brightly colored food

Over there in the sidebar - for all you RSS aggregator junkies (myself included).

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 I’d like to share, though not necessarily comment on. If the quality of their writing went down, then there might be a better case made…

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 usually applied to making products desirable in appearance, while interaction design is preoccupied with usability, and particularly ‘ease of use’. While usability is often a laudable goal, is isn’t enough. Focusing on ease of use tends to encourage a narrow view of what ‘use’ is with respect to technology, emphasizing efficiency and productivity over exploration and curiosity. With a correspondingly narrow range of models for usability, interaction tends to be self-similar, mundane, and ultimately boring.

We believe that aesthetics and interaction are tightly interwoven, so that the aesthetics of a product must be shaped according to its functions and roles, and its interactions must be judged by their aesthetic qualities - both sensory and conceptual. This leads to an aesthetics of interaction, in which the emphasis shifts from an aesthetically controlled appearance to an aesthetically controlled interaction, of which appearance is a part. Aesthetics of interaction moves the focus from ease of use to enjoyment of the experience.

A requirement for an aesthetics of interaction is attention to the richness of a system’s appearance, interaction, and potential roles. By richness in appearance we mean that the product and its controls distinguish themselves through differentiation in form, material and texture. Richness in appearance can attract users to act through the expectation of a beautiful - or aesthetically powerful - interaction. By richness in interaction, we mean that the engagement user and system should have an interesting and variable flow. Different functions should be operated through different actions, and the timing of the system responses should be appropriate to the actions and functions involved. By richness in role, we mean that the systems appearance, interactions, and functions must reflect the potential sociocultural complexity of those using them. Devices play a role in their users’ lives, and imply the role of their users: through its appearance, interaction, and functionality, each product tells a story about its user and the relationship between them.

Users find enjoyment from a product’s combination of appearance, interaction, and roles. Current black boxes, designed for generic users and with rows and rows of similar looking controls which all require pushing, turning, or sliding lack richness in all three dimensions. In order to add appropriate complexity, methods are needed to explore different interaction possibilities and the potential complexities of users.”

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

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 a person might select one spatialized audio object out of many swarming around their head. We’re using a great big metal dial to tune into the objects, so we’re exploring some of the different ways that might happen - types of motion, feedforward/feedback, etc. It’s all good fun, but I’m trying to wrap it up quickly to see if I can get a conference paper from the work, and the deadlines are fast approaching.

The work was done in the Interaction Design Studio, located within the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems. I worked with Francine Gemperle, who directs the Studio, Tad Hirsch (now at the MIT Media Lab), and some very bright engineers who know their way around MAX/MSP. Here’s a short blurb about the studio, and some of their previous projects (though it hasn’t been updated in a while. Much of their work now centers on wearable computers, as they work with the aptly named Wearable Group at CMU.

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 could handle, was impressive. Check out some videos here, here (watch the volume levels on this one - it’s loud, but several SD4s are singing and dancing), and a few good ones here. Here’s an article from PCWorld about the SD4, and a feature list from Sony. Fujita was also encouraging students to download the SDK for controlling their robots - I guess this has been quite a source of innovation for them.

I also got to see some footage of last year’s robotic soccer championships, called RoboCup, where teams of autonomous robots, including AIBOs, play soccer on a very small field. It was surprisingly thrilling to watch. The American Open 2003 is going to be at Carnegie Mellon in early May. Didn’t think I’d be saying this, but I’ll be going…

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 ActionScripting next year.

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 and dynamic type. We produced dozens of graphical treatments of quotes we were given. Mine was from the avant garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who in 1913 wrote, “Catalogs, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch.” Lots of time spent alone in InDesign and AfterEffects and together in critiques. It helped to build critiquing skills, explore a design space given some specific constraints, and strengthen our communication design skills.

2. Information Visualization - an exercise where we each had a different thing to be re-interpreted using the principles of information design - mostly content, some artifacts and spaces. I got Scrabble. People, I *hate* Scrabble. I learned a bit of respect for the game, but not before I pledged to never play it again. My interpretation was based around seeing the board topographically, with individual tile scores represented by their respective heights. It gave a nice way to see scores at a glance - something ordinary Scrabble doesn’t do well. My final piece was a 3D Flash animation of a particularly high scoring game I found on the internet between a Scrabble pro and a ScrabbleBot. I used Swift3D (terrible, terrible application) and Flash. There were animated tiles flying through the air, growing taller, multiple camera angles - much craziness (of the elegant, restrained sort).

3. Sound Design - We covered the basics of sound production, talked a great deal about the role of sound in film (read Chion’s Audio-Vision if that’s your film sound or sound design interests you), and produced two pieces: a soundscape and an sonified version of our kinetic type piece from the first section. As a sometimes foley artist, I worked on my techniques for performing sound using physical objects as well as software-based synthesizers. There was lots of editing, layering, effecting, and all that other fun stuff as well. I used Deck, Peak, Reason, and Live. Part of my piece incorporated a conversation at a party between a number of aliens - odd, yes, but a great way to learn about formants and other elements of speech along with the dynamics of conversation (think sound puppetry). Apollinaire got a dramatic reinterpretation using some of the “poetry” of recent TV ads - a bit of a juxtaposition, but it worked out well.

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 card. And if the coverage at SmartMobs is any indication, SMS, IM, networked mobile gaming, and all subspecies of blogging will be ubiquitous as well.

What have all these predictions missed? What technology, form factor, function, etc. are they underestimating? Any guesses? I’d be especially curious to hear from readers in other countries.

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 (French cafe/bakery on 18th & Guerrero, so new that it doesn’t have any presence online)). Between meals I was seduced by Aquarius Records, Amoeba Records, and Green Apple Books, so much of my cash was sucked from these shallow grad school pockets. College loans: better than credit card debt, worse than no debt.

When I was out west, several designer-type friends asked about the classes I’d taken. I figure if they wanted to know, you might too, so I thought I’d cover one class a day this week - five classes to take us through to Friday. If you’re curious about the interaction design program at CMU, or perhaps want to better understand what might possess a once nicely compensated usability specialist to quit work at a secure company that respects user-centered design and head off to grad school and an uncertain future, read on. If not, please ignore this week’s blatherings.

Class 1 (of 5): Graduate Design Seminar
Human Experience and Interaction Design: Concepts, Methods, and Products

Taught by Richard Buchanan. Best class I’ve ever taken. Ever. There were four parts to the class:
1. Searching for Data
2. Interpretations of Interaction
3. Arts, Methods, and Techniques
4. Principles & Values

We covered four broad approaches to the topic of interaction. We read works from Weaver, Simon, Hall, Weiner, Goffman, Rogers, Barnlund, Dewey, Burke, Plato, Aristotle, Moholy-Nagy, Laurel, Meggs, Barthes, McKeon, St. Augustine, and a dozen others. We talked about a number of philosophical arts - rhetoric, poetics, grammar, semiotic, and dialectic - in an attempt to understand how they served as the basis for different types of design thinking. A mix of lecture and discussion, it was one of those rare classes where you feel your entire way of thinking becoming a little sharper after each class.