This year’s 7th annual SIDER is hosted by DTU, in Copenhagen, and themed around the title Engaging Interaction Design.

A snippet from the paper call opens the topic to looking at how the design process is comprised of a range of activities in which interaction among a host of actors as well as between people, objects and methods may play a role. Engaging in interaction in design may open up to new perspectives, bridging understandings, or emerging interrelations that may be incorporated into the tasks of design.

The conference theme refers to how interaction designers frame, manage, support and/or derive impetus from such engagements. Designers are increasingly facing the task of engaging users and user insight through participation, thinking with things in design, and facilitating organizational interaction through design methods. Conversely, objects and methods, such as design games and IT-mediated approaches, may frame, manage or support the design process in unexpected ways.

For more information on paper submissions and the ACM and it’s standards visit the Design Journal and Conference Call announcement.

Paper Submission Deadline: 18 Feb 2011

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Here is a really well made video about ubiquitous computing and the inherent issues of when everything is interconnected. The video was presented by Gillian Crampton Smith at the end of her TEI’11 keynote last week in Madeira. Nice work!

[thanks Stoffel for the link]

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Mads Soegaard and the team at Interaction-Design.org just launched a new encyclopedia related to IxD, HCI and UX topics. The contributions are from leading figures who either invented or contributed significantly to each topic. This approach is quite interesting as it departs from the fully open and crowd-source dependent system inspired by Wikipedia. Here is an excerpt from their announcement:

The new encyclopedia features video interviews which we flew around the world and shot at different universities.

We make world-class educational materials available for free because we believe it’s about the Democratization of Knowledge: That people from all the far corners of the world can get free access to world-class educational materials.

Head out to www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia to discover this amazing new resource. Check their Youtube page, it contains really valuable lengthy videos.

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Remember folks: Arduinos are fun! (great ending!)

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This week I stumbled upon a couple of sites on twitter that MUST be in your bookmarks. The first one is UI Patterns. It covers the most common UI patterns (obvious, duh): registration, login, lists, libraries… it is a collection of tips and examples of common situations we’ll all have to deal with. Things that are obvious but always tricky to do nicely. The other website is Little big details, a tumblr collecting simple but elegant details in different websites or apps. Enjoy!

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Viewing In Private Fair is the first Virtual Art Fair that delivers the best in contemporary art from around the world. (The site still works a bit faulty, but its getting better)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR6ssJz9zAE]

VIP Art Fair website

There are a few interactive installations (you have to register and log in prior to watch):

Make out by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

Surface Tension by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

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Here is another bit of Microsoft propaganda from me. This time, it comes from Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge (UK). Richard Harper, who is Principal Researcher in the Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) group, recently published a book titled Texture, Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. I haven’t read the book just yet, but knowing his work and the publications from the SDS group, I’m sure it is super relevant and insightful. Here is a snippet from the MIT Press page of the book:

Harper explores the interplay between technological innovation and socially creative ways of exploiting technology, between our delight in using new forms of communication and our vexation at the burdens this places on us, and connects these to what it means to be human—alive, connected, expressive—today. He describes the mistaken assumptions of developers that “more” is always better—that videophones, for example, are better than handhelds—and argues that users prefer simpler technologies that allow them to create social bonds. Communication is not just the exchange of information. There is a texture to our communicative practices, manifest in the different means we choose to communicate (quick or slow, permanent or ephemeral). The goal, Harper says, should not be to make communication more efficient, but to supplement and enrich the expressive vocabulary of human experience.

I had the chance to work with the SDS group in Cambridge last Spring, and I don’t regret one bit of it. It was a very inspiring and stimulating experience. I’ll go ahead and order Richard’s new book right away. Look for a review here soon.

Available at MIT Press, Amazon US, Amazon UK

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How To Win Back Your Ex log/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/ideo-logo-e1295335921672.jpg” alt=”” width=”150″ height=”50″ />The IDEO Chicago office is looking for a senior communication designer, with an emphasis in new media (interactive, web and motion) and an expertise in typography. Candidates should have at least 5 years of experience, supported by strong visualization and prototyping skills, comfort working in multidisciplinary teams and excellent communication and client-facing skills. Candidates should demonstrate an ability to work across a range of projects, from brand and identity design to online experiences. Prototyping and production skills are essential, as well as a passion for design and a point of view about your work. All candidates must send a portfolio or work samples along with their inquiries to be considered.

