Still from the film xXx from Mark Coleran’s portfolio.

In Movie OS, visual storytelling is used to make the system’s important, critical reaction to a user’s action abundantly clear. In Movie OS, you know if you’re logging into Facebook.

I’d argue that visual storytelling doesn’t exist – if it does, it hardly exists at all – in computer or consumer eletronics user interfaces. The entire palette of visual storytelling in terms of interface, through accident of history, is purely engineering and control-led.

This is where, I’d say, Apple is grasping when it says that interfaces should sometimes look toward real-life objects. Real-life physical objects have affordances that are used in effective visual storytelling – and animation – that can be used well to make clear the consequences of actions. It’s more complicated than that, though, and it can go horribly wrong as well as right.

“While Charles & Ray were frequently contracted by corporations like Polaroid, Westinghouse, and IBM, they never made films on demand. Nearly all their films represent a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the client, and they only made films when there was genuine interest. Witness Westinghouse ABC (1965), which is essentially a montage of the Westinghouse product line (note that the Westinghouse logo was designed by Paul Rand). Even here there is a spirited interest in the subject. In the film, Charles & Ray focus on the technology and typography at a break-neck tempo and transform what would otherwise be an incredibly dry subject into something rich and lively. Also, in SX-70 (1972), intended as a promotional film for the newly released Polaroid SX-70 camera, the Eames’ take advantage of the opportunity to discuss optics, transistors and to display their own polaroid photographs.

A good overview via The Films of Charles & Ray Eames.

Lovely new exploratory homepage at Thinglink.

There is clearly a very well curated user-base at SVPPLY creating a continuous navigation of want.

Related: Social networks for things, Thingd, Allconsuming.

VOLUME 5a
May 2009
Part one of Volume 5 explores the connections between the moving framed image and geography, offering author-created videos and movie clips to supplement textual materials.

VOLUME 5b
May 2009
Part two of Volume 5 engages a range of media from televisual and cinematic spaces to altporn’s Suicide Girls to the use of place in transnational news..

On that afternoon we didn’t have a printer handy for making the AR marks, so we took to drafting them by hand, stencilling them off the screen with a pencil and inking them in. This hand-crafted process led to all sorts of interesting connections between the possibilities of craft and digital information.

We had lots of ideas about printing the markers on clothes, painting them on nails, glazing them into ceramics, etc. We confused ARtoolkit by drawing markers in perspective, and tried to get recursive objects by using screen based markers and video feedback.

Now as it turns out there is an entire research programme dedicated to looking at just this topic. Variable Environment is a research programme involving partners like ECAL and EPFL. The great thing is that they are blogging the entire exploratory (they call it ‘sketch’) phase and curating the results online. The work is multi-disciplinary and involves architects, visual designers, computer scientists, interaction designers, etc. Check out the simple AR ready products, sample applications and mixed reality tests with various patterns.

This seems to be part of a shift in the research community, to publishing ongoing and exploratory work online (championed by the likes of Nicolas Nova and Anne Galloway). Very inspirational.

Underneath the desk I have stuck a grid of RFID tags, and on the top surface, the same grid of post-it notes. With the standard Nokia Service Discovery application it is possible to call people, send pre-defined SMSes or load URLs by touching the phone to each post-it on the desk. On the post-its themselves I have hand-written the function, message and the recipient. This is somewhat like a cross between a phone-book, to-do list and temporary diary, with notes, scribbles and tea stains alongside names.

Initial ideas were to spraypaint or silkscreen some of the touch icons to the desk surface, and I may well do that at some point. But for quick prototyping it made sense to use address labels or post-it notes that can be stuck, re-positioned and layered with hand-written notes.

This is an initial step in thinking about the use of RFID and mobile phones, a way of thinking through making. In many ways it is proving to be more inconvenient than the small screen (particularly with the occasionally unreliable firmware on this particular cover, I can’t speak for the production version). But it has highlighted some really interesting issues.

First of all it has brought to the forefront the importance of implicit habits. Initially, it took a real effort to think about the action of using the table as an interface: I would reach for the phone and press names to make a call, instead of placing it on the desk. But for some functions, such as sending an SMS, it has become more habitual.

SMSes have become more like ‘pings’ when very little effort is made to send them. At the same time they are more physically tangible: I rest the phone in a certain position on the desk and wait for it to complete an action. The most useful functions have been “I’m here” or “I’m leaving” messages to close friends.

I have had to consider the ‘negative space’ where the mobile must rest without any action. This space has potential be used for context information; a corner of the table could make my phone silent, another corner could change my presence online. Here it would be interesting to refer to Jan Chipchase’s ideas around centres of gravity and points of reflection, it’s these points that could be most directly mapped to behaviour. I’m thinking about other objects and spaces that might be appropriate for this, and perhaps around the idea of thoughtless acts.

If this was a space without wireless internet, I could also imagine this working very well for URLs: quick access to google searches, local services or number lookups, which is usually very tricky on a small screen. Here it would be interesting to think about how the mobile is used in non-connected places, such as the traditional Norwegian Hytte [pdf].

This process also raised a larger issue around the move towards tangible or physical information, which also implies a move towards the social. As I was making the layout of my address book and associated functions, I realised that maybe these things shouldn’t be explicit, visible, social objects. The arrangement of people within the grid makes personal sense; the placement is a personal preference and maps in certain ways to frequency and type of contact. But I wonder how it appears to other people when this pattern is exposed. Will people be offended by my layout? What if I don’t include a rarely called contact? Are there numbers I want to keep secret, hidden behind acronyms in the ‘Names’ menu?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out and changes over time, particularly in the reaction of others. I’ll post more about the use of NFC in other personal contexts in the near future.

The making of…

The desk is made from 20 mm birch ply, surfaced in Linoleum. I stuck a single RFID to the underside, in the place that felt most natural. A 10 cm grid was worked out from that point, and the RFIDs were stuck in that grid, and the same worked out on top. If I were to re-build the desk with this project in mind, the tags should probably be layered close to the surface, between the ply and Linoleum. This would make them slightly more responsive to touch by giving them a larger read/write distance.

Rewriteable 512 bit, Philips MiFare UL stickers.

10 cm grid of tags on the underside of the desk.

Blank post-it notes on the surface, with the same grid.

More photos at Flickr.

Overall the interaction between phone and RFID tags has been good. The reader/writer is on the base of the phone, at the bottom. This seems a little awkward to use at first, but slowly becomes natural. When I have given it to others, their immediate reaction is to point the top of the phone to the tag, and nothing happens. There follows a few moments of explaining as the intricacies of RFID and looking at the phone, with it’s Nokia ‘fingerprint’ icon. As phones increasingly become replacements for ‘contactless cards’, it seems likely that this interaction will become more habitual and natural.

Once the ‘service discovery’ application is running, the read time from tags is really quick. The sharp vibrations and flashing lights add to a solid feeling of interacting with something, both in the haptic and visual senses. This should turn out to be a great platform for embodied interaction with information and function.

The ability to read and write to tags makes it potentially adaptive as a platform wider than just advertising or ticketing. As an interaction designer I feel quite enabled by this technology: the three basic functions (making phonecalls, going to URLs, or sending SMSs) are enough to start thinking about tangible interactions without having to go and program any Java midlets or server-side applications.

I’m really happy that Nokia is putting this technology into a ‘low-end’ phone rather than pushing it out in a ‘smartphone’ range. This is where there is potential for wider usage and mass-market applications, especially around gaming and content discovery.

Improvements

I had some problems launching the ‘service discovery’ application. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and it’s difficult to tell why this is. It would be great to be able to place the phone on the table, knowing that it will respond to a tag, but it was just a little too unreliable to do that without checking to see that it had responded. The version I have still says it’s a prototype, so this may well be sorted out by the released version.

Overall there is a lack of integration between the service discovery application and the rest of the system: Contacts, SMS archive and service bookmarks etc. At the moment we need to enter the application to write and manage tags, or to give a ‘shortcut’ to another phone, but it seems that, as with bluetooth and IR, this should be part of the contextual menus that appear under ‘Options’ within each area of the phone. There are also some infuriating prompts that appear when interacting with URL, more details below.

Details

The phone opens the ‘service discovery’ application whenever it detects a compatible RFID tag near the base of the phone (when the keypad lock is off). This part is a bit obscure: sometimes it doesn’t ‘wake up’ for a tag, and the application needs to be loaded before it will read properly. Once the application is open (about 2-3 seconds) the read time of the tags seems instantaneous.

