Alex Wright has got some of the prototype sketches for the UI designs seen in the new Spielberg movie, Minority Report.
» Alex Wright’s blog: 6.26.2002 : UI prototyping, Hollywood-style
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Bit busy with low-tech augmentation of reality at the moment but just time to ctrl-d this entry of Yoz’s which looks to have tons of good stuff in it about ubiquitous computing, simulation of urban patterns and augmented reality.
» Yoz Grahame’s Commonplace Megaphone: The Equator Project
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Somebody out there on the Lazyweb™ do this. Please! Personal mind-marketmaps...
“Random Idea:
- take the access logs from a weblog
- work out how many hits each individual entry gets
- use this to choose a background colour for that entry
Now adapt this process to work in realtime. The more popular stuff (which is likely to be the most interesting) will stick out, less popular stuff will fade into the background, giving attentive visitors an easy way to jump straight to the best content.”
» paranoidfish.org/notes/ : Ambient Page Stats
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Really, really going to have to write up some stuff about Ben Fry’s talk; but in the mean time, Peter’s been talking with another info.vis.Guru, Marti Hearst:
“Marti forecasts a significant change in how visualizations are approached. In the past, they’ve been treated as standalone applications, “Look at this thing! And how beautiful it is!” Where as the key for the future will be incorporating it as a small part in a larger system, integrating it with the rest of the interface. In doing so, this will require visualizations to seriously take the problem that users want to solve into account, a motivation currently lacking from many visualizations.
» peterme: marti hearst and info visualisation
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Nathan:
“Experiences happen through time and space and reflect a context thats always greater than we realize. Building understanding for our audience and participants necessarily starts with context, yet most of our experiences with computers and devices, including application software, hardware, operating systems, websites, etc. operate as if theyre somehow independent of whats happening around them. Most people dont make these distinctions.”
...which leads nicely into Quinn:
“CLIs have long been our retarded little friends that do whatever we say, but only if we say it exactly right.GUIs are more intimidating; they get the first and last words in. They use language and visuals to speak to us as something closer to equals. We’ve kept them largely separate and tried to keep them both very non threatening.
Our metaphors were as dry and workaday as you can get: our solopsist desktop, WIMP. The next metaphor which has already started to poke out a bit (especially from the net) is more organic.
It changes and flows with us and engages us more completely. It exists and is even active when we aren’t looking at it. It incorporates language, written and verbal and the virtual physicality that we have now without the GUI. As such, it incorporates more of us and has the opportunity to move with us and with the network as a whole, both other machines and people.
Computers don’t exist in vacuums anymore, nourished by long carefully drawn out strings of characters. It would be good to stop behaving as if this is the more powerful way to use them. This isn’t just a new metaphor for the GUI, it’s a new metaphor for computer use that the GUI and CLI and a verbal component could wrap around.”
» Boxesandarrows.com: Computer Human Values by Nathan Shedroff
» Quinn at ambiguous.org: Post OS UI
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A half-way decent idea, plus just enough OBLAAT to make the medicine go-down and scoot-around the place; gets you slashdotted, mefi‘d and number one on daypop, within 24hrs.
Blimey. What a day. Still need to write up notes from PRPS, and the Ben Fry talk we did at the BBC, which was awesome… but too tired. Have to sleep. Remind me though…
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“This isn’t going to be the year of paper/screen convergence. Maybe not even the decade. Sitting next to Steve Gillmor, I dropped my yellow legal pad onto the floor and said: “Oops. There goes $2500.” Absent a digital surface that has the qualities of paper that matter—including being cheap and disposable—I see digital ink as sometimes useful but not revolutionary.”
» Jon’s Radio: Convergence: I’ll take computer/phone over screen/paper
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Sitting in LSE liveblogging PRPS – natalie jeremienko is presenting “megabyte” – an aibo-like robodog that has been hacked to to detect radioactivity and other toxic hazards – it’s reward by finding it… makes this invisble hazard, and it’s allied data visible and accesible by all – especially kids.
Saw her talk about this at Voice02, but she’s going into much more detail, and it seems to have progressed more.
it’s a $39.99 toy… but natalie has put up a wiki which explains how to hack them to do weird and wonderful things.
Now she’s talking about how these things are actually the source of loads of really cheap components to experiment with a-life because of the economies of scale and distribution networks of the toy industry. Plus cannablising from the huge r/c subculture. Opensource robotics. Distribute the code, not the parts.
Now talking about Sony’s pseudo-opensourcing of AIBO’s sourcecode, and the campaign mounted by dog owners to get it opensourced
other memebullets she’s shootin’ from the hip:
Hopefully, no time-travelling avengers will comeback and assassinate Natalie for making these things…
» http://www.proboscis.org.uk/prps/docs/p_jeremijenko.html
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here.. Metafilter | Comments on 18034
Plus we have our first pictures of a warchalk symbol in the wild. Whooo!
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Right then. Been a while since the lunch with Loosemore, Hurley and O’Brien, but nethertheless, here’s an idea that wiggled it’s way into existence through talking with those guys.
The idea behind Warchalking is that it breaks the cycle of having to be online to get to the pages that give you the free-wireless node info for the city you are in. Fellow free-wireless travellers or those who maintain the nodes themselves have scrawled chalk symbols on the pavements to indicate the presence of wireless access.
