Tag 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 [...]
Posted in Critique, Design, Human-Centered, Opinion | Also tagged , , , | 4 Comments

“Play Money” and RMT is why I will never play MMORPGs again.

I just got finished reading Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell, and I must say that no book in recent memory has riled me up so much. Don’t get me wrong – I am not angry because I am naive about virtual worlds [...]
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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. 
Posted in Design Philosophy, Human-Centered, Readings | Also tagged , , | 2 Comments

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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Phenomenological Reading of WoW Machinima

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 [...]
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Interaction Culture Class

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 [...]
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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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Is it a designer's job to change behavior?

I have read a lot of articles that specifically say a designer’s job is to change behavior. Perhaps I am but a naive designer, but I don’t know if I buy into that statement. I have been thinking a lot about it, and I had a fellow student ask me why I thought this. Here [...]
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