The shortcuts menu gives access to shortcuts. Confusingly, this is different from ‘bookmarks’ and the ‘names’ list on the phone, although names can be searched from within the application. I think tighter integration with the OS is called for.

Shortcuts can be added, edited, deleted, etc. in the same way as contacts. They can be ‘Given’ to another phone or ‘Written’ to a tag.

There are three kinds of shortcuts: Call, URL or SMS. ‘Call’ will create a call to a pre-defined number, ‘URL’ will load a pre-defined URL, and ‘SMS’ will send a pre-defined SMS to a particular number. This part of the application has the most room for innovative extensions: we should be able to set the state of the phone, change profiles, change themes, download graphics, etc. This can be achieved by loading URLs, but URLs and mobiles don’t mix, so why should we be presented with them, when there could be a more usable layer inbetween? There could also be preferences for prompts: at the moment each action has to be confirmed with a yes or a no, but in some secure environments it would be nice to be able to have a function launched without the extra button push.

If a tag contains no data, then we are notified and placed back on the main screen (as happened when I tried to write to my Oyster card).

If the tag is writeable we are asked which shortcut to write to the tag.

When we touch a tag with a shortcut on it, a prompt appears asking for confirmation. This is a level of UI to prevent mistakes, and a certain level of security, but it also reduces the overall usability of the system. With URL launching, there are two stages of confirmation, which is infuriating. There needs to be some other mode of confirmation, and the ‘service discovery’ app needs to somehow be deeper in the system to avoid these double button presses.

Lastly, there is a log of actions. Useful to see if the application has been reading something in your bag or wallet, without you knowing…

The pseudo-analogue interface of the iPod clickwheel doesn’t cut it. It can be difficult to control when accessing huge alphabetically ordered lists, and the acceleration or inertia of the view can be really frustrating. The combinations of interactions: clicking into deeper lists, scrolling, clicking deeper, turn into long and tortuous experiences if you are engaged in any simultaneous activity. Plus its difficult to use through clothing, or with gloves.

Music and language

My first thought was something Jack and I discussed a long time ago, using a phone keypad to type the first few letters of a artist, album or genre and seeing the results in real-time, much like iTunes does on a desktop. I find myself using this a lot in iTunes rather than browsing lists.

Predictive text input would be very effective here, when limited to the dictionary of your own music library. (I wonder if QIX search would do this for a music library on a mobile?)

Maybe now is the time to look at this as we see mobile phone music convergence.

Since scrolling is inevitable to some degree, even within fine search results, what about using simple movement or tilt to control the search results? One of the problems with using movement for input is context: when is movement intended? And when is movement the result of walking or a bump in the road?

One solution could be a “squeeze and shake” quasi-mode: squeezing the device puts it into a receptive state.

Another could be more reliance on the 3 axes of tilt, which are less sensitive to larger movements of walking or transport.

Gestures

I’m not sure about gestural interfaces, most of the prototypes I have seen are difficult to learn, and require a certain level of performativity that I’m not sure everyone wants to be doing in public space. But having accelerometers inside these devices should, and would, allow for the hacking together other personal, adaptive gestural interfaces that would perhaps access higher level functions of the device.

One gesture I think could be simple and effective would be covering the ear to switch tracks. To try this out we could add a light or capacitive touch sensor to each earbud.

With this I think we would have trouble with interference from other objects, like resting the head against a wall. But there’s something nicely personal and intimate about putting the hand next to the ear, as if to listen more intently.

More knobs

Things that are truly analogue, like volume and time, should be mapped to analogue controls. I think one of the greatest unexplored areas in digital music is real-time audio-scrubbing, currently not well supported on any device, probably because of technical constraints. But scrubbing through an entire album, with a directly mapped input, would be a great way of finding the track you wanted.

Research projects like the DJammer are starting to look at this, specifically for DJs. But since music is inherently time-based there is more work to be done here for everyday players and devices. Let’s skip the interaction design habits we’ve learnt from the CD era and go back to vinyl :)

Evolution of the display

Where displays are required, I hope we can be free of small, fuzzy, low-contrast LCDs. With new displays being printable on paper, textiles and other surfaces there’s the possibility of improving the usability, readability and “glanceability” of the display.

We are beginning to see signs of this with this OLED display on this Sony Network Walkman where the display is under the surface of the product material, without a separate “glass” area.

For the white surface of an iPod, the high-contrast, paper-like surfaces of technologies like e-ink would make great, highly readable displays.

Prototyping

So I really need to get prototyping with accelerometers and display technologies, to understand simple movement and gesture in navigating music libraries. There are other questions to answer: I’m wondering if using movement to scroll through search results would create the appearance of a large screen space, through the lens of a small screen. As with bumptunes, I think many more opportunities will emerge as we make these things.

More reading

Designing for Shuffling
Thoughts on the iPod Shuffle
Bumptunes
Audioclouds/gestural interaction
Sound objects
DJammer
On the body
Runster

(Based on Dourish, see reading recommendations, below)

Each successive development in computer history has made greater use of human skills:

• electrical: required a thorough understanding of electrical design
• symbolic: required a thorough understanding of the manipulation of abstract languages
• textual: text dialogue with the computer: set the standards of interaction we still we live with today

• graphic: graphical dialogue with the computer, using our spatial skills, pattern recognition, and motion memory with a mouse and keyboard

  We have become stuck in this last model.

  Interaction with computers has remained largely the same: desk, screen, input devices, etc. Even entirely new fields like mobile and iTV have followed these interaction patterns.

  Definitions:

• Tangible: physical: having substance or material existence; perceptible to the senses

• Social: human and collaborative abilities, or ‘software that’s better because there’s people there’ (Definition from Matt Jones and Matt Webb)

  Examples

  Dourish notes in the first few chapters of his book that as interaction with computers moves out into the world, it becomes part of our social world too. The social and the tangible are intricately linked as part of “being in the world”.

  What follows are examples of products or services we can use or buy right now. I’m specifically interested in the ways that these theories of ubiquitous computing and tangible interaction are moving out into the world, and the way that we can see the trends in currently available products.

  I’m aware that there are also terrifically interesting things happening in research (eg the Tangible Media Group) but right now I’m interested in the emergent things that start to happen effects of millions of people using things (like Flickr, weblogs, Nintendo DS, and mobile social software).

  Social trends on the web

  On the web the current trend is building simple platforms that support complex social/human behaviour

• Weblogs, newsreaders and RSS: simple platform that has changed the way the web works, and supported simple social interaction (the basic building blocks of dialogue, or conversation)
• Flickr: a simple platform for media/photo sharing: turned into a thriving community: works well with the web by allowing syndicated photos, bases the social network on top of a defined funciton

• Others include del.icio.us, world of warcraft, etc.

  Social mobile computing

  On mobile platforms most of the exciting stuff is happening around presence, context and location

• Familiar strangers: stores a list of all the phones that you have been near in places that you inhabit, and then visualises the space around you according to who you have met before. More mobile social software

• Mogi: location based game, but most interestingly supports different contexts of use: both at home in front of a big screen, and out on a small mobile screen.

  Social games

  Interesting that games are moving away from pure immersive 3D worlds, and starting to devote equal attention to their situated, social context

• Nintendo DS: PictoChat, local wireless networks that can be adapted for gameplay or communication (picture chatting included as standard)
• Sissyfight: very simple social game structure, encourages human behaviour, insults
• Habbohotel: simple interaction structures, (and fantastic attention to detail in iconic representations) support human desires. Now a very large company, in over 12 countries, based on the sales of virtual furniture

• Singstar: entirely social game, about breaking social barriers and mutual humiliation: realtime analysis/visualisation of your voice actually makes you sing worse!

  Tangible games

• Eyetoy: Brings the viewer into the screen, creates a performative and social space, and allows communication via PS2
• Dance Dance Revolution: taking the television into physical space
• Nokia wave-messaging: puts information back into space, and creates social and performative opportunities (Photo thanks to Matt Webb)

• Yellow Arrow: puts digital information into city space, gives us a glimpse of the way that we might have more interaction with situated information in the future

  There are also very interesting aspects of gender in all of this: this move towards the social implies a move towards the type of games/play that is seen more often in girls.

