People First Design

Design is a balancing act, and one of the things I find merit in tossing into it is a strong understanding of theory and literature. It helps to recognize and acknowledge your values in the design process so that they can be made explicit to yourself and all other stakeholders.

That being said, I now present a brief overview of my capstone project and some of the theoretical stuff informing it.

INTRO
This project seeks to design a system that preserve the experience of virtual worlds, in this case World of Warcraft outside of the through the use of screenshots and metadata. The design aims to give players some out-of-game representation of their experience Read the rest of this entry »

I just got done reading an article from Google’s Official GMail Blog, entitled Serving Better Ads in Gmail. Scott Crossan, the GMail Product Manager, stated that GMail will now provide advertisements based on past emails if the current email doesn’t provide a good enough match. They are doing this in the spirit of giving you “more of what you’re interested in and less of what you’re not.” Read the rest of this entry »

J. Ambrose Little just posted recently about reading Jon Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design.  While I am new to this whole design thing, I have previously posted about my uneasiness with the claim that we design behavior. 
Read the rest of this entry »

In this post, I am attempting to make some sense of my argument for a paper I am planning to write.  For this paper I am doing a critical analysis of World of Warcraft’s FigurePrints service.

In making my thoughts and assumptions explicit, I have very strong opinions about how World of Warcraft favors certain playstyles over others.  I feel that the design and “loudest” player groups have created a game culture that favors ambition, aggressiveness, and a focus on certain achievements over others.  (Warning: The following sentence might be highly subjective or half-baked).  High level or “epic/elite” activities, raiding, or player vs. player are seen as “better” than any-level activities like exploration, pet collection, or crafting.  While these any-level activities are not seen as unimportant, they don’t have near the prestige of the other activities, and are often treated as a means to an end. Read the rest of this entry »

For my Interaction Culture class I decided to a close phenomological reading of a bit of machinima made from WoW clips set to the song “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down. It has been an interesting journey. It is incredible to think that some clips from World of Warcraft set to a cheesy late 90’s love-rock song could make me misty-eyed. I dare you to watch this video multiple times and not be moved at least a little bit. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently participated in one of those joint school-company training sessions.  I will just call the company “Acme”, and state that they provide a large assortment of design tools that we all know and love.  I was quite disappointed with it.  I can deal with being shamelessly advertised to, but this event was particularly bad because “Acme” was trying to force me to use their tools in a certain way and telling me how I should think about my own design process.  Scary stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

So I went into Penn Station yesterday with a buddy (Matt) to have some lunch.  When we sat down, I noticed the numerous metal bins of potatoes stacked up next to the fryers.  If you have ever been to a Penn Station, you know that the fries are fresh cut.  Anyway, I thought it was interesting that while my friend Matt was talking to me, my mind shut him out for about 15 seconds while I stared at those potatoes.  Here is what happened inside my head during those 15 seconds: Read the rest of this entry »

As I was reading Verbalising the Visual, I came across a passage that seemed to set of a big, fun, messy string of thoughts about the ways things are interpreted.  Clarke states:

It is sometimes thought that interpreting images of functional artefacts, such as a food processor or digital camera, is easier than interpreting works of fine art, be they painted, sculpted, photographed, or otherwise. At least the utilitarian, functional dimensions of the artefacts might provide a common basis for understanding. Without any comparable basis in the practical, fine art artefacts are judged to be far less contained.

Are the words functional, utilitarian, and practical problematic here?  And what do these descriptions mean for interaction design, where all of those are balled into one?  Read the rest of this entry »

So this week I embarked upon a new journey in my HCI/d education in Indiana University’s Master’s program.  The ship I am on is called Interaction Culture, and it is headed by Captain Jeffrey Bardzell.  In this class we will look at how theories in the humanities, specifically aesthetics and critical theory can be applied to the field of HCI/d.  Looking at  literature and drawing upon the wealth of philosophical debate and experience in the arts brings up the obvious question:  How does this apply to HCI/d practice?  This can be quickly followed with thoughts such as “I am a practitioner so I have no use for theory,” and “While you are theorizing I will be busy actually designing stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is sort of a continuation of the previous post about designing to change behavior. I am not really arguing one side or the other here, rather I am searching for some insights about design. To that end I have chosen a few books to dive into this summer, among them the book Freakonomics. One of the main themes of the book is about how we are creatures of incentive. Most people think only of business and marketing when they hear the word incentive, but Freakonomics speaks more about psychological and social motivations. Read the rest of this entry »