Background: In 2010 Ergonomidesign had the opportunity to develop a game which would showcase Microsoft’s new Surface. The project was internally funded by ourselves and a software developer called Connecta with the aim to create a compelling interactive experience using multi-touch. Together we created a music game called Sonicspree that launched in 2010. The game was very well received and Fast Company magazine listed it as one of the top “killer applications†for Microsoft Surface. It won the Microsoft .NET awards in 2010.
We believe this game has much more potential! Our goal is to take the game over to the ipad to be released to potentially millions of music lovers and gamers.
Intel asked the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) to look 10 years into the future and imagine how people might capture or display photos given expected advances in technology. Intel is in the ever faster processor business and uses these predictions to steer chip architecture as well as to help spur developers imagination to maintain demand for faster silicon.
Over the course of the project one of the teams (the one made by Chris Bierbower and Marco Triverio) realized that using photos for story telling is such a fundamentally instinctive behavior that it is safe to predict it will last through several generations of technological innovation. The concept they created, called Living Frames, develops on this insight. However, foreseeing 10 years into the future is tricky. With IBM’s Watson, we’re seeing a sneak peak of improvements in natural language and intention recognition. The Living Frames team thinks that one of the photo related advances users will enjoy are computers that will actually help us tell stories and have richer conversations. They created a video to illustrate the idea.
Jan Chipchase, Insights guru at frog design, previously at Nokia, recently plublished an essay titled Imperialist Tendencies on his personal site. He answers, via a long and very informative detour, a few questions pertaining to design research, users participation in insights activities, and other similar activities under the umbrella of ethomethodology. Mr. Chipchase explains his drive to conduct such inquiries, and to what extent big corporations (and all designers) are guilty of some form of design imperialism.
My summary is not that good, so head over to his personal site for a proper read. It would be super inspiring to have him visit UID at some point in time!
From the Android Developers Blog: Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is our biggest redesign yet — both for users and developers. We’ve enhanced the UI framework with new interactions and styles that will let you create Android apps that are simpler and more beautiful than ever before.
To help you in that mission, we’re introducing Android Design: the place to learn about principles, building blocks, and patterns for creating world-class Android user interfaces. Whether you’re a UI professional or a developer playing that role, these docs show you how to make good design decisions, big and small.
Does it hurt your eyes when you code? “Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. “
Mads Soegaard (and the team from Interaction-Design.org) continues to provision their Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction with world-class educational material. The newest chapter on Affective Computing is written by Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University. It is definitely a must-read for any IxD designer, and be sure to check out the four additional commentaries by Rosalind W. Picard, Paul Hekkert, Egon L. van den Broek and Joyce H. D. M. Westerink.
“The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities.
But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.”
The Socio-Digital Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge is starting a series of publications titled “Things We’ve Learnt About…”. These publications are an effort to communicate and package design research insights into something easily accessible for anyone involved with the development of tech products, designers and non-resesarchers in general.
The first issue tackles Human-to-Human Communication. It is available in digital format or in print-on-demand on MagCloud.
You can read more about the Things We’ve Learnt About… project on this page. The people responsible for this series are Richard Banks, Nick Duffield, Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen. Very inspiring work, and I can’t wait to read the coming issues.
Ericsson made this documentary titled Networked Society ‘On The Brink’. Here is the official description:
In On The Brink we discuss the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud. Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. Concepts such as borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today’s ‘dumb society’ are brought up and discussed.
The creator of the C programming language, Dennis Ritchie, passed away earlier this Fall. His seminal work and textbook influenced many generations of programmers and technology enthusiasts. C, the programming language, has made possible many of the great computation machines/systems we now love (or hate). Just to put in perspective, we all program our Arduinos using C these days. There are a lot of underlying values and thoughts behind the creation of C, on the other hand it has its share of limitations and criticism. It was designed to be platform agnostic and valuable on a wide range of hardware, from embedded microcontrollers to supercomputers. To discover more about C, check out Ellen Ullman’s NYTimes article or the wikipedia entry.
“hello, world” was the output visible on a monitor if you followed the first example in the book “The C Programming Language†co-written by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan. Over the years, it became the iconic first test program that you would write when you learn a new system or try out a new programming language.
So next time you tackle a new programming challenge, you can now pop a “hello world” program in there, knowing where it came from.
It is this time of year where we get to eat a lot and reflect a bit on the last twelve months that just went by so quickly. 2011 was a fruitful year interaction-wise. I am trying to collect a few links and thoughts to specifically look back at the novelties, hits and misses that impacted us over the last year. Share your perspectives and links in the comments.
IxD-related news/things that made a dent in my life during 2011:
(another new) android tablet announced, Nokia and MS join forces, 3d printers are selling like cupcakes, Steve Jobs passed away, Flash on mobile discontinued, Arduino 1.0 launched, everybody is shooting movies with DLSR, companies are launching IoT devices, no more multitouch tables (or very few, phew!), Open source hardware (OSHW), video mapping is trendy, kickstarter is the new ebay (pay now but get it in 3 months!), LEDs everywhere, fancier robots but they are still creepy, Sparkfun is the Wallmart (but much better) for makers and designers, Google still owns the web (or think it does), Kinect everything projects, mind-control computing is still not there yet but coming fast, quad-copters will save us, revolutions are happening everywhere and governments are trying to control or shut down telecom/internet, I am still waiting 5-10 minutes for a render on my latest generation computer, 3D movies/TVs are meaningless tech designed for planed obsolescence, the IxD world is growing quite much, IxD graduates are finding amazing jobs/internships, I am happy there is no tech on my bike, so I can easily fix it myself!
The Xbox Kinect has certainly become a useful tool for innovation, with modders finding applications in medical imaging, robotics, and even aids for the visually impaired, to name just a few. Now it looks like you can add “topography” to that list with the development of the SandyStation. Created by two students in the Czech Republic, the SandyStation projects a realistic ecosystem over an ordinary sandbox, which can be altered in real-time.
The students, Peter Altman and Robert Eckstein from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, built the device using a Kinect, a data projector, a program of their own design, and of course, an ordinary box of sand. Sitting two feet above the sand, the Kinect monitors the varying heights and depths of the area and relays the information through a program to a projector. The projector then displays the topographical information on top of the sandbox as a series of specific colors. Each color represents a different height or depth, from dark blues for deep bodies of water to forest greens for the tops of hills, giving the sandbox the appearance of a thriving, lush environment.
That would be impressive enough, but the SandyStation can almost immediately respond to any changes made to the sandbox and alter the image accordingly. A person can carve out rivers with their hands and watch the “water” flow down a new path or scoop up a hill that appears to instantly sprout plant life. In a clever touch, the programmers have also made it possible to build a mountain and dig a hole out of the top to make it spew lava. The program will even show this virtual lava being extinguished if it runs into a body of water.
Writing the first prototype for the SandyStation only took the authors a few days, but they are still looking for further uses for it. In the future, there could be some mainstream uses for the technology in other industries such as education, advertising, or graphic design.