  Recommended reading

  Where the Action Is, Paul Dourish (Read the first 3 chapters for a great introduction)

  Digital Ground, Malcolm McCullough (Exploring the relationship between architectural and digital spaces)

  Physical Computing, O�Sullivan, Igoe (Practical book on making physical computing devices)

  Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold (Exploring wider social aspects of mobile technology)

  The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin (Covers screen based interaction, but has the best discussion on ‘modes’ of any book)

  Mind Hacks, Matt Webb and Tom Stafford (Looks at our interaction with the world from the perspective of neuroscience, great introduction to ‘affordances’)

  ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/03/tangible-and-social-interaction/feed 3 http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:28:07 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects These are some of my notes from his lecture, and our discussion over lunch.

  The aim of the Soundobject research is to liberate interaction design from visual dominance, to free up our eyes, and to do what small displays don’t do well.

  Reasons for focusing on sound:

  • Sound is currently under-utilised in interaction design
  • Vision is overloaded and our auditory senses are seldom engaged
  • In the world we are used to hearing a lot
  • Adding sound to existing, optimised visual interfaces does not add much to usability

    Sound is very good at attracting our attention, so we have alarms and notification systems that successfully use sound in communication and interaction. We talked about using ‘caller groups’ on mobile phones where people in an address book can be assigned different ringtones, and how effective it was in changing our relationship with our phones. In fact it’s possible to sleep through unimportant calls: our brains are processing and evaluating sound while we sleep.

    One fascinating thing that I hadn’t considered is that sound is our fastest sense: it has an extremely high temporal resolution (ten times faster than vision), so for instance our ears can hear pulses at a much higher rate than our eyes can watch a flashing light.

    Disadvantages of sound objects

    Sound is not good for continuous representation because we cannot shut out sound in the way we can divert our visual attention. It’s also not good for absolute display: pitch, loudness and timbre are relative to most people, even people that have absolute pitch can be affected by contextual sounds. And context is a big issue: loud or quiet environments affect the way that sound must be used in interfaces: libraries and airplanes for example.

    There are also big problems with spatial representation in sound, techniques that mimic the position of sound based on binaural differences are inaccessible by about a fifth of the population. This perception of space in sound is also intricately linked with the position and movement of the head. Some Google searches on spatial representation of sound. See also Psychophysical Scaling of Sonification Mappings [pdf]

    Cartoonification

    ‘Filling a bottle with water’ is a sound that could work as part of an interface, representing actions such as downloading, uploading or in replacement of progress bars. The sound can be abstracted into a ‘cartoonification’ that works more effectively: the abstraction separates simulated sounds from everyday sounds.

    Mikael cites inspiration from foley artists working on film sound design, that are experienced in emphasising and simplifying sound actions, and in creating dynamic sound environments, especially in animation.

    A side effect of this ‘cartoonification’ is that sounds can be generated in simpler ways: reducing processing and memory overhead in mobile devices. In fact all of the soundobject experiments rely on parametric sound synthesis using PureData: generated on the fly rather than using sampled sound files, resulting in small, fast, adaptive interface environments (sound files and the PD files used to generate the sounds can be found at the Soundobject site).

    One exciting and pragmatic idea that Mikael mentioned was simulating ‘peas in a tin’ to hear how much battery is left in a mobile device. Something that seems quite possible, reduced to mere software, with the accelerometer in the Nokia 3220. Imagine one ‘pea’ rattling about, instead of one ‘bar’ on a visual display…

    Research conclusions

    The most advanced prototype of a working sound interface was a box that responded to touch, and had invisible soft-buttons on it’s surface that could only be heard through sound. The synthesised sounds responded to the movement of the fingertips across a large touchpad like device (I think it was a tactex device). These soft-buttons used a simplified sound model that synthesised impact, friction and deformation. See Human-Computer Interaction Design based on Interactive Sonification [pdf]

    The testing involved asking users to feel and hear their way around a number of different patterns of soft-buttons, and to draw the objects they found. See these slides for some of the results.

    The conclusions were that users were almost as good at using sound interfaces as with normal soft-button interfaces and that auditory displays are certainly a viable option for ubiquitous, especially wearable, computing.

    More reading

    Soundobject
    Gesture Controlled Audio Systems
    ICAD

    ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects/feed 2 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:13:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged my presentation [pdf] and presentation notes from Design Engaged 2004. Lots of pretty pictures of stickers, tags, flyposting and such. I will chip in with Dan, Adam, Matt, Molly and Fabio to say that this has been the conference highlight of the year.]]> Notes on two related projects:

    1. Time that land forgot

    • A project in collaboration with Even Westvang
    • Made in 10 days at the Icelandic locative media workshop, summer 2004
    • Had the intention of making photo archives and gps trails more useful/expressive
    • Looked at patterns in my photography: 5 months, 8000 photos, visualised them by date / time of day. Fantastic resource for me: late night parties, early morning flights, holidays and the effect of midnight sun is visible.
    • Looking now to make it useful as part of more pragmatic interface, to try other approaches less about the abstracted visualisation
    • prototype
    • info, details, research and source code
    • time visualisation

      2. Marking in urban public space

      I’ve also been mapping stickering, stencilling and flyposting: walking around with the camera+gps and photographing examples of marking (not painted graffiti).

      

      This research looks at the marking of public space by investigating the physical annotation of the city: stickering, stencilling, tagging and flyposting. It attempts to find patterns in this marking practice, looking at visibility, techniques, process, location, content and audience. It proposes ways in which this marking could be a layer between the physical city and digital spatial annotation.

      Some attributes of sticker design

    • Visibility: contrast, monochromatic, patterns, bold shapes, repetition
    • Patina: history, time, decay, degredation, relevance, filtering, social effects
    • Physicality: residue of physical objects: interesting because these could easily contain digital info
    • Adaptation and layout: layout is usually respectful, innovative use of dtp and photocopiers, adaptive use of sticker patina to make new messages on top of old

      

      Layers of information build on top of each other, as with graffiti, stickers show their age through fading and patina, flyposters become unstuck, torn and covered in fresh material. Viewed from a distance the patina is evident, new work tends to respect old, and even commercial flyposting respects existing graffiti work.

      

      Techniques vary from strapping zip-ties through cardboard and around lampposts for large posters, to simple hand-written notes stapled to trees, and short-run printed stickers. One of the most fascinating and interactive techniques is the poster offering strips of tear-off information. These are widely used, even in remote areas.

      

      Initial findings show that stickers don’t relate to local space, that they are less about specific locations than about finding popular locations, “cool neighbourhoods” or just ensuring repeat exposure. This is opposite to my expectations, and perhaps sheds some light on current success/failure of spatial annotation projects.

      I am particularly interested in the urban environment as an interface to information and an interaction layer for functionality, using our spatial and navigational senses to access local and situated information.

      There is concern that in a dense spatially annotated city we might have an overload of information, what about filtering and fore-grounding of relevant, important information? Given that current technologies have very short ranges (10-30mm), we might be able to use our existing spatial skills to navigate overlapping information. We could shift some of the burden of information retrieval from information architecture to physical space.

      I finished by showing this animation by Kriss Salmanis, a young Latvian artist. Amazing re-mediation of urban space through stencilling, animation and photography. (“Un ar reizi naks tas bridis” roughly translates as “And in time the moment will come”.

      Footnotes/references

      Graffiti Archaeology, Cassidy Curtis
      otherthings.com/grafarc

      Street Memes, collaborative project
      streetmemes.com

      Spatial annotation projects list
      elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation

      Nokia RFID kit for 5140
      nokia.com/nokia/0,,55739,00.html

      Spotcodes, High Energy Magic
      highenergymagic.com/spotcode

      ?Mystery Meat navigation?, Vincent Flanders
      fixingyourwebsite.com/mysterymeat.html

      RDF as barcodes, Chris Heathcote
      undergroundlondon.com/antimega/archives/2004_02.html

      Implementation: spatial literature
      nickm.com/implementation

      Yellow Arrow
      yellowarrow.org

      ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2004 09:37:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged all sat around a table in Amsterdam, at Design Engaged 2004. There are lots of photos going up to Flickr, and here are my notes.]]> Ben Cerveny
      • The growth of the soil
      • How do we comprehend complexity
      • How do we build structures around complex information
      • Accreting meta-data: GPS data, descriptive information

        Decomposition

        Break down of material as it hits the soil

      • Soup, tags, condensed and distilled meta objects

        Self organisation

        sorting mechanisms, affinity browsers, related, filtering, emergent relationships, interrelationships

        How do we conceive a metaphor for building these processes? A structure that is meaningful for the users.

