IxD Theory
3 posts tagged.
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Embodied interaction in music
A set of sketches from Easter 2005 on navigating music on portable devices, written after switching from a 40GB iPod to the iPod Shuffle. The clickwheel doesn’t cut it on huge alphabetical lists. The sketches try predictive text input, squeeze-and-shake movement, audio scrubbing and gestures like covering an ear to switch tracks.
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Tangible and social interaction
On a Nintendo DS in a café, two people are sending each other stick-figure drawings over PictoChat. On a TV in someone’s living room, four people are singing along to Singstar and making each other worse at it. At a bus stop in Berkeley, a phone is quietly logging which other phones it’s been near over the course of a day, a map of familiar strangers. Two lectures given at AHO in Oslo in January 2005, arguing that tangible and social interaction are the next chapter after the desktop. The PDF of the full presentation is here (1.9MB). Posted partly in response to Matt Jones and Chris Heathcote ‘s ETech presentation ( notes , link restored from Wayback). (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, which set the standards of interaction we still live with today Graphic : graphical dialogue with the computer, using our spatial skills, pattern recognition, and motion memory with a mouse and keyboard
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Sound objects
A box sits on the desk, with no markings on its surface. Touch it with a finger and the box makes a sound, impact, friction, deformation, depending on where you touch. There are soft buttons on the surface, but you can’t see them. You hear them. Notes from Mikael Fernström’s lecture at AHO in February 2005. Fernström runs the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick, where the Soundobject project is working on sound in ubiquitous computing, a relatively unexplored area of interaction design. The aim of the Soundobject research is to liberate interaction design from visual dominance, to free up the eyes, and to do what small displays don’t do well. 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 good at attracting attention, which is why alarms and notification systems work. We talked about ‘caller groups’ on mobile phones, assigning different ringtones to people in an address book, and how effectively that changes our relationship with our phones.