puzzle game inspired by Portal: The Flash Version which is a 2D renewal of Portal, developed by Valve Corporation.” Need to play this. I like the fact that it includes a map editor.
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“I really like the idea of the popular mini game Crayon Physics: You draw an object on the screen and it instantly becomes physical and interacts with other objects. The first thing that sprung to my mind when seeing it was “This would be awesome on the DS!” And Pocket Physics is what I came up with after two weeks.” On my flash cart now. Awesome.
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“It puts arrival information for all the stops near me on one page, and puts the emphasis on when I need to leave the house to catch a train. It tells me whether I need to get going right now, or whether I have 5 minutes to play with my kid before leaving.” This is lovely, because besides being something developed to scratch an itch, it is well designed too.
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“most public objects – and certainly all municipal objects – should offer APIs” Amen to that. It would have made the making of my travel time map of NL much easier, for one.
links for 2008-12-04
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“So we hereby present the outcomes of an exiting day with 23 people who crunched their brain on the subject of “Adding value to commodities“.” Results from the 1st Service Design Conference. More workshops should share their outcomes like this.
links for 2008-12-03
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Drawing hands is a bitch indeed. I prefer to do it myself, but for those who prefer ready-made ones, here’s a stencil you can use to visualize multi-touch interactions.
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Habitat was one of the first (if not THE first) virtual world. I never knew they did an actual promotional video, but they did. This is from 1986. Awesome.
links for 2008-12-02
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A physical computing project from 2005. “Create a composition by laying out the boxes. Make some different shapes and press play on a box to see how your composition sounds. Now pick up one of the boxes and move it to change your piece of music as its playing!” I imagine this would be so much easier to build nowadays with stuff like Arduino.
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An interesting indie game made in Flash that combines physics based mechanics with music loops, resulting in a pleasant aesthetic experience. Via Tom.
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My friends at Netlife Research have outdone themselves with this crazy plan: an UX conference in the Arctic, where designers get to tackle a big problem.
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Ton’s started a blog to keep track of his foray into the world of networked objects.
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Old, but never got around to bookmarking this. A slightly silly service that allows you to keep track of stuff and display the data in a dashboard-like fashion.
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The devil is in the details. An extremely well-crafted online story by Jonathan Harris.
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A library that makes it easy to get Adobe Kuler palettes into Processing. Might come in handy some time.
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“Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.” Ugly, but interesting.