Tag: interaction design

My Mobile Game Directions Pecha Kucha

Yesterday I presented my talk on mobile gaming at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Rotterdam’s Off_Corso. I was programmed as the first speaker, which was exciting (and also allowed me to benefit from the primacy effect, as my girlfriend pointed out). Colleague Iskander was kind enough to record the whole thing on his N70 (fittingly) and I present it here for your enjoyment or aggravation, whichever you prefer (please take note that the talk is in Dutch). The slides I used are over at SlideShare.

I’m still not sure the subject matter was appropriate for the event, considering the majority of speakers were either graphic designers, autonomous artists or architects. The crowd might’ve been a bit underwhelmed by my commercial and pop cultural references. Oh well, I had fun, I guess that’s the most important thing.

Many thanks to Nadine and Bart of Hunk Design for letting me loose on stage. ‘Nuff respect to all the presenters for taking the trouble of preparing a presentation. There were plenty of cool and inspiring ideas on show. Finally, thanks to the creators of all the images I used, you can find the credits in the SlideShare show.

Update: I’ve deleted my YouTube account so here’s an embed of the video on Vimeo:

Where are the good European IxD schools?

Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path wrote an introductory piece for budding interaction designers. Five years ago, Robert Reimann of Cooper did the same. Both are nice overviews for novices and especially the parts on a designer’s temperament are entertaining to read.

Saffer fails to mention any good IxD schools outside of the US and UK. Which is a shame for all of us European designers. Reimann mentioned Ivrea’s now defunct IxD institute.

I’d like to start by pointing to my courageous little country’s Utrecht School of Arts, which has been teaching IxD for 15 years now (!) and today offers both BA and MA programs. They’ve recently branched off into game design, which has been quite successful.

Full disclosure: I was a student at the same school from 1998 – 2001 (BA IxD, MA Game Design) and am now teaching a course in mobile game design.

Any other good IxD schools in Europe that you know of?

Update: discussions on Saffer’s post on the IxDA’s maling list here and here; overview of IxD education (mostly in the US) here.

Signals from the Leapfrog offices

Or in other words, what I’ve been up to, besides keeping myself busy over at Info.nl.

  1. Reboot 8 is shaping up to be another great conference. I’m already looking forward to seeing Matt Webb and Chris Heathcote speak, among others. I’m also still thinking about doing something myself, the question is: what?
  2. While we’re on the topic of conferences, make sure you don’t miss The Web and Beyond – the 10th annual SIGCHI.NL event. I’ve been helping with the organisation and must say it’s promising to be an interesting look at the web 2.0 phenomenon from an interaction design perspective.
  3. I have a heap of articles and posts lying around waiting to be fed to my del.icio.us account (I actually read all that stuff before bothering you with it). Now to just find the time to tag them all – to think this stuff is supposed to have a low cognitive load!
  4. Right after visiting Reboot 8 I’ll be off to beautiful Italy for some much needed R&R. Be sure to keep an eye on my Flickr photostream for slightly crappy cameraphone shots of Napels, Rome, Florence and Venice. Looking forward to that!
  5. Finally, you may have wondered about the “martial arts enthusiast” bit in this blog’s introduction. Between all of the above I’m getting myself ready for some examinations in Takeda Ryu this summer. When I get back from Vienna, I hope to be a certified teacher’s assistant and second dan in Aikido. Wish me luck.

Now back to our regular programming – deathly silence while I get some more client work out the door.

Thinking about IxD patterns

Having just posted about a new pattern library; my mind has been occupied a bit by the role of patterns in design. I’ve noticed that for a lot of IxD problems, I tend to first try to tackle the issue myself. Then, I usually refer to some examples and / or patterns, to see if I’ve missed any obvious caveats. After that, I usually fine-tune the solution. What I like about patterns is that they give a clear outline of the most common way of handling a given problem. I do think that they’ll never be a replacement for some genuine inspired design – stuff that no one has come up with before. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when interaction designers will be replaced by a huge pattern library…

Yahoo! opens up some more

Some great new resources are now available, courtesy of everyone’s favorite web 2.0 company: Yahoo!

The Design Pattern Library contains a whole bunch of patters for user interface designers to use and abuse. Martijn van Welie finally has some competition.

Of more interest to developers is the UI Library, containing “a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications”. These code examples are frequently linked to from the pattern library.

I must say, these look like some excellent additions to the current body of knowledge available to designers and developers. Thanks a bunch Yahoo!

However, my paranoid mind can’t help but think: what’s the catch?

Via Jeremy Zawodny.