SKILLS REQUIRED

Visual design expertise – Candidates for this position know the difference between good and great work and are able to contribute within teams to deliver great work. They not only identify and evangelize best practices, but are able to push new boundaries and explore new territory in order to deliver innovation. They should demonstrate excellent composition and typography skills, a keen understanding of systems, and an eye for detail.

 Prototyping skills – Successful applicants for this position understand prototyping methods at different levels of fidelity, and have experience doing and initiating such work. Applicants should feel comfortable throughout all phases of a project, from translating verbal ideas into visual concepts through design development and refinement to production-ready artwork.

 Team skills – Candidates must believe that better work is accomplished through collaboration and be able to effectively share their point of view and expertise. They should possess the ability to inspire teams through collaboration as well as direction, vision and planning. They should be highly organized with an ability to multi-task and manage multiple deadlines.

 Communication skills – Candidates must have strong presentation, verbal and written skills. They understand the business environment and what clients need to make something actionable and how to make clients feel comfortable throughout the innovation process. Additionally, successful applicants understand the value of design and brand within a business context.

 Education – Bachelors Degree in Graphic Design, New Media or Equivalent

 Skills – Design Prototyping Tools across a variety of media (print, motion, web) including proficiency in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, AfterEffects, (Flash or Director a plus).

 
If you are interested in applying please click this link, http://www.ideo.com/careers/interactive-communication-designer

How To Win Back Your Ex

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Of course, this is just a joke. I couldn’t stop laughing when I was watching it for the first time.

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Google calls it The Google Code university. You can learn different programming languages from the ground up, everything teached by Google staff.

It’s worth to give it a try:
http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/html-css-javascript/

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No sound, just silence.

http://www.vimeo.com/chriskpalmer

http://www.shadowfolds.com/

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Lena Edman and I were getting a bit restless on client-projects here. We decided to have some fun after-hours and make our own little stop-motion experiments.

Hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it!

(Felt bad missing out on all the fun learning up in Umeå, so thank you UID-ers for the inspiration)

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Eyeo brings together the most creative coders, designers and artists working today, and shaping tomorrow—expect an amazing three days of talks, labs, demos & events fueled by the people and tools that are transforming digital culture.
Converge to inspire.

A pretty stellar list of presenters—mostly datavis specialists and artists—is already up. It includes: Golan Levin, Ben Fry, Casey Reas, Amanda Cox, Robert Hodgin, Marius Watz, Heather Knight, Nervous System, and many others.

The dates of the festival are 27-29 June 2011 in Minneapolis, MN, USA. By the way, Minneapolis, one of the two twin cities, is the US’s friendliest city to cycle in. That ain’t nothin’.

I don’t know if the School still has some of the Higher Education prize money anymore. If so, y’all should apply.

Go to eyeofestival.com for more info.

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Sorry for the Microsoft-heavy angle on my posts, but hey I’m in Redmond so that’s what I’m surrounded with!

The Kinect controller is proving to be quite popular, both in mainstream gaming but also in the hacky-designerly-sensorium domain. It’s a great bundle of sensors at a super affordable price. How does it exactly works? Well that is less obvious to properly understand the many facets that give Kinect all its power.

The XBoX’s Engineering Blog recently published a nice article detailing how the thing actually works. It’s worth the read and makes a good primer on the topic of machine learning. It goes to some details about the development of the whole system, failures they had along the way, and how they rely on prototyping with users to validate their ideas.

The well-established rules for HCI didn’t always apply when designing interactions for a living room with a 10-foot gesture experience, but that’s what made the process exciting! Through play testing we were able to better understand how users behaved, how much body movement was comfortable while gesturing for extended periods of time, and what natural gestures conflicted with the gesture sets we were exploring.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/EngineeringBlog/122910-HowYouBecometheController

Below is an older video explaining the Kinect.

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A generous initiative that could make your life easier when beating time : The Noun Project.

“The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.”

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