brightly colored food

Nice collection of links about all aspects of web usability, a la Usable Web.

Just last week I read this article entitled “Ask Not for Whom the Cell Phone Tolls: Some Problems with the Notion of Context-Aware Computing”. Here’s one of the scenarios mentioned in the article:

Spying a newspaper rack, Tom pulls his rented car to the side of the road and hops out to grab a paper. The car, recognizing that the door has closed and the engine is running, alertly locks its doors.

Imagine my near-amusement when I received a desperate phone call from a friend on Saturday. She was standing outside her car, and needed me to go fetch an extra set of keys…

I was checking out Jan Borchers’ homepage. He does great stuff with HCI Patterns as part of the whole pattern language thing (see also: Martin van Welie, Thomas Erickson). I was trying to find out more about some list on HCI patterns that I seemed to have subscribed to (ui-patterns@cs.uiuc.edu) at some point.

Anywhoo, on his homepage he mentions the Stanford Interactivity Lab, which I hadn’t come across before. The Lab has a bit on their approach “to develop new devices, techniques, and theories that support the design of fluent interaction in a ubiquitous computing environment”. Hmm, fluent interaction, that’s a new one. There’s more on fluent interaction as well as their research projects.

As Andrew noted, Web Techniques has now changed their name to New Architect. Their subtitle is “Internet Strategies for Technology Leaders”. Maybe we’ll be calling codewarriors and other technologists “New Architects”; perhaps this is their big landgrab in the architecture namespace….

Did you know that in Texas it’s illegal to have “Engineer” in your job title unless you have a college degree in some type of engineering?

To give “New Architect” a little credit, their articles are pretty decent, even if their branding may be a bit off the mark. As editor Amit Asaravala mentions, in addition to their feature articles they have case studies, legal analysis, product reviews, Q&A to strategic questions, and guest editors. That’s a pretty good mix, I must admit.

Updated the links page. Most of the usual suspects are included, though there’s a couple of sites you might have missed.

This interview was from Talk of The Nation on NPR last Friday. Scroll down the page a bit and click on the speaker icon to start the interview (requires realplayer).

More info on the program.

I saw Harry Gottlieb speak recently. He’s the guy who made “You Don’t Know Jack”, which is among the more natural and fluid interactive games I’ve played. Harry’s big thing these days is what he calls an “Interactive Conversation Interface”, which strives to use conversation as a natural mode for interaction for a computer agent communicating to a person. The conversation agents he creates, like the one in YDKJ, are amazingly natural to interact with. To do this, he focuses on the subtleties of conversation, stuff like pacing and creating/maintaining the illusion of awareness. Harry calls the principles behind what makes his agents so believable “The Jack Principles”.

Most of us obviously aren’t doing much with speech these days, but it’s worth seeing how he’s integrated learning from the film and TV industry into creating engaging experiences. The sensitivities and overall approach could definitely be applied to other media and forms of interaction.

Here’s a short version of The Jack Principles. However, if you have the time, I’d recommend the longer version. Yeah, there’s a tiny form to get the PDF, but it’s worth it; Harry is quite a funny and engaging writer.

On May 29th, 2001, the D&AD SuperHumanism conference took place in London, convened by Richard Seymour of Seymour Powell. The event brought designers and other professional creative people together with historians, social theorists, technologists and policy makers. Their shared goal? To reassert human values over the technological and commercial ones that sometimes seem to have taken over our lives.

The site has transcripts of all of the speeches given at the conference. There’s some good discussion around using design as a force for social change. Naomi Klein, Rem Koolhaas, and John Maeda are some of the contributers you might recognize.

With some help from my friend David, I finally got my act together and put up a new design for Brightly Colored Food. Hope you like it. It’s now running using Movable Type, which I recommend if you’re getting a bit more serious with the weblog thing. If you have any feedback,
- freeware
var linktext = “let me know”;
var email1 = “chad”;
var email2 = “brightlycoloredfood.com”;
document.write(”” + linktext + “”)
//–>
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