Sunday, December 27, 2009
Journal of Information Architecture
It is also interesting to see how the field of HCI, interaction design, information architecture, experience design, are all blending into something new. Even product design and "real" architecture is part of the mix. All this is of course a natural reflection of the technological development where physical material is combined and infused with digital material and all products become a new form of artifacts that needs to be designed as a whole.
And since it is that time of year. Happy New Year!
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Milton Glaser
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
"GOMS: Get out of our head and in situ"
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
2nd annual HCI CONNECT at IU
Is your organization looking to recruit high-quality User Experience Designers?
Did you know that the School of Informatics and Computing at IU has one of the top Master’s degree programs in the nation in Human-Computer Interaction Design?
Please consider joining us for the 2nd annual HCI CONNECT.
How do we describe this event: It’s a ‘day of interaction,’ or a ‘chance to experience talent,’ or a ‘relational on-ramp’ with some of the top students in the field. Visit www.hcidconnect.com for details, registration info, and pictures of last years event.
Who is Invited
User Experience Design Managers and Team Members - each organization may bring up to 3 people (We highly encourage attendance of HCI-Design Alumni)
All the graduate students and faculty in the HCI-Design Program (About 75 students)
Event Details
January 21 & 22, 2010
21st: 7:00-9:00 pm: HCI Faculty, Student, and Employer Reception
22nd: 9:00 am - 3:00 pm: CONNECTing students and faculty through interaction, discussion, and brief employer presentations
Employer Cost & Benefits
$500 per organization includes:
· Resume Book of all students in attendance
· Portfolio Reference Guide - which provides links to almost all HCI Grad student online portfolios
· Extensive discussion time with students and faculty
· Opportunity to share your design team dynamics, culture, and process.
· Hors d'oeuvres and drinks with faculty
· Lunch for up to 3 on Friday
Registration Process
There are two steps in the registration process.
(1)Make sure you are an employer user in Informatics Career Link, our online connection system (see below)
(2)Register for CONNECT thru Career Link.
· To do both of these steps, visit: iuinformaticscareers.com
· Once you are a user in Career Link, log-in and click on the 'career fair/events' tab.
· Then Click on the CONNECT 2010 event link to register.
You will receive confirmation of registration, including more details about the event following registration.
We look forward to your attendance.
Very Best,
Jeremy
jeremy podany . director of career services
indiana university . school of informatics and computing
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Design Thinking Readings
Alexander, C. (1979). The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press.
Buchanan, R. Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. In The Idea of Design. V. Margolin and R. Buchanan (eds). MIT Press, 1995, 3-20.
Buxton, B. (2007) Sketching User Experience – getting the design right and the right design. Morgan Kaufman.
Cross, N. (2007). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Birkhauser, Basel.
Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books.
Dorst, C. H. (2003). Understanding Design. Amsterdam: BIS Publisher.
Dunne, J. (1993). Back to the Rough Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techné’ in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle. Notre Dame, IN. University of Notre Dame Press.
Frayling, C. Research in Art and Design. Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1, 1 (1993), 1-5.
Heskett, J. (2002). Design – A Very Short Introduction. Oxford. Oxford Press.
Janlert, L-E. & Stolterman, E. (1997). The character of things. in Design Studies, Vol 18, No 3, July (1997), 297-314.
Krippendorff, K. (2006) The Semantic Turn – A New Foundation for Design. CRC Press.
Lawson, B. (2005). How designers think – the design process demystified. Architectural Press.
Lawson, B. and Dorst, K. (2009). Design Expertise. Architectural Press.
Nelson, H. & Stolterman, E. (2003). The Design Way -- Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. Educational Technology Publications. New Jersey.
Pye, D. (1969) The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. Cambium Press; Reprint edition (July 1995)
Rittel, H, W. & Webber, M. M. (1974). Dilemmas in General Theory of Planning. in Design Research and Methods, 8 (No. 1): 31-39.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. New York, NY. Basic Books.
Schön, D. A. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Stolterman, E. The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research. in International Journal of Design, 2, 1 (2008), 55-65.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Good Interaction Design Magazine web sites
Johnny Holland Magazine
Design Observer
Konigi
A List Apart
The UX Bookmark
Cone Tree
Smashing Magazine
Boxes & Arrows
UXmatters
UX Magazine
ACM Interactions Magazine
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Design and Sketching
Friday, October 23, 2009
Evolution of interactive technology (again) and Buxton
In todays technology climate it is easy to believe that everything you have not seen before is also something “new”. This is understandable since it is quite difficult to know the background history of every technological solution and design and even more difficult to know how contemporary applications of that technology have evolved over time.