        Application design: movement through states of application: to tending to a flow of processes

        Tending to meta-data is a growth process

        DLA diffusion limited aggregation, natural process model

      • The relationships between metadata can be visualised as this * Should model metadata using plant models: plant models have existed for eons, basic structures for material

        Rules for expression

        L-systems growth, mimics biological rulesets

        Map rule-sets in metadata onto L-systems, affinity rules

      • Branching tree structures could be used to make metadata more useful

        Roots and Feeds

        RSS feeds, a root system, aggregator has roots, to the surface of a newsreader

        Structural information

        After applying rules of expression (algorithms, l-systems) we could see differences in the way that the plant has evolved

      • A “botany” of these different structures: smaller, larger clusters, structures.

        Cultivation as culture

        From a user perspective the idea of cultivation: users can actually affect change: can breed your own searches, using searches generationally, using own adapted metaphors for new contexts

        Mix and match mechanisms or instruments (specific rule-sets) move expressions and apply them to different rule-sets

        Don’t have to understand genetics, but we have found use for plants for generations

      • User doesn’t need to know mechanisms, just ability to make changes and view outcomes

        Tending the garden

        Incredible complexity, incredible diversity

        Not intimidated by the complexity of the garden

      • Present similar tools to tend to data

        Discussion

        Casey Reas: organic information design

        Thinkmap, physical simulation systems

        Mitchell Resnick: Turtles Termites, Traffic Jams

      • Matt J: Does it rely on visual metaphors: how do we get people to cultivate rather than consume?

        Thomas Van Der Wal

        Synching feeling

        Everything fit in our brain

        then libraries

        then digital bits

        then putting everything in one place

        Our information on our pdas, cellphones, somewhere

        The dream is that we have accurate information at our disposal when we need it

        Personal info-cloud

        Local info-cloud: should it be located?

        External info-cloud: things you don’t know about

        How do users use information?

        Device versus network?

        Our networked space, that exists out in space

        Usable: syncing between two devices: calendar, address book, to do list

        Dodgy: documents, media maps, web-based info, multiple devices

        Personal version control: different devices have different versions

      • Personal categorisation:

        Standard metadata for personal info-cloud

        content description

        creator

        privacy

        context

        use type (eg)

        instruction: destroy, revise in 6 months

        object type:

      • categories: not a structured system, but hackable flat data

        Actual solutions

        Spotlight (Apple Tiger)

      • MIT Project Oxygen

        Possible/partial solutions

        Script aggregation by metadata tag

        Publish to private/public location in RSS

        Rsynk and CVS

        Groove (Windows)

      • Quicksilver (Mac)

        Adam Greenfield

        All watched over by machines of loving grace

        Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous computing environments

        Ubicomp is coming: IPV6 6.5×10 to the 23 addresses for every square metre on the planet

        Moving from describing to prescribing

        Technological artefacts are too dismissive of people

      • Someone to watch over me: attractive as well as scary

        Default to harmlessness

        must ensure user’s physical psychic and financial safety

        must go well beyond graceful degredation

      • faults must result in safety

        Be self disclosing

        Contain provisions for immediate, transparent querying of ownership, use, capabilities, etc.

        Seamlessness is optional

        Analogue of broadcast station identification or military IFF

      • Web derived model for user-consent: cannot carry over to ubicomp, would be too intrusive to have to approve each and every disclosure of information in four space

        Be conservative of face

        ubiquitous systems are always already social systems: they must not unnecessarily embarras, himiliate or shame

        Goes beyond formal information-privacy concerns

      • Prospect of being nakedly accountable to an inseen omipresent network

        Be conservative of time

        Must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations

        Adult, competent users understand adequately what they want, shouldn’t introduce barriers

      • Potential conflict with principle 1

        Be deniable

        Should be able to opt-out, anytime, anywhere, any process

        Critically: the ability to say no, without sacrificing anything but the ability to use whatever usage

      • The “safe word” concept may find an application here

        Discussion

        Fabio: what about gossip

        Chris: surely there’s human responsibility

        Tom C: Social control includes humiliation and embarrasment

      • Molly: systems for shaming: can be institutionalised and applied in problem places: difference between smart and smartass. Haven’t got good enough at modelling situations in order to get this right.

        Stefan Smagula

        Teaching and writing about interaction design

        Mike Kuniavsky

        Writing about ubicomp, society and social

        Material products areform from social values

        Products affect how we think

        The pattern is “a recognition of the complexity, unpredictability, confusion of the world”

        The framework of thought of the last 600 years is coming to an end

        “by dividing the world into smaller pieces, ways can be found to explain it”: this method is waning

        Communication and transportation has been the key driver of this change

        Shown people (designers?) how complex life is

        Most people don’t know what to do about this complexity

        At the end of the prescriptive rationalist vision of the world

        It is our job as designers to recognise these ideas: “design is a projection of people’s ideals onto product”

        Past the confusion of postmodernism: the complexity hasn’t been branded yet, hasn’t been given a core set of ideas

        Book: Human built world

        The complexity of the world is an uncomfortably bright light, people turn away: designers can make it manageable

      • Go to the light of compexity!

        Discussion

        Adam: are we up against biological limits: are we wired to deal with things in a linear way? Yes: physiological limits: 7 +-2.

        Ben: we conceive as a subtractive process: a mental scene out of an excess of input: we have a body of linear tools to process. There is a realisation that we are non-linear systems: technology is becoming us, and the other way around.

        Matt: we can learn complexity way more than we realise: tests show that we subconsciously learn complexity beyond language and rational thought

        Magical thinking is not wrong: all our models are wrong

      • Tom C: Looking at people as shearing layers of perception and cognition

        Remon Tijssen

        Behaviours, tactility and graphics

      • Tensionfield between playfulness and functionality

        David Erwin

        The funnel

      • Serial, parallel and optional interfaces

        Peter Boersma

        Transactional interfaces

        ezGov uses IBMs RUP

        RUP is weak in user-experience

      • Added StUX, definitions of deliverables for user experience

        Dan Hill

        Self centred design

        Not selfish design

        Background: adaptive design, design as social process, inspiration from vernacular architecture, hackability, allowing and encouraging people to make technology what they want to be

        Inspiration from trip to US

        Assumption that UCD is generally a good thing

        The focus on usability has distracted people: it has become an end in itself

        UCD manifests itself in usability, at the expense of usefulness

        Cultural and social products: massive variation of use across the globe

        Products most innovative at BBC/music: audioscrobbler/lastFM: intense meaning in the patterns it generates. More innovative than iTunes music store. Steam: setting reminders for radio stations: hacked third party product, BBC is trying to support this innovation.

        This innovation is coming from non-designers

        Veen: Amateurised design: the most interesting design on the web: Shirky: Situated software

        Always consider a thing in it’s next larger context: Eliel Saarinen: useful piece of design process. Chair, room, house, city.

        A lot of information about the self, coming out of these systems

        Audioscrobbler: looking at ones music, bookmarks, photos, lunches, weblog posts, gps co-ordinates: how does this affect habits?

        Pace of development: what can be done on the web.

        Self-knowledge and enlightenment: how does it affect one’s life

      • The practice and focus of design is moving towards behaviour

        Limitations

        This is early adopter activity, this is geeky, high barrier to entry, it requires code to make these things. It’s self limiting: only certain kind of people can make these products.

        Scaleability problems: resilience: lack of reliability of iterative development, when will we be at the stage when we can rely on things working?

        BBC, radio broadcasting needs to be resilient: public service

        Database design and scaleability: Flickr doesn’t need to be normalised

        Common appeal of these things is self-limiting: too much systems level thinking.

        Moving into a space where products are social, and can have social meaning, and thus be socially harmful

        People’s assumption and experiences are based on context

        Need to be more rigourous about understanding social patterns

        audioscrobbler is not good at classical music

        Designers and researchers need better understanding of each other

        Designers are at their most useful when they are enabling adaptive design

        Using ethnography within a design process, look at long-term ethnographic process: hooking it into the rapid prototyping of the adaptive design world

        There is the value of sociology here. Ethno-methodology, Heidegger

        Book: Where the action is, Dourish.

