Nice overview of various takes on the importance of storytelling here. Bruner, Ong, Seeley Brown, Baudrillard, Jung, and more. Looks like a promotional site for a book on storytelling in organizations.

Going Dutch? Design pros and cons of the Netherlands

By John Thackara of Doors of Perception on how the priorities of governments and a country’s existing design culture affects what’s designed (and how it’s designed). I’d love to work in another country for a few years after graduating, so the little bit of intercountry comparison left me wanting to know more.

The article also mentions STEIM, a music and acoustics research/design lab whose work was shown at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference I went to in June. Hearing Michel Waisvisz perform has been (at the risk of overstatement) one of the sonic highlights of my life.

There’s lots of other good stuff from John’s In the Bubble series of articles and mini-essays.

If time and money allow, I’ll hopefully be checking out the Doors of Perception conference next year. Others I’m thinking about include DIS (Designing Interactive Systems) and possibly HITS (Humans | Interaction | Technology | Strategy). Others I’m missing? I wish there was a conference out there that was a bit less formal, a bit more hands on, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Thinking Visually is an excellent book. That’s all.

If I had the time, money, and lived back west, I’d be attending the two week Physical Interaction Design for Music summer workshop at Stanford. Bill Verplank, Michael Gurevich, and Scott Wilson talked about the course at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference and it looks like a great experience. Maybe next summer after graduating if I’m jobless.

Yes, um, so it’s been a while. When I’m nearing a month since last writing here, the ringing bells of guilt start tolling in my ears. Part of the summer internship involves using a fairly ridiculous number of collaborative tools, so I’m usually pretty burned out by the time I get to thinking about this weblog. I’m also maintaining two other weblogs as well – one as a bibliography of sorts and an internal one behind the IBM firewall. Fabio would probably say that I’m suffering from a bad case of interaction anxiety. There comes a point where you realize that you’re writing more about what you’re doing than actually doing it. Not a good thing.

Two days ago I presented my paper on an approach to audiocentric interface design at the International Community of Auditory Display (ICAD) conference. For the first paper I’ve presented at a conference, it went well, though I wish I’d gotten more feedback. However, I got the sense that my approach was probably a too bit pragmatic (dare I say user-centered?) to garner much interest from the audience of researchers (mostly psychoacousticians and computer scientists).

In addition to presenting some auditory interface components I’d created, I was focusing on how to give designers – who primarily have a visual focus – a simple, generative approach to issues of mapping and communicating using sound as a medium. It was motivated by what Richard Buchanan taught us last year about a grammatical approach to design, through my own experience swimming in psychoacoustics and sonification literature, and through observing other designers deal with sound design for the first time.

I don’t want to say I left the conference frustrated (actually, I do), but it was one of those moments where I was really attracted to some of the design problems in an area but largely turned off by the approaches and emphasis within that domain. Different priorities I suppose. I was going to tackle another auditory interface design project next year for my thesis project, but the past few days (as well as a grant that didn’t come through) have deflated my enthusiasm a bit.