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“Chocolate Castle is a tricky sliding block puzzle game. The object of each puzzle is to arrange blocks of chocolate into large connected regions so that they can then be consumed by a team of hungry animals.”
Author: Kars Alfrink
Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.
links for 2008-06-19
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Sent to me by Alexander: A very low key parkour video which makes it all the more powerful. No music, and including mistakes.
links for 2008-06-18
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Powazek’s new project with HP sounds great. Now to figure out what to publish…
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A collection of work by MA RCA Design Interactions students on the future of money. Some nice bits here (and well presented).
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A FabLab opening in Utrecht… Will have to check it out once I get back. Have a few ideas for toys I’d like to see fabbed.
links for 2008-06-17
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A write-up of a Will Wright talk that is quite different from what he has been speaking about in the past.
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James links to an almost animal-like BMW prototype car that has a flexible, adaptive skin. The wink at the end is downright creepy.
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“Using a billion points of GPS and WiFi positioning data from the last few years – plus real-time feeds – Citysense sees S.F. from above and puts the top live hotspots in your hand.”
links for 2008-06-16
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Played with this at FBTB and really liked it—four speakers with telephone receivers attached for “subtle interference etudes, to collaborative chanting and big, bad rhythm orgies”.
links for 2008-06-15
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A new IxD course in NYC. Seems to be focussed on screen based interactions.
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Interview with the author of a new book on Steve Jobs. Some more evidence in support of Bill Buxton’s claim that Apple is one of the few companies where *real* design is happening: a huge amount of elaboration and exploration up front.
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Anonymous reviews of and salary reports on companies. Interesting concept (and content).
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Huzzah! Interaction 09 has been announced and looks to be bigger and better. Had to miss the 1st edition, will make sure I won’t have to this time.
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A look at implementations of social interaction patterns in ARGs. “in ARGs where patterns such as ‘individual rewards’ and ‘social statuses’ have been invoked by developers, there has been player-created events that thwart, ignore or reverse them”
links for 2008-06-12
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I quite enjoyed this video of Joshua Klein explaining how he ‘hacks’ crows.
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This pamphlet by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard provides a good overview of urban computing and asks some much needed questions about where things are headed and how that may be influenced.
links for 2008-06-11
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“Within about 10 clicks, the system makes a guess at the user’s cognitive style and morphs to fit. “If we determine that you like lots of graphs, you’re going to start seeing lots of graphs,”
he says.“ -
I like this short but sweet talk by Johnson about the fight against cholera in Victorian London.
links for 2008-06-10
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Stephen P. Anderson was kind enough to mention me in his presentation about getting UI inspiration from ‘the edge’.⊘
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Shawn Allen of Stamen uses a visualization to debug a visualization.
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Have seen these in several presentations now—wonderful interactive maps allowing you to look at travel times and other variables in London. Wouldn’t mind a personal version of this for my own use.
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“Mail Trends lets you analyze and visualize your email”.
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“[…] an augmented Oyster Card (the RFID-enabled Underground ticket) holder which displays, over time, the journeys a rider has taken […]”
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“SenseWear WMS® enables automated monitoring of calories burned, dietary intake, duration of physical activity and sleep […] The SenseWear® platform is a marriage of three basic components – a wearable monitor, a personal feedback device and a website
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“The EyeTap is a name for a device that is worn in front of the eye that […] Acts as a camera to record the scene available to the eye, and […] Acts as a display to superimpose a computer-generated imagery on the original scene available to the eye.”
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“Sousveillance [is] the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity, typically by way of small portable or wearable recording devices that often stream continuous live video to the Internet.”
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“Find The Cameras is a social networking site at SUNY Purchase College to identify the locations of security cameras.”
Moving, speaking
It’s final days for me. In Copenhagen, that is. July 1 I will exchange this lovely city for my home town of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The plan is to continue work as a freelance interaction designer. So if you’re interested, but physical distance has been putting you off so far, get in touch.
Between now and then, most of my time will be spent at conferences. Here’s the rundown:
- First up is From Business to Buttons, June 12-13 in Malmö, Sweden. My talk is titled More Than Useful. I will attempt to show that for a certain class of products, playfulness is a vital characteristic. The idea is to introduce the IxD crowd to some game design concepts.
- The week after that I will be at the Festival of Games, June 18-20 in Utrecht, Netherlands. My presentation is titled Playing With Complexity. I will introduce the game design audience to some interaction design thinking and suggest data visualization might be an interesting area to team up on.
- Last but not least is good old Reboot, 26-27 June in Copenhagen. I have submitted a proposal titled Playful Activism in the Real-Time City, which I hope will be selected to be on the program.1
If you will be at any of these conferences, do drop me a line or say hello at the event itself.
- If you’d like to see it too, don’t hesitate to vote it up. [↩]