        Social systems work well when there is accountability

        Building things where this also builds an account of the building

        Place and space: place being about social structures

        Embodiment: Appropriating products, building social meanings into products

        Accountability: part of the action is a documentation of the action (Dourish). Is ‘view source’ accountability?

      • Book: Presentation of self: Irvine Goffman

        Matt Webb

        Neuroscience and interaction design

        This is really mostly psychology

        Game: remembering animals

        Light comes from top left

        Easier to react in the direction that things approach you from

        Dialogue boxes, work with natural directions

        We follow human eye direction, not robot eye direction, pulling a lever is faster when eyes point in that direction

        We respond the same to arrows as we do to gaze

        All that neuroscience has done is to confirm what we know from psychology

        3 types of object, animate, inanimate and tool

        3 zones: graspable, peripersonal The schema of the body is extended by the held tools

        Our body space is quite mutable: space on a screen becomes the space represented by the body, anything which moves as part of your hand becomes part of your grasp, there’s an amount of time that this takes to understand this, learning process and experience

        Grasping has as much primacy as a cup itself: so “sit down” or “chair” are equivalent in the brain

        If we see or say grasping, or looking at coffee cup shows

      • “What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time” a* Mapping observed phenomena to the science of jetstreams, same thing will happen to neuroscience.

        John Poisson

        The stretch time conundrum

        Sony is a huge force: vaunted to villified in three short decades

        Loss of brand value: products are not meeting user expectations

        Sony founders have changed, directions have changed

        One of the problem is in the fact that it’s japanese: basic simple cultural processes

        Hikaru dorodango: process refinement as creative expression: successively sculpting and crafting mud balls into spheres

        3 interconnected languages are undocumentably mixed

        Languages are connected to neurological development: learning japanese at an early age increases the threshold of tolerance of the pain of complexity: Kanji pain begets user pain.

        At first thought that it was a problem of language, but then realised this increased tolerance of complexity pain.

        Sony “iPod killer” is a user-experience nightmare, but for japanese it’s not too complex

        There’s an overall acceptance of complexity in Japan

        Pattern based learning: origami: 48 steps of process, more complex than interfaces

        Stretch time: at 3o’clock on the Sony campus everyone stops, music plays and everyone is encouraged to stretch.

      • Process is good: start with rice cookers and end up with transistors: releasing lots of stuff and then seeing what works. But there are a lot more misses than hits at the moment

        Sanjay Khanna

        Kurt Vonnegut in “Cold Turkey”

      • Mike: intended effects are insignificant compared with the emergent effects, just noise compared to the overall outcomes

        Niels Wolf

        Intro to JXTA

        Works on every network device

        Allows control over your data, sharing, peer to peer backup

        Implemented in many languages: including python

        Assigned a unique number, which works across IP, bluetooth, mobile rendezvous, etc.

      • Everybody becomes a server if no other can be found

        Molly Wright Steenson

        All hail the vast comforting suburb of the soul

        Lots of research into garden cities

        Worried that the future is going to be boring

        Closing off some avenues for development by focusing on urban environments

      • What are the constraints that define a suburb?

        Jack Schulze

        Mapping and looking

      • Lots of cool stuff: no notes.

        Matthew Ward

        Questioning the commodification of space

      • We are social, spatial, temporal beings

        What were the conditions for the rise of these spatial technologies

        2001 descrambling of GPS

        FCC policy to make sure 911 callers can be located

        Ubiquity of mobile phones

        If we don’t move away from the “where’s my nearest pizza” we are going to get really bored really soon

        Differential space: socio-spatial differences are emphasised and celebrated

        Iain Borden: Skateboarding

      • “social space is a social product.” “Our task now is to construct everyday life, to produce it, consciously to create it, boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated desires” Lefebvre.

        Chris Heathcote

        Nuts and bolts, how to use location

        Location is co-ordinates

        Location is names and titles

        Location is also near Matt Webb, or near my iBook: relative position might be more useful way of thinking

        Physical augmentation: using, abusing, changing where they live

        Visual design: Buddy finder on mobile phones: spatially false, chart junk

        Context awareness is really hard:

        What happens when you get rid of the maps?

      • Lots more cool stuff that I didn’t take notes on…

        Matt Jones

        Nokia: Insight and foresight

        A hard problem: “Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high.” Gene Becker, Fredshouse.net

        Next-gen mobile: big screens, more whizzy features, but we still have the same old messy world

        A modest start: being in the world instead of in front of the screen

        3220: 5140: power up covers with new capabilities

        3220: LED displays with accelerometers and thus motion capture

        Where the action is: This ignores 99% of our daily lives

        dance dance revolution and eyetoy: new world

        5140: first RFID reader phone

        New ways of using mobiles with touch based tech

        easy and concrete access to services and repeat functions

        transfer of digital items between devices as simple as a gesture of giving

        in the future also fast and convenient local payment and ticketing: fast, easy way of getting settings and services

        When you count all the steps to make simple actions are about 100 actions: to find settings, set up the human modem thing

        Touch actions are potentially two orders of complexity less: into 1 action

        LAunched active cover with NFC: near field communication: philips, sony, visa, samsung: nfcforum.org

        Pairing things up, putting things together (how is this different from BT? passive chips)

        Prototype things!

        NFC is a touch based RFID technology

        Putting the information into the tag: can contain more than an ID

        Close mapping to physical objects: Dourish

        NFC active objects will have mixed spirit world of objects having magic behind them: permitted moves for games, origins of objects, spime like stuff,

        One to one mapping: multiple digital meanings on objects

        it’s not a one-way world: these things are re-writeable: secular isn’t the dominant way of thinking

        Now that we can give objects spirit world, semiotic, actions

        Into fetish objects: auspicious computing, unique wooden balls (minority report)

        Friendster: a game of how many connections. Turning into an info-fetish physical game

        – phones are precious, tags are not

        – throwaway, data detritus, spime spume

        + programmatic product life-cycle

        + audit trails for trash

        + automation of recycling

        Techno-optimism

      • WWF: sustainability at the speed of light

        Long now, (Stewart Brand)

        Fashion

        Commerce

        Infrastructure

        Governance

        Culture

        Nature

      • Sometimes technology can disrupt these layers

        Fabio Sergio

        From collision to convergence

        How I learned to stop worrying and watch tv on my mobile phone

        2001: who the hell would want to watch tv on a mobile?

        2003: using mobile to watch big brother from the car

        consultants: timeliness, context sensitivity, self-expression, immediacy, relevance

        People rely on their connected devices to fill-in interstitial time slots

        Armed with this notion outlets aquired content and chopped it into 3-5 minute videos

        The end result is too much navigation and not enough content, undermines the concept of “snacking”. The navigation has become the experience

        Navigation is not bad per-se, the web is arguably built on it

        Flow: where the consumer is completely engaged with interaction

        Mobile content experiences happen in contexts that basically negate the ability to focus

        How do you access video: at the moment through a browser

        Big Brother: lessons learnt

        Always on-ness: there is aways something new happening: marshall mcluhan meets orwell

        Something might happen at any time

        Action can be just a video call away

        Easy to get into the flow of what’s happening

        Cut to measure: as little or as long as you want

        Conversation-based: you can keep hearing when you can’t watch: don’t need to look at the screen

        Why should the browser and media player be two different applications? should probably be one.

        People need context medium content, probably in this order

        The handset should be a remote control: as much as possible make navigation resident on teh device

        Content should be snackish: but should be grouped

      • The experience should be around the on/off switch

        Timo Arnall

      • Presentation and notes

        Sunday discussion

      • Brief: design a ticket machine that also allows city navigation and takes care of tourists and busy commuters equally, that doesn’t have a screen
      • Alternative brief: A permanent tag large enough to contain digital info, that could be unobtrusively attached to anything in public space
      • Mechanisms for friendly denial

        I’m lost: design a physical pathway which

        includes the idea of signs to explain features of teh environment to the unmediated

        which could serve as a compensation or apology for people denied in the ubiquitous sense

        which was distinctively local and amsterdamish

        includes infrastructure

      • poetics and emotional enhancements required

        Overheard somewhere at the bar: anthropology/ethnography is this year’s library science: another new/old juxtaposition. Not that I agree.

