Category: Links

I agree with Merholz that doing a maximum of one IxD project at a time is ideal. Sadly this is hardly ever feasible in these busy times.

Interesting-looking seminar that Dan Saffer will be delivering in Malmö on play, gaming and IxD. Would love to see the proceedings from this.

Morville points to a folksonomic faceted search and browsing site. Gotta check it out, ’cause I’m designing one too…

Lovely piece of ambient technology designed by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino that aims to keep you in touch with loved ones remotely.

Merholz reviews his statement that IA is sleeping. He wasn’t impressed with the summit’s content, but did get the idea that the field is in a state of transition. What are the new interesting problems to solve?

The blogosphere is abuzz with news of the threats against one of my favourite bloggers: Sierra. What’s happened to her is horrible, the question is how to go about handling these things in future without violating some of the Internet’s first principles.

An old post by Bill Scott on a possible way of categorising patterns.

Merholz bemoans the cancellation of an IA Summit workshop on ethnographic methods and IxD and wonders whether this is a sign of the IA community becoming insular and closed-minded.

First of 2 posts by Heathcote on service design has him raving about serendipitous sites like Upcoming.org and Twitter as well as the new Dopplr. I just wonder: where does he get the time to actively use all these services?

Frank Meeuwsen introduceert Frankwatchend Nederland tot de wondere wereld van Getting Things Done. Hoog tijd, degelijk overzicht, beetje jammer dat hij wél linkt naar zijn eigen WTNA en niet naar 43folders…

Ik heb Luis gisteren zien spreken op de HAN. Was vermakelijk en leverde wel wat interessante ideeën op voor feedback loops in algoritmisch opgebouwde sites. Daar volgt nog een post over.

“At Nokia, we have an internal market for ideas. There could be someone in Nokia who wants research, and they will come to us.” — That’s a cool environment for a user researcher to work in, I think.

“The prevalence of social networks and community sites is eroding our ability to keep ourselves to ourselves. In order to ‘take part’ you need to give a lot away and if you don’t play you could be conspicuous by your absence.”

Notes by Joshua Kauffman on Matt Biddulph’s talk about the internet of things; building bacteria in 2nd Life and using Arduino as a rapid prototyping tool for tangible computing.

A nice review of a new scientific paper management tool developed for Mac OS X by two Dutchmen and poised to win some awards.

Fun short interview with the guru of flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He points to some interesting ways web sites can be improved to induce flow (guiding users and giving more feedback amongst them.)

Excellent post by Kathy Sierra summing up three important reasons Twitter (and other rich presence services requiring continuous partial attention) might be harmful. These services certainly challenge the ability of the user to *focus*.

“However, market research, no matter how thorough, can never substitute for front-end user research, and we need to make the distinction clear to our clients and articulate the value of both.”

“Interaction Design grew out of the meeting of digital and cultural worlds and the need to make computers more useable, it will be interesting to see what other forms of design will emerge over the coming years.”

“At CERN they developed an open system that passed power to its users as not to preclude innovation. […] we don’t know what will be created next week, next month or next year because we can’t see the ‘Issues’ that need to be resolved […]”

Saffer thinks Twitter’s bad because it encourages antisocial behaviour and ugly because it doesn’t allow you to determine how much you want to read about your contacts. The last is nicely implemented on Jaiku.

Merholz prefers his personas without user typology because it decreases the ability of the reader to have empathy for them.

Gah! This is the first time Flickr introduces a feature I don’t like. Collections that can be nested up to 5 levels deep… An IxD’s nightmare – haven’t they ever heard of file piles being superior to hierarchies?

Another Spore video! This one has Will Wright talking you through the game. It was taped at SXSW.

A news item on how at the GDC it was obvious game designers & developers are paying close attention to the social software revolution taking place on the web.

“There’s nothing stopping us from conceiving of games and from having exercises like the game design challenge,” — well maybe there is: brash commercialism.

Er is volgens mij geen verband tussen de opkomst van web 2.0 en UX, het lagen van usability, UCD en UX vind ik onlogisch, UX is niet hetzelfde als XD, Morville’s honingraat wordt verkeerd uitgelegd en UX moet wél het doel zijn van ieder project!

Alexandra remains aggravated by RCA’s move to rename its IxD course to Design Interactions. I prefer having a narrow, exact definition of IxD (to prevent the IA effect) but at the same time want to be able to branch out into a wide range of areas.

Stowe Boyd agrees with Ross Mayfield that Twitter is “going nuts”. I’m not sure I like Twitter, I feel it’s too disruptive/intrusive. At the moment, I prefer Jaiku.

A whole bunch of videos of the upcoming Spore. Every clip I see continues to amaze me. Progress is still being made, but the richness of the game can be clearly seen here. Great stuff.

Molyneux proves he’s one of the top game designers again with his work on Fable 2. Evoking new, real emotions never felt before in games.

O’Reilly discusses a new semantic web initiative, this one crossing wiki principles with a relational database. It’s a cool tech demo but the question remains if people are willing to invest time in keeping it up to date.

Some nice pointers for bloggers and would-be bloggers. Took away some useful stuff such as the greatest hits list.

Over hoe Randstad energie steekt in een uitzendbureau in 2nd Life. Voorbeeld van hoe het ook kan: als bedrijf daadwerkelijk de interactie met de virtuele wereld opzoeken en waarde toevoegen in de wereld.

Twitter seems to be reaching critical mass. Mayfield takes a look at some of the unique properties of Twitter and other mobile social software.

A recap of GDC on the virtual worlds blog Terra Nova. They’ve noticed Sony’s assault on Second Life too…

Another look at Freebase, Ziade has it right when he says: “the crux of it, […] is usability. For something to take off, it must provide some sort of immediate, conceivable value to the masses upon touching it.”

A movie of Sony’s new virtual world for PS3 players. Echoes of Second Life here; the demo leaves me wondering what the added value is of a virtual world that mimics the real one so accurately it becomes boring… Via Jacco.

First part of a two part demo video that shows how an expertly simulated do in the game Fable 2 can evoke real emotions in a player. Great stuff! Via Jacco.

Resources about systems thinking for designers.

Playable version of flOw, a game consciously designed to induce, well, flow. It features adaptive difficulty levels and is coming to the PS3.

“gSyncit for Microsoft Outlook keeps Microsoft Outlook and your Google calendar in-sync.”

Some very useful guidelines for designing location aware applications.