Category: Links

Excellent Aphex Twin music video by Chris Cunningham that comes quite close to making you physically unwell. Via Ad.

Very positive (almost lyrical) post by Webb on the virtues of Animal Crossing: Wild World’s interaction design. I’ve just started playing this and can feel the addiction already grabbing hold. Webb’s observations of the deterministic character of AC’s wor

A social software classic. Shirky talks about how there are certain things you need to accept and certain things you should design for when creating social software. One of the key take-aways for me is: with social software, the individual isn’t the only

A short piece on mobile social software such as Jaiku. The writer took the trouble to interview some knowledgeable people such as Jyri Engestrom and Danah Boyd.

Roger Johansson looks at an alternative to WYSIWYG editors that allows content editors to mark up text with meaning in stead of styling. Might help in keeping sites with CMS’s behind them accessible.

“[…] one of the design challenges for social software is in allowing groups to grow past the limitations of a single, densely interconnected community while preserving some possibility of shared purpose or participation […]”

I’m reading lots of ‘old’ stuff on social software lately. Here’s one piece by Matt Webb that gives a taste of how cutting edge this stuff was in 2003.

Entries for learning more on social software by Matt Webb.

Matt Webb on classifying groups in push and pull, telic and atelic.

“We can look at technologies that were successful without meaning to be, look at social environments that give results with being forced, and investigate what factors in the substrate made this possible. And then, hopefully, build some ourselves.”

Post–social software seminar post.

These descriptions of flow states sound familiar to me, mostly from practising martial arts.

Jeffrey Veen gives some pointers on how to create a good portfolio.

I’m rereading Shirky on social software. This piece describes how Clay’s thinking was influenced by a class he taught at NYU.

On encoding software with political bargains and how that influences the groups and users that use it.

Presentations by Keith Instone on faceted browsing. Offer a wealth of examples and a lot of questions. Nice tool for thinking about your own faceted browsing interfaces (like the one I’m designing now).

Finally got around to reading this Economist piece on Second Life. Surprisingly good description of the world’s history and current problems.

This interview with the main designer and developer of the indie fighting game Rag Doll Kung Fu makes me want to become a game designer. It seems the internet is giving game designers the chance to be authors of their own games again.

A brief for a graphic design class assignment by Jack Schulze. The assignment is to design a set of icons that explain the use of RFID. Interesting to me for the subject RFID and the fact that I’m preparing my own mobile game design class and need example

Elaborate report summarizing and synthesizing trends in technologies that support cooperation. Best of all are the large number of examples and the short summaries of each cluster’s principles. I especially like the large poster…

Discussie over welke teksten thuis horen in alt-attributen en in welke gevallen een leeg alt-attribuut volstaat. Voor de toegankelijkheidsfreaks.

Interface designer Luke W gives a nice set of guidelines for designing web forms. I really like the amount of effort he put in the example screens. They clarify his points nicely.

Collaborative site for sharing illustrated guides on how to make things; anything it seems: fashion, food, electronics, you name it. A Flickr for how-to’s.

Post linking to PDF of short presentation on several wireframing techniques aiming to capture details in rich interfaces: storyboards, lo-fi prototypes and wireframs with keyframes.

“Comics are in everything.” — Jack Schulze compares a comic spread and two pages from an instruction manual. He says designers can learn much more from comics than they think. I went from comics to IxD. Not surprisingly, I agree!

Short but sweet how-to on using sparklines in CakePHP.

Evert Stobbe van SNS Bank over ‘Co-creation economics’.

In-depth profile of game design god Will Wright. Of particular interest are the sources of inspiration for his games and to read how one of the few industry leading game designer that has actual creative freedom is incredibly isolated at the same time.

Over two year old post by Matt Webb describing all the aspects that go into explaining social software to non-experts and training them in use and design. Lots of interesting leads to follow up on here.

Joshua Porter highlights issues Digg is having with their design. They’ve changed an algorithm, and now the community is pushing back. Porter writes: “The issues are social ones, probably unpredictable in any straightforward way.”

“The wi-fi connected umbrella with a built-in camera takes pictures and uploads them on to the photo-sharing website Flickr.com. Users can browse through photos, as they would online, by twirling the umbrella to the left or right.”

Repository of game design patterns that enhance usability or accessibility. By Eelke Folmer, via the IxDA list.

A large study on how people evaluate a site’s credibility shows that people primarily base their judgement on visual design and use very few ‘hard’ criteria. This is especially true for sites of financial services providers.

A thorough introduction to CakePHP (a rapid development framework inspired by Ruby on Rails). Gave this a spin over the weekend, and I must say I’m impressed.

An old article containing some not so revolutionary tips for building web apps with PHP and MySQL. I’m mainly tagging this so I remember the authors’ book.

A rogue economist spends years to analyse the time it takes for creative geniuses to peak. Turns out there are roughly two patterns. Is it sad that I’m already opting for the slow ‘experimentalists’ slot?

Decent introductory article on the DIKW hierarchy and knowledge management.

Matt Jones is triggered by Kevin Kelly’s post on a cool tool to determine how aware you are of your surroundings. He proposes to create a mobile app that helps answer Kelly’s questions.

The original article by Eno wherein he proposes the Long Now’s cousin: the Big Here. How conscious are we of our location and how does that influence the choices we make for the future?