Category: Links

In depth article on the meaning of batto giri (drawing and cutting with a real sword) in Takeda Ryu Kobilza Ha.

Spool says iPhone is the best case for experience design so far. I think so too but worry it’ll be interpreted wrongly as another win on features.

First in a series of posts on the significance of Second Life. Part of a debate with Clay Shirky and Henry Jenkins.

Elaborate write-up by Alper on a way to make your social network portable between services using open standards and formats.

Interview with Matt Biddulph shining some light on where social travel service Dopplr is headed.

First post of Clay Shirky’s part in the debate on Second Life’s significance, mainly zeroing in on the false statistics (aren’t they always) behind the hype.

Descent piece on the current state of (US) location based services.

More CSS typography goodness, this time on incremental leading; the ‘next level’ after baseline grids.

Critique of Marinka Copiers thesis on the non-existence of a magic circle in massive multiplayer online games. I don’t agree with Marinka or Jörgen, I guess I should blog on that sometime soon.

Timo reports on NFC developments around the world. It’s coming fast! (Or actually, it’s already here.)

This seems to have stirred up quite a storm. Thought-provoking essay by Danah Boyd on the differences in audience of Facebook and MySpace.

Merholz’s angle on experience design: the starting point for a product should not be features.

First in a two part post with some useful pointers to things you should address when designing social sites.

Tight little article on CSS typography on a vertical grid. Gotta give this a try sometime.

“Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.”

Porter’s at his best when he just concisely describes stuff that’s happening in the social web field. I agree with him, this latest example of the Digg community’s out of control-ness is insane.

Hype-laden report of conference on virtual worlds. Perhaps the most noteworthy point is the call made for dramatic improvements in the user experience of these environments.

What does Porter mean by ‘works’? I don’t think the current implementations of befriending in social software work. Friendship is such a fluid thing (as Danah Boyd has pointed out in the past) that we need to move beyond simple binary categories.

Interview with fellow HKU graduates who are doing cool stuff out of their own small agency, mostly in experimental interfaces.

I’m reading too much Bokardo lately. This is Porter’s analysis of a New York Times piece on the effect of showing popularity scores for items on social web sites. Good to keep in mind when coming up with aggregate data views.

Useful model that outlines the distribution of people’s roles in value creation online. Perhaps the most important point Horowitz makes is that implicit ‘voting’ on cool content (like Flickr’s interestingness) is often much more effective.

Bleecker blows my mind with his sheer determination to create non-trivial, non-pragmatic critical objects. Inspiring.

Spool raves about field studies. I’m convinced they’re very useful but would love to see Jared name a few examples of “the most usable designs” that were created using “critical information” gleaned from field studies.

On-line backup solution for Mac and PC weighing in on $ 4,95 a month. Might come in handy when the Lacie lets up.

“Essentially, personas aren’t a method that you follow step by step and end up, automagically, with a reference-facsimile of your user. It’s really an emotional, almost theatrical leap that takes imagination and deliberate, focused empathy.”

“This is one of the genial intuitions of Alan Cooper. We do design for ourselves, so why don’t we create alternative personalities—the personas—that can expand our “ourselveness” to encompass new dimensions and reveal new perspectives?”

In-depth review of interesting book. Sadly, it ‘only’ covers information design of non-interactive dashboards. Non-essential but desirable addition to the library of an IxD I think.

“From your personas you can work out what functionality is included and what is the core functionality. Once you’ve got that information […] put them away and use your skill as a designer.”

Handy reference for the next time I’m doing some CSS typography.

Feel like tweaking you’re blog? Here are some good starting points.

“you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” Cool piece on the use of patterns in game design, with lots of examples.

Spore on a Nintendo DS Lite… sounds like gaming bliss.

Ho boy… can’t wait to give this puppy a try on my iBook. Panic continues to release cool stuff. The way they balance features with simplicity is inspiring.

Porter takes a look at The Economist’s piece on how social networking is becoming more popular than porn on the web. So we’re going from smut to chatter. Porter also predicts that the next step in social networking is subject specific sites.