Bill Buxton writes about this issue in a short but very good article in BusinessWeek. He makes the case that “touch technology” is not the solution to every interaction design problem. In his effort to show this, he conducts a very simple but excellent design critique of four different watches that all to some degree uses touch technology. He shows how details matter in design. He also shows quite convincingly that touch technology is not in itself a good thing but has to be designed into a compositional whole to provide a good user experience.
Buxton also discusses the notion of technology development and reminds us all that touch technology has been around since the early 80s and that the designs we see today loaded with touch technology is not necessarily inventions or radical innovations, but clever (or not so clever) designs where this technology have been designerly used in new products.
This is a great little article that every interaction designer should read!!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Book review: "Dangerous Games" by MacMillan
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Evolution of What Is Easy to Use
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Tim Brown at TED -- and the future of design thinking
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Book review: "Design Expertise" by Lawson and Dorst
The theory of design that the authors presents is stable and rests firmly on a deep understanding of design as a basic human activity, and even mroe as a professional activity. Even though the book has architecture as its primary field of design when it comes to examples, the authors do a good job in being open and broad, which means that the book can be read by anyone interested in how to understand design no matter what field.
The book is not a ordinary textbook but at the same time not a fundamental research book. It is in between. For someone who has a good understanding of design and is knowledgeable with many of the original sources the book still offers an integrated understanding of design that is well needed in the field.
After this first read, I have nothing to complain about, however, I will go back and read some parts in more detail, and I will hopefully come back to this preliminary review.
(Of course, I am quite disappointed that the two books on design that I consider to the best so far are not referenced. That is Klaus Krippendorff's "The Semantic Turn - a new foundation for design" and my own "The Design Way" with Harold Nelson :-)
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Design Research and the 'coolness' factor
Friday, October 09, 2009
Dropbox
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The Complexity of the Particular
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
A brief book review
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Design, details and craft
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
UXmatters
Sunday, June 14, 2009
HCI online resources
There are of course some attempts in HCI out there. The most known is probably the HCIB managed by Gary Perlman. Degraaf is also doing a good job with his HCI Index. While looking for more resources I also found a number of web sites that since a few years are no longer being updated, but they all started out with good intentions and ambitions.
However, none of these attemtps can be compared to PhilPapers. It would be great for students and researchers to have a great resource site. I will wait for it.....or maybe there is something out there that I don't know about.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Limits of Interaction (Patti Maes & Andy Rutledge)
When you have watched it, you can read this highly critical review of Maes' demonstration by Andy Rutledge. He argues that Maes' "demonstrates a measure of irresponsibility, misrepresented facts, and shallow thinking".
The demonstration itself and the review taken together shows us what we will see much more of in the future since the imagination among designers and the development of technology seems infinite. It is inevitable that with such a development, questions will be asked. How interactive do we want our environment to be? In what ways can interactivity that helps me be intrusive for others? Who has the resposibility when it comes to our future interactive environment? What is the responsibility when designers excell in "exploring potential design spaces"?
Watch, read, and think...
Friday, April 17, 2009
Interactive Innovations and Design Spaces II
Friday, April 03, 2009
Interactive Innovations and Design Spaces
But, even though I am easily fascinated by new technology, when I see these new innovations my reaction is usually the same. I am surprised and fascinated by the technology and the new design space, but quite disappointed with the function or application that is used to introduce the technology. This is a consequence of the fact that the innovative design is technology driven and not neccesarily human centered. But, what I have learned over the years is that the worst mistake is to dismiss a new innovation as useless based on the application instead of focusing on the potential design space that the technology is opening up. To be able to see and imagine new potential design spaces is a crucial skill of being a good interaction designer! So, what design space do you see when you look at the Moixa Sphere?
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
The Cost of Interaction
Is the overall interaction cost increasing since our things and environments are increasingly becoming and requiring interaction? Is there a limit to how much we want to "pay". When and why do we chose non-interactive alternatives? When do we look for interaction and when do we find interaction unacceptable?
Well, it is possible to ask many interesting questions around the notion of the cost of interaction, and I predict that this will soon become a very important aspect for all forms of interaction design!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
"The Three Paradigms of HCI"
Thanks to Kevin here is a link to the paper!
Friday, March 20, 2009
Good Design
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Reading news for confirmation
This is a case of a technological development where the technological development, experienced as positive small steps ahead, are seen as great and promising, but where we one day we may be asking ourselves "how did we end up here".
