Today I made a quite big update to stikis.com. It’s been a long time since I’ve made any changes to the live site, so this one is well overdue.

Notes from today’s reading group, where we discussed the following paper:

Harrison, S., Tatar, D., and Sengers, P. The three paradigms of HCI. In Alt. chi. Proceedings of CHI ‘07. ACM Press, NY, 2006.

(Click for a big version)

They list six intellectual commitments of the ‘situated perspective’, which is the third paradigm of the title. These are:

• The construction of meaning as a central focus and seen as constructed on the fly by people in specific contexts through interaction.

• Putting users in their place entails seeing the understandings that people have of their world are strongly tied to and informed by their varying physical and social situations. Understanding the local, situated practices of users.

• Putting interfaces in their place means recognizing that the specifics of the place where interaction with interfaces takes place is a strong determinant of the meaning that people make of those interfaces.

• Putting researchers in their place means also seeing the knowledge of researchers as situated within their own particular practices and, following from this, opening up for a diversity of research traditions to be brought together to understand a phenomenon of interest.

• Explicit focus on values in design means a widening (and plurality) of possible criteria by which the worth of a design might be judged, including political, emotional, aesthetic and value-based criteria.

• The necessity, but inadequacy, of theory entails a position toward theory that sees it as a useful lens for making sense of a setting, but at the same time as contingent upon the meaning that emerges through a process of design in a setting.

My friend Tim shared a link to an interesting post about some very early color stereo photographs taken of the 1906 SF quake.

I figured it would be fun to try to combine them into animated gifs - like you do. Here’s how they turned out.

(I think the final one might have been restored or something? It looks like the plates are identical in one part on the lower right)

For future reference, the following command will format a javascript source file as a 2-up syntax highlighted postscript file (you can open this in preview.app).

enscript -2Gr --color -Ejavascript file.js -ofile.ps

"...if one truly likes to design for movement-based interaction, one has to be or become an expert in movement, not just theoretically, by imagination or on paper, but by doing and experiencing while designing. So, besides having knowledge of the salient aspects of embodied interaction, one has to move in order to design movements."

Hummels, C., Overbeeke, K., & Klooster, S. (2007). Move to get moved: a search for methods, tools and knowledge to design for expressive and rich movement-based interaction. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(8), 677-690. doi:10.1007/s00779-006-0135-y