User Designer

I’m always a big fan of TED talks…and here’s a fascinating short 8 minute talk, by Pattie Mae’s from MIT Media Lab. She talks about and shows off SixthSense, which is an invention for turning any surface into an interactive gesture controlled video surface. Neat and easy enough to integrate into current mobile devices.

Bosch have enhanced the night vision system system in cars, so that it provides smartly enhanced high contrast images of the road ahead at night. Clever but would you trust it to properly identify which parts of the road are critical for highlighting?

For the last few years I’ve been using and really liked Sony’s eBook Reader, the PRS500. Yup, I was an early adopter and altogether unsure whether I wanted to give up paper books! Recently there’s been an explosion of electronic readers, lead by Amazon’s Kindle. Within the next few years we’re going to see bendable, foldable and colourful electronic paper. For those of you who are design minded and interested in using E-Paper to invent new kinds of interactive visual displays and devices, here’s a handy guide for learning more about E-Paper technology.

Fascinating The Secret History of Silicon Valley – just over an hour long but well worth watching.

How aesthetically beautiful are your photos? Try out Acquine, an Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine. Welcome to the brave new world of computational aesthetics!

Clever – video of evolving a human face using a genetic algorithm. A face detector is used for the fitness function.

Time to start gaming for mental health?

Haunting and beautiful sand art “animation” – very neat and worth the 9 minutes.

Neat video showing off Paper Computing. Author electronic circuits by painting and dropping electronic components on paper! (found via Turbulence.org)

Any ideas on how I can design and build a Charisma Augmentation Device…? Learn about the science of charisma.

Handy handy – a useful new and free visualisation tool called Parallel Sets has just been released.

An arty digital analog clock designed by Humans Since 1982 – Clock Clock: The Analog Digital Clock (thanks Baz).

Me likes MOY – design and adapt the visual design of your car…in real-time! Probably a bit distracting but I suspect it could be useful for making your car visually pop-out in dangerous low-vision driving conditions? MOY is a design concept from Elvis Tomljenovic “The idea behind MOY concept is that everyone can design their own car on their own computer and then apply the design to the vehicle using wireless data transfer or share it with other people through web-site, forum, e-mail etc. To those who lack the necessary skills or time to create their own design, we offer the option of downloading ready made designs. The vehicles are interconnected, so the change is possible in motion. ”

Interesting article in MIT Sloan Management Review on Cracking the Code of Mass Customization. You can register for free to access it for free. The authors identify three required capabilities for mass customization companies. (found via Mass Customization & Open Innovation News)

Read Core77’s writeup Physical pixels: design for the not so near future on the Organic User Interfaces panel at CHI 09, which I previously mentioned. Is it a bit too futuristic? Psst, the answer is no – as long as futuristic innovations feedback into here and now innovations.

User Designer is back…yep, I went very quiet for a few months – but it was for great reasons 1) I became a dad (loving it), and 2) I was writing up my HCI PhD. Fortunately I’m getting to continue focusing on HCI / Interaction Design research, as I’ve just started as a postdoctoral researcher in the CLARITY Centre in University College Dublin, Ireland.

Some day soon I’ll do a proper writeup about the PhD, but in short I was looking at the effect individual differences in low-level vision have on the user experience of HCI designs – a fun fusion of interface / information visualisation design, vision science / optometry, eye physiology and probabilistic modeling.

Anyways lets get started again with a Link Bucket, enjoy!

Did you know that Attractive Things Work Better, written by HCI guru Don Norman.

John M. Carroll, one of the fathers of HCI, writes about the History of HCI (thanks Mads Soegaard @ Interaction-Design.org).

CHI 2009, one of the main HCI conferences has just finished, read about a few neat ideas in The Stranger Side of CHI 2009.

Excellent, HCI and Interaction Design research focused on a malleable and readily adaptable world is really beginning to gain traction. How long before it has its own conference?

There’s a bunch of very interesting workshops at CHI 2009, which will be on in Boston from April 4th to 9th. CFPs (Call for Participation) that caught my eye include:

Super busy at the moment but I’m delighted to announce “BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined” (my project in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen) is back online after being offline for 4 years! So now is your chance to join the email community that had most people scratching their heads and wondering what happened to email as they knew it.

Join the list here!

We’ve put it back online because it’ll be showing in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) as part of “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now” from November 8, 2008, through February 8, 2009. Press release for the show is here.

Other artists in the show include “bramovi?/Ulay; Vito Acconci; Francis Alÿs; Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb (former members of Ant Farm); John Baldessari; Joseph Beuys; Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke; George Brecht; Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett; John Cage; c a l c and Johannes Gees; Janet Cardiff; Lygia Clark; Minerva Cuevas; Maria Eichhorn; VALIE EXPORT; Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin; Fluxus Collective; Jochen Gerz; Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; Matthias Gommel; Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Dan Graham; Hans Haacke; Lynn Hershman Leeson; Nam June Paik; Allan Kaprow; Henning Lohner and Van Carlson; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Tom Marioni; MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates); Antoni Muntadas; Yoko Ono; Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv; Raqs Media Collective; Robert Rauschenberg; Warren Sack; Mieko Shiomi; Torolab; Wolf Vostell; Andy Warhol; Stephen Willats; and Erwin Wurm.”

Enjoy, next week regular blog posting will resume.

All the world is aflame with the iPhone! Have a look at this example of the iPhone used as an Augmented Reality device. (thanks Karl)

See how the world looks to a baby’s eyes.

What is our psychology of time? Read The future is nonlinear on Mind Hacks to learn more.

Drool drool love the visual style in the My Drive Thru music video.

Air Ape art.