One of the most thoughtful books I have read about the relation between the new world of communities and news and information, is Cass Sunstein's book "the republic.com" and the new edition ("the republic.com 2.0"). Usually I am not pessimistic when it comes to technology, but when it comes to the topic of news, how news will be formed and delivered in the future, how we will "use" news, I am actually quite pessimistic. I am not sure that community technology is moving us in a good direction, but I hope I am wrong.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
What theory in HCI is about II
"I need to know what are the (common) categories of theories in HCI. So, this is where I need some help. I have decided that the categories should be based on what the theory is about, that is, defined by its object of study."
I also suggested three categories and have now received several proposals for other categories. First of all, to understand how I think about this, what I wrote above, that I want to "defined by its object of study" is important. There are several other ways of categorizing theories, for instance Jodi suggested that they could be categorized based on their "matureness", and Tanykim suggested that theories can be categorized along a dimension of micro-macro, or objective-subjective. These are all interesting suggestions and would probably lead to interesting and useful results, but I would like to stay with my criteria that theories can be defined by its object of study.
Shveta suggested a new category that has to do with how design relates to business and management. This is a good suggestion, but for me it is a sub-category to the design process category.
Bala suggested design history as a possible object of study, and I think that is a great suggestion, however, I think design theories of this kind can be categorized as falling within the existing categories. I suspect most of them are about the design process and lead to inspiration for designers. So, I think this is another sub-category.
Xythian suggested research as an object of study, and I think that might be a real one. Theories in HCI that are about HCI research (methods, approaches, etc) has probably a distinct enough object of study.
So, for now I have four distinct categories of theories in HCI. The four are:
The first category contains theories that has (human computer) interaction as the object of study, that is, theories that say something about the interaction between humans and interactive artifacts.
The second category of theories are those that have the design process as a core object of study.
The third category contains theories that address how interactivity and interactive technology changes society and environments, that is, theories that have the relation technology--society as the object of study.
The fourth category contains theories that have the HCI research process itself as an object of study.
I am still not sure how valuable this exploration is. I know that there are some other attemtps out there, for instance, John Carrolls edited a book in 2003 with the title "HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks: Towards a Multidisciplinary Science". In this book there are about 14 theories presented, they all fall into the three categories of design process, interaction, and research.
Looking at these theories, it is also clear that it is possible to see these three categories as being sub-categories of each other. For instance, theories about interaction can be used to inform the design process. At the same time it is clear in Carrolls book that the selection of theories about interaction are overwhelmingly focused on the human side. Most theories are about how humans think and act. There are no theories about interactive technologies.
I think that a "map" of kinds of theories in HCI, based on what their object of study is, can help us to explore and exmine our field, and also help us to see where a lot of effort is already made and where we have big gaps.
Again I invite you to comment on this.......
I can also let you know that I will soon expand this categorization of HCI theories with a couple of more criteria, apart from "object of study" :-)
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
What theory in HCI is about
The first category are theories that has human computer interaction as the object of study, that is, theories that say something about the interaction between humans and interactive artifacts.
The second kind of theories are those that have the design process as a core object of study. Based on intuitive statistics (!) I think this is where we find the major part of theories in the field.
The third kind are theories that address how interaction and interactive technology changes society and environments, that is, theories that have the relation technology--society as the object of study.
So, what else? Any ideas?
Monday, February 23, 2009
Tangible interaction -- Siftables
I am looking forward to what good designers can do with this and similar technologies in the years to come. Advanced technology does not always lead to complex interaction!
Friday, February 20, 2009
iPhone again...and how to understand it...
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Buxton and basic research
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Rapid Expert Design
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Relation between concept design and visual design
In their patent application for the iPhone, it is interesting to see the sketch from Apple that shows the interface. It is very clear that it is the iPhone as we know it, even though it is a very simple sketch without any efforts made to make the appearance aestheticlly pleasing. For interaction designers there is a lesson to be learned here about the relationships between ideas and manifestations, between sketches and final designs. Almost anyone could have made this sketch of the iPhone with the purpose to portray the ideas. This is comforting for those of you who are afraid that you do not have enough visual skills. If you can do this, you can then get help from someone to make this into a full and beautiful deisgn.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
HCI and Aesthetics
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
[Re]Searching the Digital Bauhaus
Sunday, January 11, 2009
What User Experience is NOT
Saturday, January 10, 2009
The Year of Interaction!
With these trends, the rest is all about interaction! With ever present access and with streaming data and information, use becomes all a question of how will we interact with this world of bits.
So, my prediction of when it comes to the future of computing (not unique in any way) is that most of what we see as traditional computing issues (computation, storage, access, etc) are moved into the background and becomes invisible infrastructure and services. For the individual user, these services will not be interesting since they will be always there. For the individual, it will be vene more about the "thing" or the artifact that is the window into the infrastructure/services, that is, the interaction. Everything will be about interaction design, not just this year but every year from now on!!!