Intwo

It has been far too long since the last post on this blog. Largely due to other aspects of Per and my lives, the updates have slipped by the wayside. In an attempt to revitalize the use of this space, we have made a decision to change it’s direction slightly.

I will be taking a course on speculative design in which one required element is blog posts. Since the content of the course is somewhat inline to what has been posted on intwo in the past, I will be updating intwo with the required posts for the class. As always, discussion is very welcome, we would love to hear what you have to think about the material posted.

design | No Comments

It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.

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design, environment, humanity, technology | 2 Comments

Mike McCracken, loneconspirator , has made an Audio ping-pong game (or audio Pong, really) for one person using an Arduino board, headphones, and an accelerometer (a sensor that measures tilt, used in the Nintendo Wii controller). It is still in an early prototype stage, but I have a feeling he will keep refining it.

It is a one-person game. You put on the headphones, and you will hear a sound “approaching”. It will be to your right or left, and you tilt your head to center the sound. If you tilt your head, or the “paddle”, to the right position, you strike the “ball”, and it will come back. Speed increases over time, just like classic arcade games.

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technology | 3 Comments

Today, I was invited to a design charette hosted by SIAT’s Ron Wakkary. It was a 2.5 hour gathering with about 15 talented designers and thinkers from SFU. The goal of the charette was to come up with interaction design concepts for a solar powered house. The focus was partly on raising occupant awareness of their power consumption habits, but most importantly to enrichen the experience of living in the house.

The project is a big one, with 2 other universities in Canada joining SFU to form “Team North”. The concept house is called “North House”, and will be one of 20 entries to the 2009 Solar Decathlon, put on by the US Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

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design, environment | No Comments

Nastypixel is a design collective, composed of people associated with Interaction Ivrea in Italy. As a contribution to open-source learning, they have published a a series of excellent step-by-step tutorials, or “recipes”, on how to make various DIY interactive projects. The first project, Soundpad, teaches you how to take apart a computer keyboard and appropriate the internal logic to your own needs. This way you can connect four button pads to your computer, where a Flash software component plays different sounds depending on the pad you press.

As a note on gestural interfaces, previously mentioned on Intwo, SmartRetina is a platform for computer gesture recognition, developed by Yaniv Steiner of Nastypixel. It has a camera component and a software component, forming the base for touchless gestural interfaces.

design, technology | 2 Comments

Feedr is a concept I am working on. The name is a play on “News Reader” – just like a reader makes your favorite blogs and online news available from within one interface, feedr allows you to search newly blogged-about videos. The idea is that you enter a search word/term, and the software searches blog posts tagged with those words that include videos. What you get in the feedr player is a continuous stream of videos. There are controls to pause, skip ahead and back, and there is a link to the original video.

I am posting this to get some feedback on the idea. I want to keep the interface extremely minimal – the inspiration is a TV, but instead of a predetermined set of channels, you ‘zap’ by entering search terms, and the channels are ever changing – reflecting the current online trends and discussions. As soon as I get a working prototype up and running, I will post a link here.

technology | 5 Comments

Cati Vaucelle [blog, Interview], Researcher in the Tangible Media Group at SFU Media Lab, is scheduled for a talk at SFU Surrey, May 2nd at 10.30 a.m. Sign up here ($25, free for SFU students + Alumni). This is going to be a really interesting event!

Vaucelle proposes a new genre of human-computer interaction: Gesture Object Interfaces. Gestures promise the potential for a person to interact with technology using her entire body and spectrum of movement, rather than being limited by the ‘traditional’ human-computer interaction paradigm of keyboard and mouse.

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design | 7 Comments

This is a great music sharing site. Create a playlist and you are added to the list.

The idea is good, but I am really impressed with the interaction design. He is limiting the searchability of the site, which some users could find as a deterrent. Putting the users in a cluster, though, increases the exploration of the content, and then, when you view a users playlist he is using semantic urls so that you know where you are and that you can bookmark back to that page. So many sites use proprietary bookmarking systems when all internet browsers already have bookmarking capabilities.

The interface is clean and to the point. Kudos.

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design, technology | 8 Comments

Yesterday I attended a public lecture by Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO and grandfather of interaction design, at Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver BC. Mr Moggridge designed the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass in 1980, and is the author of the book Designing Interactions, a historical look at the evolution of the field of interaction design. The book comes with a DVD packed with interviews with people who have shaped the field, and it has a companion website.

The title of the talk was Design Thinking, and it was an introduction to the problem space interaction designers move in. He started with the example of phone services.

design | No Comments