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/design-engaged/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/10/art-communication http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/10/art-communication#comments Wed, 06 Oct 2004 15:36:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/10/art-communication RIXC in Riga, Latvia.]]>

        Even and I presented our Timeland project during the 3 day conference and exhibition.

        I have made a large photo set at Flickr, and we have been using the tag art+communication for collaborative documentation.

        The highlight of the event was a trip to Limbazi, for the opening of Piens the “milk” project, looking at the personal stories around the mapping of milk routes through the EU. It was really good to see GPS being used as a storytelling tool, a way of opening up personal stories in the documentary process.

        

        A big thankyou to the RIXC lot, and everyone involved.

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/10/art-communication/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/08/design-research http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/08/design-research#comments Sat, 07 Aug 2004 23:50:44 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/08/design-research What is a designer: things, places, messages

        Norman Potter.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Models and Constructs

        Norman Potter.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Design Research: Methods and Perspectives

        Brenda Laurel Ed.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Design Writing Research

        Abbott Miller, Ellen Lupton.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Screen

        Jessica Helfand.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/08/design-research/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/07/geo-referenced-photography http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/07/geo-referenced-photography#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2004 15:35:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/07/geo-referenced-photography The easiest way of linking photos to locations is to combine the time-stamps from both a digital camera and GPS receiver or other location-aware device. If this data is available (over the same period of time) it’s possible to process a series of images and location tracks to stamp each image with location metadata.

        Here are a few resources, papers, projects, guidelines and other geo-reference issues.

        Papers

        • Position-annotated Photographs: The Geotemporal Web
        • GEOREP: Digital Library for Spatial Data
        • Geographic location tags on digital images, Microsoft [pdf]
        • Portable digital photo album [time based interface]

          Prior work

        • Tokyo Picturesque [Details]
        • Habitat Perspectives
        • Photo Location [Details]
        • Geo Snapper
        • WWMX web demo
        • Good list of other photo mapping projects

          Geo-referencing Photos

          These are some commercial applications and scripts that link photographs to geographic information.

        • Robophoto
        • 93 Photo Street
        • Photofusion
        • Media Mapper
        • OziPhotoTool
        • GPS photo link
        • GPS TrackMaker
        • QuakeMap
        • WWMX Travelogue application
        • AkuAku: GPS tagged jpegs
        • Adding GPS Information to EXIF Images with Photostudio
        • GPS Photo Linking in iViewMedia Pro [Mac]
        • GPS plotting in Flash

          GPS track and waypoint extraction

          Transferring data from GPS devices can be problematic. If this is going to work in a wider, collaborative context there is a need to make guidelines for this process. It is also really important to make sure units and timezones are correctly set up on all software, so that no translation happens as the data is converted. Exported data also tends to be messy, with mixed tracklogs and waypoints, which for us meant a lot of hand-tweaking.

        • Garmin Mapsource
        • MacGPS Pro
        • GPS Babel
        • GPSylon tool for downloading/viewing GPS data
        • GPS to GEO-RDF
        • Some notes on coordinate translation

          Extracting EXIF data

          To get a handle on the photographic data we need to look at the embedded EXIF information, which contains things like capture date, time, exposure and aperture.

        • Python Exif Parser
        • Media Metadata for Python
        • Extracting EXIF data with Python
        • Geo tagging images: Exif GPS with python and java
        • EXIF metadata extraction in java

          Content metadata guidelines

          In order to standardise the sharing of geographic information (tracklogs and waypoints) we need to think carefully about the formats used. We initially intended to use locative packets, but have ended up using GPX format alongside some custom XML for time and photo information.

        • Locative packets
        • Other recommended vocabularies
        • GPX namespace manual
        • JPEG RDF strategy for storing location info
        • W3 RDF geo-vocabulary
        • Describing and retrieving photos using RDF and HTTP
        • Exif vocabulary workspace – RDF Schema
        • Vocabularies for w3photo project
        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/07/geo-referenced-photography/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2004 18:52:05 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation physcomp, interactionfield and aware for inspiration.]]>

        Image from Yellow Arrow project.

        Murmure

        An archival audio project that has collected stories set in specific locations throughout Vancouver’s Chinatown. At each of these locations, a murmur sign marks the availability of a story with a telephone number and location code. By using a mobile phone, people can listen to the story of that place while engaging in the full physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

        Area Code

        Invites you to collect and reflect upon your immediate environment, and enables new forms of engagement and information exchange between person and place. Areacode aims to inspire comments about the affect of urban regeneration in the city.

        Yellow Arrow

        A physical sticker allows people to mark places of interest, then tell a story about it using a photographic record.

        Grafedia

        Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content – images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere – on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers “click” on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + ”@grafedia.net” to get the content behind the link.

        The Blue Plaque project

        Collect all of the plaques in London, and then to put the people and events they commemorate in context – with their time, their contemporaries, and location.

        Implementation

        Implementation begins as sheets of stickers, with a different text on each sticker. We will distribute these sheets to individuals, both personally and via post. Instructions, asking people to peel the stickers off and place them in an area viewable by the public, will accompany the sheets.

        Talking street

        Using everyday technologies, like your own cell phone, Talking Street offers new ways to explore a destination. It’s having an ultra-savvy resident show you around—a guide who can reveal what a place is really like, and how it got that way.

        The intelligent street

        The intelligent street will enhance the experience of users in both locations by creating a gentle sonic playground that reflects the cultures of its users, entertain and act as a talking point. Users will be able to interract by sending SMS messages from their mobile phone. A display in each location and on the web will give optional information about how users are engaging.

        Neighbornode

        Group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it.

        TAG: Scripting Presence

        The inundation of consumer and mass media advertisements has eroded the presence of the individual within the city. In my thesis, I will explore how we can reclaim our physical landscape by reinserting the individual through visual representation into her/his urban environment. My intent is to create a momentary place to communicate messages of self-expression contributing to a network in which the next user can connect and experience.

        R-Click

        An area-information service from NTT DoCoMo incorporating mobile phones and a “wireless tag” device. A small, handheld RFID device will enable users to receive a wide variety of area information as they walk around the new metropolitan cultural complex of shops, restaurants, entertainment facilities, residences and hotels (Roppongi Hills).

        Public Play Spaces

        A platform for creative work exploring the playful, emotional and appropriate incorporation of technology into everyday public life. Drawing on our combined background in art, architecture, game and interaction design, the work focuses on developing both innovative design methods and experimental prototypes for social interventions in public space.

        Trailblazer

        A computer-mediated communication tool for supporting a virtual community. It attempts to integrate aspects of physical activity by community members in the real world into the virtual environment and to provide a structure for discourse around those activities.

        34 North 118 West

        Lets the user uncover samples of Los Angeles’s hidden history as s/he navigates through the multi-layered depths of downtown’s most poetic and surreal space. The result is a new kind of ‘scripted space’...

        InterUrban

        A user-driven experience that responds to participant’s amble through the city streets. Factors such as the distance traveled by the listener, time of day and proximity to fictive events, determine how the narrative unfolds.

        Hidden natures

        Location based narrative. Texts read by actors are the voices of the characters you hear as you walk through a space. A double headed arrow on the screen of your pocket computer (PDA) indicates the narrative direction – the future in one direction and the past another

        Greyworld: Telescapes

        Visitors discover a soundscape of messages left for them by both the artists and the public via voice and email. This interactive installation calls attention to how advances in cellular and wireless technologies contribute to the ubiquity of personal communications in public spaces, while illuminating the relationship between the built environment and the invisible networks that make these fleeting exchanges possible.

        Geoloqus

        Geoloq.us is a service that lets users leave behind memories, comments and digital artefacts in a physical location, for others to discover and enjoy. A cameraphone with a web browser is all you need to use geoloq.us; browse pictures from the place you�re at, comment a location or a picture and find out what�s nearby. Tag your items and surf those tags for similar items from other people in other places.

        GeoNotes

        Based on positioning technology, allows people to attach virtual notes to real world locations. When other people pass the location, they will be notified about the note and will be able to read it. GeoNotes allows mass-annotations with no or little restrictions on accessing others’ GeoNotes. It is also social in the way it incorporates social filtering techniques to sort out unwanted GeoNotes.

        GeoStickies

        An interactive public art project that enables us to make and access to collective of personal memory that could have been overlaid on to urban space. The project puts some “tags” of small events onto geographical fields so that the audience can feel correspondence between “Information space” and “Urban space”. The audience will find tiny electronic memorials for tiny events. But those are only visible or able to be experienced through mobile phones.