A few people I’ve talked to about this have said “why chalk?” and suggested something more permanent. Well, part of me is a fuddy-duddy who doesn’t want to inflict permanent marks on the pavement (but hey, the utitlities providers do) and the other, more important part, is that I like the idea of the marks having an impermanence, so they have to be renewed and validated on a regular basis by an active community of warchalkers.
The root of this stuff is Hobo language – Nadav pointed to some great resources on this a while ago. Like hobo language, hopefully we can evolve a little common symbology and chalk up our cities…
» Blackbeltjones.com: Let’s Warchalk
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...so that’s what I look like when I’m geeking out over something…
» The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, June 24, 2002: “A journalistic moment of joy, preserved”
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I know I’ve been deviating wildly from IA and Design here lately, but it’s all connected to what I do everyday in my head, and hey – this here is my outboard brain.
I think everyone involved in design, particularly experience design is keenly aware of the importance of storytelling, in communicating important ideas in a business context, and also the wider heritage of the storyteller and narrative’s bearing on designing experiences.
I’ve been plugging away at couple of comicbooks for my own pleasure for a few years now, and comics are something I do continously – storyboards and illustrations for work, or for fun.
But i hadn’t written a story as in ficitonal prose with words and nothing else, since secondary school. So, I thought I’d try.
It took me an evening. I didn’t edit it. Didn’t revisit it apart from a spellcheck. I wanted to see what came out. I lucked out, and got it published on upsideclown.com.
It’s clumsy. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not a great read. It’s too high concept, and there’s no-one or nothing to care about.
But it was fun
I’ve started reading “ender’s game” on the recommendation of many folk I met at ETCON. In Orson Scott Card’s introduction he offers up this on the difference between what I did (and enjoyed) and what he did when he had the idea for the book…
“It was a good idea… [but] I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about turning the idea into a story. It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tll around that idea.”
and further thoughts about the craft of telling that story once it has grown from eing a mere idea:
“I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn – that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale”
I went through the tale once, and it was probably one of the million wrong ways to tell the story as a result – but I’ve got the bug now, and I’ll try again… See – separation of content from presentation, iterative process… not so far away from being a proper IA blog ;-p
»Books By Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game
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TonyP (who looks a HELLUVALOT like Chief Anderson from Battle of the Planets), after we had a cup of tea and a natter in the BBC canteen, where I mentioned some of Raffi Krikorian’s stuff knocked up a little bit of code that takes the current weather in London from a public site, and converts it into a background colour for his homepage.
The poetic bit, for me at least, is that little squares of the colour/temp. start building up at the bottom of the page over time.
Cue another natter between Tony, Me, Gid, Caroline and a few others who are looking at the design of the BBC Homepage, about layering information, especially rich, pattern-based “second-order” stuff, beneath or around a very simple, usable page design.
New users, or those in a task-hungry hurry are not impeded from use, and those with subtler or less-directed needs get satisfied by the nuances that build up and reveal themselves over time as a very individual, collective or complex/adaptive infotapestry is built up.
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Dan’s got some lovely thoughts going, connecting design for community, weblogs and a Simon Schama lecture:
“History commands attention for its gifts of freedom, empathy and the possibility of reconstituting community; all big words to which the practising stiffs of the craft are constitutionally allergic. But the big words won’t go away.”» cityofsound/blog/”The music of life passing through fields of sonic distortion”
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Just found this:
Josh has pointed me towards Herman Hesse before, and loads of ETCON folk told me to read “Enders Game”, which I’ve just started.
Liz is thinking of getting this: “Games and Information”: Eric Rasmusen (Editor)
Where else should the intellectually-challenged user-experience designer begin to get his head around Game Theory??
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Jeff’s done a nice job here – a very accessible and sellable introduction to benefits of faceted classification. Very readable and forwardable little memebullet to aim squarely at clients and bosses alike.
“So often we assume that Web sites should be hierarchically organized. We talk about a “home page” that offers “top-level navigation” so that users can “drill down” to the content. It’s as if we’re programmed to think top down.But what about information that isn’t as easily structured this way? Sometimes, content has many attributes that have different importance to different users. A hierarchy assumes everyone approaches these attributes the same way, but that’s often not the case.”
Blimey! I actually blogged something about IA for once. I was starting to feel guilty about that…
» adaptive path » publications » essay for june 18, 2002
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London’s in the middle of a huge come-down. And so am I. Acch. Well… I guess now it’s time to support Korea... and… even…
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
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My .sig is, has been for a while, and probably always will be:
“To have a great idea, you have to have a lot of ideas”
» Index – Linus Pauling Research Notebooks – Special Collections
[via Oblomovka]
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and tell any friends of yours called “Sarah Connor” to start working out and held for the hills.
After four months of entertaining humans, Gaak the predator robot yesterday did what all the best robots do in science fiction: he copied his masters’ most basic instinct and made a dash for freedom.Programmed to sink a metal fang into smaller but more nimble prey robots, to “eat” their electric power, at a science adventure centre, Gaak showed that a two year experiment in maturing robot “thinking” may be proving alarmingly successful.
Left unattended for 15 minutes, the 2ft metal machine crept along a barrier until it found a gap, squeezed through, navigated across a car park and reached the Magna science centre’s exit by the M1 motorway in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
» Guardian Unlimited | Robot fails to find a place in the sun
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