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).

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.

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.

Have you ever gotten into one of those silly arguments about the colour of something? You know where you’re sure that a t-shirt is red, while your friend is 100% sure its redish yellow. Frustrating isn’t it.

Strange as it is, both of you can be utterly right.

You both “see” a slightly different colour because of individual differences in physiology. The receptors in eyes that help convert light into colour often have slightly different sensitivities between people. For most people the differences are so slight they’re not usually noticed, but people with colour blindness experience a world where colours appear very different. Go here for details about the Ishihara colour plate image, which is used in testing whether people are colour blind.

There are thought to be women who are the opposite of colour blind, they are tetrachromats who are able to see more colours than most people (who are usually trichromats). Damn Interesting has a good introductory article about tetrachromats A Life More Colorful, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a good article with a little more science background, Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes.

Previously I’ve touched upon individual differences in genetics for Personalised Medicine and the Psychology of Individual Differences.

There are many other kinds of subtle physiological differences, such as variations in taste receptors and densities on the human tongue. Here’s an introductory article about taste blindness.

Individual differences in physiology can be measured. These measures can be used to shape the design of objects. For example measures of your taste receptors could be used to automatically adapt a collection of cooking recipes to enhance the flavour for your tongue. Or TVs could have inbuilt smarts that adapt football game colours so a person with red-green colour blindness can more easily see their favourite football team. No more struggling to see a team wearing a red outfit running around on a green pitch, or a red snooker ball on a green table.

If the above is to become possible then self-mallable / re-shapable objects that adapt to the individual physiology of users need:
1) measures of user physiology
2) predictive models of the impact due to physiological differences, i.e. if an object is adapting to a user how does it know an adaption has a positive or negative effect?

This builds on implications from When Toothbrushes Mate: Form & Function DNA. Malleable objects and artifacts need to be:
1) self-describing
2) user describing (predicting the impact on user experiences due to physiological differences).

Tune your ears (listen) to Donald Norman, deep thinker about the implications of cognitive psychology for usability / HCI / design, getting interviewed by Peter Merholz. (found at putting people first)

Flybot – read about Harvard University’s microrobotic fly. Visit Prof. Robert Wood’s Harvard Microrobotics Lab website. (thanks to Baz for the suggestion)

5 Alternative Ways to Browse Amazon. Yep, more information visualisations that might be useful, but may well be utterly useless but ever so pretty.

Lots of tiny little builders = massive house. Watch this video showing myrmecologists figuring out how big an ant colony is. If you’re short on time just jump in 4 min 4 seconds for images of the ant colony structure. Tis amazing and beautiful!

Many many years ago myself and friends went through a short phase of playing Tic-Tac-Toe (TTT), also called Noughts and Crosses. You win this simple two player game by forming a horizontal, vertical or diagonal straight line of three Xs or three Os. If both players play properly then neither player can win and the game finishes as a draw.

Early in the 90s Jiajie Zhang, as part of his PhD, did a number of experiments where he tested how well people could play TTT against a computer. What he wondered was whether different visual representations effected people’s ability to play the simple childhood game of TTT. Below are four (A to D) different graphical and conceptual layouts of TTT. If you play the (C) Shape version of TTT would you win more or less than if you play against the computer on the (D) Colour version of TTT?

Each of these graphical representations is called an isomorph of TTT. When you use these isomorphs to play TTT you are trying to solve the same problem as in TTT except the problem is presented differently, i.e. to win you still need to create a group of three items.

When playing (A) Line you colour three circles in a line to win, (B) Number you colour three circles so the numbers add to 15, (C) Shape you colour three circles so they share at least one shape in common and (D) Colour you colour three circles so they share at least one common colour.

What he found was that people’s ability to play TTT, this simple childhood game, was seriously effected by what isomorph version of TTT they played on! In one experiment he found that more than 50% of the players failed to get 10 draws in a row in the first 50 games when they played on the (B) Number version.

Depending on the computer’s opening moves (he did a number of experiments where he controlled what sequence of opening moves the computer could make) he showed that (A) Line was easier than (D) Colour, which was easier than (C) Shape which was around the same hardness as (B) Number.

Not only did the visual representation effect how well players did, but what options they had for their next move on the visual representation also effected their playing ability.

