Category: Links

My friends at CIID are organizing a cool event: “A 2-day symposium bringing together some of the most talented pioneers and practitioners of service design from all around the world.”

“Aviary is a suite of web-based applications (RIAs) for people who create. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for artists of all genres.”

“Soundsnap is the best platform to find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s.”

“Surely […] if it was Yahoo who was the dominant player, we would be regularly extolling the virtues of [their] design expertise.”

“Pressing the button makes the kodo move in the direction it is facing. If a Kodo is left standing still for a short while, it will automatically rotate to a new direction. This allows many players to play simultaneously on a single phone.”

Peter Bogaards links to a nice piece by Buxton about how he got started in ‘HCI’.

“The 4 Fun Keys create games’ four most important emotions: 1. Hard Fun: Fiero – in the moment personal triumph over adversity 2. Easy Fun: Curiosity 3. Serious Fun: Relaxation and excitement 4. People Fun: Amusement”

A guy gets his laptop confiscated by Danish police: ‘We traced the transaction back to the wireless network in this apartment.’ ‘But we have an open wireless connection. It’s unsecured.’ ‘The internet doesn’t work that way.’ ‘What? Wait. What?’

“[A] new theme for [Wordpress]: Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter.”

“How is life offline? Logout and do stuff in the real world for once. Tell us about it. Repeats on the first friday each month, or whenever you feel like it.” Wonderful idea. I’ve been doing this for a while now every other weekend or so.

1st in a 4-part series of reviews by Saffer of a book I will have to read. The descriptions of how practitioners frame problems and their own practice feel very familiar. I myself seem to be struggling with at least 2 frames: interaction and game design.

I was too lazy to listen to this interview with Thackara earlier but honestly it’s just 10 mins and well worth it. “Designers feel a weight of responsibility becasue they suffer from delusions of grandeur…” Via Alexandra and Jeff Howard.

A site archiving lots and lots of documentation from Atari’s history. Recent additions include a 60 page memo on Centipede. Wonderful, wonderful stuff well worth a look for interaction designers

“You are a deer. So are the other players. You meet each other in an endless forest on the internet. The setting is idyllic, the atmosphere peaceful. You communicate with one another through sounds and body language.”

Webb might not see himself as a designer but this is required viewing/reading for designers as far as I’m concerned. Lots of goodness here but I’ll pick 1 thing: The motivations flowchart are interesting and remind me of the skill chains from game design.

“Snap is a simple human interface to common actions, on a website or desktop application.” Smart interaction pattern thought up bu Webb and prototyped by Armitage.

Tom Armitage shares his side of the story about Snap (“Syndicated Next Action Pattern”) for which he built a prototype application called Dentrassi: “A simple, hacky approach that exists beats any amount of RFC-drafting and hypothesising.”

“What happens when inventive people hack and play with limited technological ingredients to make best with what they have?” My friend Joshua is speaking at ETech on his experiences working in Cuba. If you’re attending, check him out.

My friend Jane has published a whitepaper on “[w]hy exchanging (immaterial) gifts will enhance productivity, innovation, and loyalty in organizations”. Guaranteed to be good reading.

A book by the Adaptive Path people. Looking forward to this: “The true success of experience design isn’t how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when things start going wrong.”

“[W]e propose and curate […] a collection of personal videos that adhere to the following principles: No zoom, No edit, No effects, 60 seconds max., Fixed camera, No audio.” Via Asbjørn.

Apparently these people make really nice notebooks. Via Ben Hammersley.

A silly conversation about the meaning of “nerd” and “geek” results in some interesting links. Who said microblogging was useless?

Now that I know what a kotatsu is, I want one. The photo in this post of the guy working at one fills me with envy.

“The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.” Fun.

“In the coming decade, many businesses will achieve their greatest breakthroughs by playing games—specifically, alternate reality games, or ARGs.” Bold clame. The article this is part of seems chockfull of such mildly wacky but interesting ideas. Via Zb

Needless use of Flash in this site, but under “Potential” there’s an elegant visualization of the different places (multi)touch screens can be integrated.

“I find Skate exciting because it’s a prime example of a game that understands Generation C; it allows players to share game-information outside the game – and in a manner that is so much more easily referenced, due to it having a permanent link […].”

Lots of design of playgrounds, skateparks, etc.

“Ludic fallacy is a term coined by the philosopher of knowledge Nassim Taleb […] summarized as “the misuse of games to model real-life situations”. Taleb characterizes the fallacy as mistaking the map (model) for the reality[…].”

“[A viral loop is] [t]he steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users”. Via Webb.

Who will be the virtual graffiti cleaners once we all live in a Virtual Light world? Via the Roomware peeps.

“Maybe I love IA for the same reason I loved creating ‘dungeons’ as a kid playing D&D?” Glad to see I’m not the only UX person infected with the possibility space virus.