Category Archives: Human-Centered

People are not to blame for bad privacy decisions

We are at a point in history where technology is forcing us to re-evaluate our understanding of privacy. However, too often the conversation looks like this, which was taken from the comments section of an article about Facebook: “If you really don’t want to share….DONT PUT IT ON THE NET!” I am not a technological [...]
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Facebook needs human-centered design

The most recent user uproar against Facebook and its increasingly cryptic privacy settings spurred the New York Times to collect questions from concerned users and posed them to Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook. He responded quite eloquently in this recent article, but unsurprisingly his words have done little to calm the [...]
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Random stuff I found on Sticky Notes

I recently went through a bunch of notes I found on my computer. All of them look to be the beginnings of blog posts, but I thought it would might be fun to throw them all together in one blog post and expand up on them later. (And then I can delete them from my [...]
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My Thoughts on “Thoughts on Thoughts on Interaction Design”

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. 
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Critical Analysis Pre-Writing

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 [...]
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Incentives and the Path of Least Resistance

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 [...]
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MMORPGs and HCI

I have always loved RPG games. I often think about how RPGs and MMORPGs can relate to HCI. There are probably a ton of people who could talk on this subject better than I will, but I will spit out my couple of cents anyway. I am considering doing my Master’s capstone project on the [...]
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Human-Centered vs. User-Centered

After attending CHI 2009 I gained some perspective. It seems that the industry that I am about to dive into, full of youthful exuberance and naivety, has grossly understated the value and potential of HCI. The field of HCI seems to still be very focused on user-centered design, and sometimes uses the phrase human-centered design [...]
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Mac OS vs. Windows vs. Insert Favorite OS Here

After watching Bill Buxton’s talk about Microsoft starting to understand design better, I proceeded to view the comments, knowing full well what I would endure. It was pretty much the standard fare for any talk about technology when Microsoft’s name gets brought up: people missing the point and then valiantly defending their OS of choice [...]
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