        GeoGraffiti

        To demonstrate the concept of waypoint sharing we have been developing a number of waypoint sharing applications. These applications access the waypoint lists for retrieval and storage of waypoint data and other accessory information, such as text, images, audio, video, or links to other information.

        Digital Graffiti

        The application allows mobile phone owners to send a message, similar to an SMS (Short Message Service), to a geographical point where it appears on the screens of other users passing through the defined location. Unlike an SMS, the message is not sent to a person but rather to a location, and can be received by a number of mobile phone users entering the defined radius.

        Ambient Wood

        An outdoor playful learning experience. Pervasive technologies are used to digitally augment a woodland in a contextually relevant way, enhancing the �usual� physical experience available to children exploring the outdoor world. Studies show this to be a highly engaging novel experience for learners, that effectively supports collaborative learning, as well as providing preliminary guidelines for designing different ways of delivering digital information for learning.

        Thingster

        Lets you publish information about places. You can use thingster to discover things in your own neighborhood that might be interesting to you – and you can use thingster to publish information about things that you find interesting. Thingster also provides signalling and discovery services for discovering other nearby folks with interests similar to your own.

        World-Wide Media eXchange

        The project explores possibilities with digital photographs and geographic location. The location where a photo was taken provides clues about its semantic context and offers an intuitive way to index it, even in a very large collection. The combination is powerful, but still not supported well by either the photo-software or camera-hardware industries.

        Mobile Media Metadata

        Leverages the spatio-temporal context and social community of media capture to infer media content.

        Altavistas

        An experimental project to explore how physical and electronic spaces can be designed in conjunction with each other to provide new kinds of experience in the city.

        mStory

        A mobile mapping and recording system built for the PocketPC platform. It integrates GPS tracking technology with a set of diary-like recording features. mStory assign a variety of attributes to recorded locations, including photos, audio recordings, narrative descriptions and icons.

        Katumuisti tositarinoita Helsingista [Street memories]

        Personal local stories for public listening using mobile phones & billboard notices.

        Interactive portrait of the Liberties

        An interactive digital narrative application providing multimedia content to individuals and to groups, which is relevant to them at a particular point in time and space.

        Section

        A database video project, currently under development, that examines the embedded syntax of our routes through the city and challenges the mediated experiences of the urban environment through methods of collecting, editing and compositing video.

        TRACE

        A memorial environmental sound installation that is site-specific to the network of hiking trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia.

        Map Hub

        MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group managed information storage system and map. Collecting information about people, places, events, and notes, can help to document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based Hubs.

        Community Mapbuilder

        Offers a range of resources to help organizations get started with standards-based online mapping. The main initial focus is creating an open source framework to allow communities to jointly build geographic databases and share them over the web.

        Annotated multimedia Google map

        This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you�ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map.

        City of memory

        A narrative map of New York City that allows visitors to create a collective memory by submitting stories. Visitors link stories together by theme, creating new “neighborhoods” of narrative that can be explored by others. Stories can be recommended, giving new visitors a sense of the narrative created by the populace.

        TeleTaxi

        A site-specific media art exhibition in a taxicab. The taxi is outfitted with an interactive touch screen that displays video, animations, music, and information triggered by an onboard GPS receiver which allows the displayed artwork to change depending on where the taxi is in the city.

        New York Songlines

        By relying on maps, signs and Manhattan’s perpendicular geography, New Yorkers have given up something important: a sense of place. If you can get from your starting place to your destination without knowing anything about the points in between, chances are you won’t pay much attention to them.

        Touch Tone Tours

        Delivers tour guides of popular landmarks, museums, attractions and the unusual to wireless devices. More info.

        Soundwalk

        Sound recordings as guides to specific locations. Available as audio for sale or as downloaded format from Audible or iTunes.

        Tag

        A street activity proposed for the site of Times Square, NYC. Employing mobile phone text messaging, it focuses on increasing personal contribution and interaction to the experience of this public space. Individuals will participate with one another as they tag designated areas or �nodes?? by displaying their inscription.

        Mogi

        A collecting game ‘item hunt’. The game provides a data-layer over the city of Tokyo. As you move through the city, if you check a map on your mobile phone screen, you’ll see nearby items you can pick up and nearby players you can meet or trade with.

        ASAP: another spatial annotation project

        Allows you to visualize your location on a map, use a GPS unit (I use a GPS-based GPS device) to mark your coordinates (or just navigate the map to find your location – especially useful in cavernous cities like Manhattan), annotate that location by titling it and giving it a description, optionally adding an icon or snapping a digital picture with the attached camera.

        Urban Tapestries

        A research project exploring social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies.

        HyConExplorer

        HyCon is a framework and infrastructure for context aware hypermedia systems developed primarily by the hypermedia group at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The HyCon framework encompasses annotations, links, and guided tours associating locations and RFID- or Bluetooth-tagged objects with maps, Web pages, and collections of resources. The HyCon architecture extends upon earlier location based hypermedia systems by supporting authoring in the field and by providing access to browsing and searching information through a novel geo-based search (GBS) interface for the Web.

        Herecast

        Provides location-based services on a WiFi device. At its simplest level, it can tell you where you are. More advanced services can use your location to enhance information lookups, publish presence information and create games.

        Texting Glances

        This ambient “waiting” game establishes a symbiotic relationship between a transient audience, a waiting place, and a story engine that matches SMS inputs to image output. By incorporating culturally current messaging norms, the audience becomes an active collaborating author in a layered exploration of social familiarity and public space.

        Public alley 818

        Creating and performing artworks in a public alley in Boston, MA, with work selected by participants in the space and online.

        One block radius

        Psychogeographic survey of one block in New York, building a multi-layered portrait of a particular part of the city.

        Annotate space

        A project to develop experiential forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations. Stories are presented through text, images and audio files that participants can download from the Web to their handheld computers and take with them to the place of interest.

        Annotated Earth

        The goal of AnnotatedEarth is to create a user-driven community of quality location and spatial information, a infrastructure for accessing that information, and software that uses that information to provide location-aware information.

        Embedded Theatre

        A system for creating immersive narrative experiences where location is an actor. It is the result of an intensive research and design project addressing how interactive narrative can be successfully realized through mobile technology.

        Tag and Scan

        London-based locational application and service for mobile telephones. The technology allows users to “tag” a physical locations, placing them into meaningful context. Tags can be private or public. Other TagandScan users can scan their environment for public tags left by others. TagandScan essentially enables the community to annotate its physical features.

        Spotcode

        Each Spot is a circular symbol that holds data like a two dimensional bar code. Users of the latest camera phones point their phone at the Bango Spot circular symbol, click and the mobile site opens on their phone in a matter of seconds.

        PDPal

        A mapping application that transforms everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. Engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments.

        AmbieSense

        Context-sensitive technology based on the use of context tags. These small electronic tags are a means of capturing and communicating information about the surroundings.

        Hypertag

        A commercial service allowing access to info and content on a mobile phone directly from objects like adverts and signs. It works by allowing infra-red mobile phones, and PDAs (e.g. Palm Pilots or Pocket PCs) to interact with a small electronic tag which is attached to the advert or sign.

        Pathalog

        Exploring the ability of a path-based publishing system, based upon GPS tracking technologies, to foster new relationships between communities of users and their environments.

        Waveblog / Wavemarket

        Three commercial platforms for location based services. You can add information and commentary about restaurant reviews to safety tips. Waveblog lets users upload blog-like information with geographic metadata.

        Rabble

        Rabble enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create. Create your channel and post location-based media – your favorite places, photos or an up-to-the-minute newsworthy event. It’s like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you.

        Earthcomber

        Lets you connect with customers in a timely, efficient and positive way. By providing a direct match between a user’s favorite and something you offer, Earthcomber brings you to the customer’s attention. In multiple information screens, they can see what you offer and where you are on the map.

        Timespots

        Offers ‘location-based services’ on mobile devices (PocketPC/phones) enabling new uses of traditional travel and tourism services. We overcome current limitations (in reach of and access to information and services) by combining information and navigation services with communication services on one device.

        Websigns

        HP research labs. Using a handheld computer, cellular phone or other device, users can get information on the Web related to physical structures and objects in the immediate vicinity.