Think Nintendo’s Wii is deliciously haptic? Then click over to Exertion Interfaces: Sports over a distance for social bonding and fun. Checkout their Table Tennis for Three website and video, where three friends in different parts of the world play table tennis together. I wonder have they built their Remote Impact – Shadowboxing over a Distance into a free standing punching bag?

If you only ever subscribe to one podcast then I cannot recommend WNYC’s marvelous Radiolab enough. Over the last few months I’ve been listening to their back catalogue – science radio at its very best. A dash of depth, a dash of humor and lots of interesting diverse topics. It always leaves me delighted and wondering could I do research in that field, and that field, and that field. Boo, there’s never enough time for all the interesting things in the world!

What’s cooking in Research and Development at IBM, Microsoft and HP.

Blog-a-licious 3 Quarks Daily – An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature.

Zoomii is an interesting and well executed Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) for browsing books on Amazon. With Zoomii you see virtual bookshelves that you can zoom in and out of, a little bit like the experience of exploring a physical bookstore. I reckon they should tweak Zoomii so when you zoom towards a book cover you don’t just see a bigger version of the cover, rather you also see the details about the book. Incremental semantic zooming would remove the need to click on a book cover for more details.

Zoomii reminds me of my old MLE project Media Dive. Media Dive was a graphical and audio ZUI for browsing large collections of music, where I played around with integrating zooming with controlling exposure to multiple spatially arranged audio sources. One feature of Media Dive enabled you to zoom towards a song/album to select what music to hear while also increasing (or zoom out to decrease) the music’s volume.

Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, misses and ones to watch.

Sit back and watch the addictive flickrvision. flickrvision is a spatial photo visualisation that shows photos on Google Maps as the photos are uploaded to flickr.

Jump around jump around and smile Where the Hell is Matt?

Neat video showing off a 360 degree 3D display created by researchers from the Graphics Lab at University of Southern California. More details can be found on their website and in their SIGGRAPH 2007 paper.

Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist.

Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab.

User Designer has been very quiet because I was on holidays and attending the Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 conference, where I presented Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences. Yet again AVI was an enjoyable conference with lots of friendly faces. Unfortunately its only on every two years.

While in Italy I headed to Pompeii and unexpectedly stumbled upon a 2000 year old bistable optical illusion mosaic in The House of the Faun. Wow. I hadn’t realised the Romans and Greeks used optical illusions in their art. Below is a photo of the mosaic:

Fashionable Technology is a just released book on The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. (found via architectradure)

Therein lies the future – as a follow-on to my post Metamatter: Self-Reshapable Materials check out Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. CTIHP is a report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Commerce (DOC), so its worth paying attention to. There’s also the follow-on Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies In Society.

Arthur Shaprio, vision scientist at Bucknell University, has setup a new blog featuring visual illusions with explanations of why they occur. I particularly like his Lucy in the Sky illusion.

Beautiful – The Singing, Ringing Tree.

A true HCI classic from 1945 (pre-pre-HCI). Vannevar Bush’s reflections on how technology can augment the human intellect: As We May Think

Neat – Kickable self-reassembling robots. (thanks Graham)

Get some insight into how Google approaches usability and HCI in the talk The Art and Science of User Experience at Google.

An amusing ad. Have you ever felt like that forward thinking little girl when explaining some far out research and design concepts?

Affordances – a common usability term. Do you mean Gibson’s or Norman’s sense of affordances?

Just a quick blog note: For the last few weeks I’ve only posted a weekly Link Bucket. A lot of my time and energy is going into writing up my HCI PhD (woohoo!). Every week I’ll continue sending interesting links your way BUT for the next while I won’t be writing longer speculative and reflective pieces. Got to keep focused.

Very neat – A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods from Visual-Literacy.org. Hover your mouse over any of the entries and up pops the related visualisation.

Excellent, the 2nd Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference is going to be on on the 19th and 20th of September in University College Cork, Ireland. Submission date is June 13th, 2008. Get writing! For more details keep an eye on the 2008 iHCI website.

Get a very brief glimpse Inside Microsoft’s Research Labs. If you want more depth wander over to Microsoft Research’s website – while there have a look at the recently released report Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020.

Recently I’ve been reflecting on Science 2.0, especially wondering what my research practices will be post-PhD. Science 2.0 (or whatever its getting called this month) is a much more open approach to science. Scientific America has a good introductory article explaining it. For example Science 2.0 scientists put their lab books online, writing about failures as well as success’ while making early stage research work (pre-publication) available for all to read about. Like others I suspect that the rise of the Internet inevitably leads to the emergence of Science 2.0, with a corresponding increased fluidity of idea exchange and cross pollination. There’ll probably be some of the same kind of issues occurring as in other digital media industries, i.e. ignore the openness, then fight the openness and finally embrace it. Admittedly the process of figuring out how to make Science 2.0 work fairly is going to interesting.

Sensisphere is a multitouch hemispherical display that lets you drag, move, push and pull digitial things with your hands. Pop over to YouTube and see it in action.

Scientists have created an entire synthetic genome. Another important step towards making biological nanobot “machines”, which would be extremely useful as smart malleable materials.

Very very blog relevant and interesting Call For Papers: Imagining Domestic Interiors. This is one CFP I’ll definitely be working towards! Robots are set to play an increasing role in our everyday lives, particularly in our domestic interiors. Already, they have found their way into vacuum cleaners, sweepers, mops, and other automated service machines for the home. Looking beyond these largely predictable developments, advances in self-configurable and adaptive robots promise some radically new possibilities. Our furniture, for example, may be host to interconnected assemblies of robotic modules that can re-configure themselves to suit different purposes, events, or even moods. An adaptive home interior might also physically age with its occupants, conforming to their changing needs and operating to support their states of development and health. (rest…)

What Kind of Genius Are You? Slow burn or short fast bright bright bright.

This post is dedicated to Molly “Isn’t it only natural”.