For the full paper with far more details about the experimental results you should download at least one of Zhang’s papers about the research The Interaction between Perceptual and Cognitive Processes in a Distributed Problem Solving Task.

A good starting point for learning more about this area is to read about representational determinism and distributed cognition. Mike Scaife’s and Yvonne Rogers paper External cognition: how do graphical representations work? is a good introduction.

Do you think people’s ability to play the isomorphic versions of TTT was affected by their familiarity with the graphical layouts? If a player was given enough practice would they play TTT as well no matter how the game looked? If they could practice would the speed at which they learn to play better be due to the visual representation? Why would one visual representation be easier to learn with than another?

The benefit of this research is it highlights an interesting danger of an individual centered user experience: People could end up shaping and creating tools that make it subtly hard to use the tools for thinking and problem solving. For example if you were an accountant or scientist looking at lots of numbers there is software that makes it easier to create visualisations of the numbers: How do you know that your visualisation isn’t playing with your mind by making it harder to think about the numbers?

Dear Santa can I have a Dattoo (by frog design) and a Timeflex (from solovyovdesign). More at Top 10 technology wonders that don’t exist yet

A clever kinda crowdsourcing business idea: Low Cost Usability Testing

Scientists have discovered a second light-sensing system in the human eye that tells your body whether its day or night.

Got sometime to throw your ears in the direction of Philippe Starck’s TED talk about design?

In today’s Creativity Knowledge post I’m focusing on a series of research projects from Patrick Baudisch, who is affiliated with the VIBE group in Microsoft Research and DUB in the University of Washington. Over the years Patrick and co-researchers have developed a range of innovative interaction techniques focused on enhancing people’s ability to move content around screens.

Interactive displays surfaces are getting larger – for example checkout these exciting demos of Multi-Touch and Surface (thanks to Cormac and co for the link). A usability problem is that content, such as icons, is moved around these large display surfaces using the same techniques as on desktops. We grab an icon with the mouse, we drag the icon by moving the mouse a physical distance proportional to on-screen distance, we then place the icon where we want it to go by letting go of the icon.

The desktop interaction model, which is designed for small displays, has been kludged to work on large surfaces. Imagine moving the icon with a large wall sized display: we grab the icon, we run half way across the room to drag the icon to a desired location, we let go of the icon, we catch our breath then run half way back across the room to where we started.

How would you make it easier to move content around large displays? How about when you can interact with the displays using your whole body?

Check out this interactive online flash demo where you can play with drag-and-pop. Instructions for the demo are here. Drag-and-pop is designed so when a “user starts dragging an icon towards some target icon, drag-and-pop responds by temporarily moving potential target icons towards the user’s current cursor location, thereby allowing the user to interact with these icons using comparably small hand movements”. On the drag-and-pop website you can find videos and papers explaining the interaction technique in detail, along with material explaining push-and-pop, drag-and-pick and Mountaz Hascoët’s push-and-throw. Yep all this pushing, dragging and popping is confusing! Enjoy.

On a related point: I’m regularly drawn to research around innovative interaction techniques but is there too much focus on novel interactions in interaction design research? Are we like moths to the flame of novelty? Does novelty distract from the development of deeper theories? Or does it highlight that HCI can and should also be practiced as an applied field of research?

Test how your website looks in different web browsers with Browsershots.

You might enjoy the high volume Interaction Design Association (IxDA) mailing list, which is good for getting a sense of interaction design as practiced in the business world.

Visit Riding With Robots for eerie photos of what Spirit and Opportunity see on Mars, along with images from other space robots.

On idealist you can read about lots of (possible) inventions or share your ideas and creativity. I’d like to get my hands on one of those cutting scales.

Lots and lots of usability and online accessibility tools that perform automated evaluations.

Tomorrow night the Alchemist Cafe in Dublin is meeting where the there’ll be a talk by Dr Vaughan Bell (who writes one of my favourite blogs: Mind Hacks) on the “Science of Hypnotism”.

Yep, Helvetica was entertaining. There was a big big turn out for it in Dublin.

Ooops, nearly forgot – SEED art + science salon is on tonight with a presentation by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac.

Heat Maps for your website. See what users are doing on each page. An interesting example of a tool for non-intrusive real world usability evaluation.

You should pop over to brainjuice – its an old blog I kept that still has lots of fun (and distracting!) links.

Shirky on “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags“, aka “The rise of user-developed classification”.