        Microsoft Aura

        The Advanced User Resource Annotation system (A.U.R.A.) is designed to provide the ability to access and author annotations on objects and places using machine readable tags. In our system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with specific tags. Users can also review the tags and descriptions of the objects they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal.

        Active Campus

        Community-oriented ubiquitous computing, exploring the problem and opportunity of sustaining community through mobile wireless technology. The two principal applications in operation are: ActiveCampus Explorer, which uses students’ locations to help engage them in campus life; and ActiveClass, a client-server application for enhancing participation in the classroom setting via small mobile wireless devices.

        Mobile Augmented Reality Systems

        Exploring the synergy of two promising fields of user interface research: Augmented reality, in which 3D displays are used to overlay a synthesized world on top of the real world, and mobile computing, in which increasingly small and inexpensive computing devices, linked by wireless networks, allow us to to use computing facilities while roaming the real world.

        Living Memory LiMe

        A network of augmented places within the local community which support the creation and meaningful distribution of informal content within that community. LiMe provides low-threshold interfaces in natural meeting and crossing points within that community, such as caf�s and bus stops.

        Location linked information

        LLI is similar to augmented reality systems which overlay digital information on top of the physical world. Whereas augmented reality systems typically concentrate on solving the user interface problem, LLI attempts to solve the data access and search infrastructure issues. In LLI users navigate the physical world with a variety of XML-speaking devices, discovering and leaving “handles” to information nuggets.

        MUD London

        A kind of collaborative mapping project. it consists of geographical models which are represented as RDF graphs. you can wander round them, like a MUD or MOO, with a bot interface which you can use to create and connect new places.

        Psychogeographical Markup Language

        A protocol that can be used to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about urban space. PML is a unified system of classification that lurks behind the psychogeogram: the diagrammatic representation of psychogeographically experienced space.

        Spatial Annotation with Locative Packets

        An attempt to fuse powerful concepts of existential declaration (I am here experiencing this!) with networked social communication media. By mixing together a set of terms about space, time, description, social relationship, and media, the locative packet project has described a unique ether over which one form of collaborative map can travel.

        Wooster Collective

        Huge archive of street artists work, techniques, interviews, and guides.

        Here I am only including projects that mark space, not mobile social software or dynamic gaming, smart-mobs, friend-finders or GPS drawing projects, although I have included a couple of spatial platforms, that aim to standardise the way we mark-up space.

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation/feed 3 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/transcultural-mapping http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/transcultural-mapping#comments Thu, 20 May 2004 10:28:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/transcultural-mapping Transcultural mapping workshop in Lofoten in June. I am also participating in the ‘Loop City’ workshop at the Outside In symposium.]]> Update: new website
        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/05/transcultural-mapping/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2004 12:18:57 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design Notes on the Synthesis of Form

        Christopher Alexander.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Nature of Order

        Christopher Alexander.
        amazon.com

        The Oregon Experiment

        Christopher Alexander.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        A Pattern Language

        Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Timeless Way of Building

        Christopher Alexander.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        How Buildings Learn

        Stewart Brand.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

        Mitchel Resnick.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

        Steven Johnson.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Tipping Point

        Malcolm Gladwell.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

        David Weinberger.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

        Howard Rheingold.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Death and Life of Great American Cities

        Jane Jacobs.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo

        Vanessa Colella, Eric Klopfer, Mitchel Resnick.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        A New Kind of Science

        Stephen Wolfram.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Control Revolution

        Andrew L. Shapiro.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Society of Mind

        Marvin Minsky.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Electric Meme

        Robert Aunger.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

        Sherry Turkle.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Virtual Community

        Howard Rheingold.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Design for Community

        Derek M. Powazek.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Community Building on the Web

        Amy Jo Kim.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Online Communities

        Jenny Preece.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/03/adaptive-design/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/02/architecture-theory http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/02/architecture-theory#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2004 14:20:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/02/architecture-theory City of Collective Memory

        M. Christine Boyer.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Breathing Cities: Visualizing Urban Movement

        Nick Barley.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture

        Manuel Gausa.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Rebuilding the Reichstag

        Norman Foster.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Towards a New Architecture

        Le Corbusier.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Architecture and Disjunction

        Bernard Tschumi.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Manhattan Transcripts

        Bernard Tschumi.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Logic of Architecture

        William J. Mitchell.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture

        Jennifer Siegal ed.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        City of Bits

        William J. Mitchell.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        E-topia

        William J. Mitchell.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Strangely Familiar

        Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, Jane Rendell.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Invisible Cities

        Italo Calvino.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Poetics of Space

        Gaston Bachelard, Etienne Gilson, John Stilgoe.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        De Stijl

        Paul Overy.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Fragments of Utopia

        David Wild.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Architects in Cyberspace

        Neil Spiller, Martin Pearce.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/02/architecture-theory/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2003 23:46:56 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management Mastering the Requirements Process

        Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Software Requirements

        Karl E. Wiegers.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Collaborative Web Development

        Jessica Burdman.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Web Redesign: Workflow that Works

        Kelly Goto, Emily Cotler.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Rapid Application Development

        Steve McConnell.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/10/design-management/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/08/usability http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/08/usability#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2003 09:40:59 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/1999/11/usability The Design of Everyday Things

        Donald Norman.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Things That Make Us Smart

        Donald Norman.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience

        Douglas K. Van Duyne, James Landay, Jason I. Hong.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        User-Centred Web Design

        John Cato.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs

        Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        User and Task Analysis for Interface Design

        Joann Hackos, Janice Redish.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Shaping Web Usability: Interaction Design in Context

        Albert N. Badre.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Websites

        Andrew Chak.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Handheld Usability

        Scott Weiss.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Web Accessibility for People With Disabilities

        Michael G. Paciello.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Design by People for People: Essays on Usability

        Russell Branaghan.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Designing Web Usability

        Jakob Nielsen.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Usability Engineering

        Jakob Neilsen.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Web Site Usability

        Jared M. Spool.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

        Steve Krug.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/08/usability/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2003 23:45:28 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals

        Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Game Design

        Bob Bates.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

        Andrew Rollings, Ernest Adams.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Game Architecture and Design

        Andrew Rollings, Dave Morris.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Game On

        Lucien King.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        RE:Play

        Liz Faber.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Electronic Plastic

        Jaro Gielens, Robert Klanten.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Trigger Happy

        Steven Poole.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/04/game-design/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/01/business-and-strategy http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/01/business-and-strategy#comments Sun, 12 Jan 2003 14:14:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/01/business-and-strategy The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from Ideo

        Tom Kelley.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Innovator’s Dilemma

        Clayton M. Christensen.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Dream Society

        Rolf Jensen.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Experience Economy

        B. Joseph Pine.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Experiential Marketing

        Bernd H. Schmitt.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2003/01/business-and-strategy/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/12/technical-books http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/12/technical-books#comments Sat, 14 Dec 2002 14:22:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/12/technical-books Designing with Web Standards

        Jeffrey Zeldman.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Taking Your Talent to the Web

        Jeffrey Zeldman. A fantastic how-to book for designers looking to get involved in web publishing and design. Takes the reader through writing, usability, architecture and technical tips.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design

        Eric Meyer. One of the leading proponents and practitioners of css on the web explains his ideas and techniques.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation

        Owen Briggs, Steve Champeon, Eric Costello, Matt Patterson
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web

        Håkon Wium Lie. The inventor of CSS1 explains advanced w3c standard site design techniques.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Database Design for Mere Mortals

        Michael J. Hernandez. High level design guidelines for designing relational databases, covering categories, fields, relationships and the end-user.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Building Accessible Websites

        Joe Clark. Valuable work on the techniques for improving the accessibility of online media.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com / website

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/12/technical-books/feed 0 http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/05/narrative http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/05/narrative#comments Tue, 14 May 2002 23:43:18 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/05/narrative Hamlet on the Holodeck

        Janet H Murray.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative

        Mark Stephen Meadows.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Computers As Theatre

        Brenda Laurel.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        The Hero with a Thousand Faces

        Joseph Campbell.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Interactive Acting: Acting, Improvisation, and Interacting for Audience Participatory Theatre

        Jeff Wirth.
        amazon.com

        Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence

        by Roger C. Schank, Gary Saul Morson.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Understanding Comics

        Scott McCloud.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Comics & Sequential Art

        Will Eisner.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative

        Will Eisner.
        amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

        ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2002/05/narrative/feed 0