Side dish of RSS
Over there in the sidebar – for all you RSS aggregator junkies (myself included).
Interaction Anxiety
I enjoyed reading Fabio Sergio’s latest mini-essay about always on people almost as much as I did connectedland. My only quibble is that I disagree that the recent trend of posting uncommented lists of links on weblogs is a result of “continuous partial effort”. Like others, I have a folder of links to sites that [...]
Aesthetics and Interaction
My friend Carl pointed me to an interesting (and a bit provocative) article [pdf] by William Gaver. It has a great statement on the role of aesthetics in interaction design. “Aesthetics and interaction are often treated as separate concepts in product design, a situation to which we strongly object. When they are separated, aesthetics are [...]
Volume One
Looks like Volume One of Christopher Alexander’s four volume series The Nature of Order is now shipping. It’s called “The Phenomenon of Life”. The others will be shipping in the following months. From Z + Partners
Schoolwork – part 4
Blow-by-blow of last semester’s course load. Independent Study: Auditory Interfaces. I covered what I did in slightly more detail in a previous post, but to summarize, I looked at how auditory interfaces might leverage spatialization, and how a person might interact with the interface. I’m still finishing up the research, and I’m currently looking at [...]
Sony’s Next Robot
On Tuesday I went to a lecture by the Masahiro Fujita, the Principal Scientist and System Architect at Digital Creatures Laboratory, Sony Corporation. They’re the group that made the AIBO. He was talking about what looks to be the successor to the AIBO, the SDR-4. The motion, particularly the balance and types of navigation it [...]
Schoolwork – part 3
Classes I took last semester… Computing in Design An introductory programming class. We used Java. Not much else to say except that there’s better languages that an interaction design student could be learning, especially ActionScripting and Lingo, or maybe some web scripting or services languages. Hopefully that will change – there’s a proposal up for [...]
Schoolwork – part 2
In my continuing series of oversharing about the classes I took last semester… Graduate Design Studio A studio class taught by Dan Boyarski, head of the school, and by two other instructors – Colin Campbell and Tina Blaine. There were three sections to the class. 1. Interpreting Voice – mostly dealing with typography, both static [...]
The future of mobile computing
I’m doing some research into the future of mobile devices. Here’s a bunch of predictions as to what we’ll see in the next couple of years. It’s funny how much of it seems like a foregone conclusion to the device that does everything: phone, web, photo/video capture, music/video playing, GPS – location-aware, bluetooth, 803.11g, smart [...]
Let’s try this school thing again
I’m back in Pittsburgh after a wonderful time in San Francisco. The weather was blissful – it stopped raining as I took BART up from SFO, and stayed warm and clear for the week. I saw many friends – old and new – and ate well (new discoveries were Sunflower (Vietnamese), Mamasan (sushi), and Tartin [...]