NIKE78 - Nick Marsh | ‘NIKE Wiis’ from NIKE78 on Vimeo.

Uuum, I’m not sure about this. It looks like he’s having trouble standing up or something.

Tony Orrico: Penwald: 2: 8 circles (2009)

“The second part of Gesture and Speech is entitled ‘Memory and Rhythms’, and it is above all in Leroi-Gourhan’s attention to the rhythmicity of technical activity, rather than its grounding in social memory, that this counter-argument appears. A great many operations, he observes, entail the regular repetition of certain manual gestures: these include hammering, sawing and scraping. And whether or not the artisan has an idea in mind of the final form of the artefact he is making, the actual form emerges from the pattern of rhythmic movement, not from the idea.” (Ingold, 2009, p.438)

The week before last, I was at the Designing Interactive Systems conference. I was there as one of the organizers of a one day workshop on the topic of ‘Materialities Influencing the Design Process’. We haven’t managed to make much of a synthesis of the outcomes of the workshop yet, but I have got the documentation for the day up on line:

• photos and videos from the day
• posters and booklets

And here’s the abstract from the workshop website:

The use of material artefacts within the design process is a long-standing and continuing characteristic of interaction design. Established methods, such as prototyping, which have been widely adopted by educators and practitioners, are seeing renewed research interest and being reconsidered in light of the evolving needs of the field. Alongside this, the past decade has seen the introduction and adoption of a diverse range of novel design methods into interaction design, such as cultural probes, technology probes, context mapping, and provotypes.

Yet, interaction design does not have a cohesive framework for understanding this diverse range of practices. Such a framework would assist practitioners in comparing and choosing between methods across the different stages, contexts and stakeholder relations within a design process. It seems that one fruitful place to start in addressing this lack is to focus in on the common characteristic that these practices share of materialities influencing the design process. This workshop proposes to bring together practitioners, educators, and researchers to discuss and begin the development of a shared understanding around this theme.

“…tangible computing has been explored, largely, as a practical exercise. Most prototypes have been developed opportunistically, driven as much by the availability of sensor technology and the emergence of new control devices as by a reasoned understanding of the role of physicality in interaction. We have various clues and pointers, but there is no theory of tangible interaction.” (Dourish, P. “Where the action is” p.52)

“Creation of a thing, and creation plus full understanding of a a correct idea of the thing, are very often parts of one and the same indivisible process and cannot be separated without bringing the process to a stop.” (Feyerabend, P. “Against Method” p.17).

Nice use of augmented reality on this Lego packaging. I haven’t seen this myself yet. Must keep an eye out the next time we’re down town.

Design pattern template in rtf format.

A template for documenting design patterns for this week’s HCI task is now available on the HCI course page. To use the template, download the document and edit it to replace all the red text with your own. Change the images also.

The template is based on the format of those in the Yahoo! design pattern library. You can visit there to see some concrete examples of the kind of information that should be in a pattern description as well as for inspiration on the kinds of things that patterns can be about.

Image Credit: manifestcreative

It has taken me a while, but I have finally finished putting up a summary of the lecture on Situated Actions from week 8.

A summary for this week’s lecture will be coming soon (I promise).

Cursors as displayed by different browsers

(I actually made this post and the update it talks about quite a while ago, but did not get around to publishing it until now).

Today a minor update to stikis so that mouse cursors are a bit more logical. I say a bit more logical, because, as you can see from the picture above, the way different browsers render the same cursors varies a lot. The strangest one to me is the different between how Firefox renders the ‘move’ cursor compared to IE and Safari. On Firefox, this is an open hand, actually identical to the ‘-moz-grab’ cursor, whereas on IE and Safari it is a left-right-up-down arrow. Another strange one is the ’se-resize’ cursor, which Firefox and Safari both render as an arrow pointing down and to the right, but IE renders as a double-headed arrow. This actually looks quite similar to the way Firefox and Safari render the ‘nwse-resize’ cursor, but unfortunately IE doesn’t recognise this. Oh well.

There are actually lots of different cursor styles that you can apply with CSS. As usual, PPK has a good reference for support of cursor styles across different browsers. However, his table doesn’t show what these different cursors actually look like, even if they are supported. As the picture shows, there’s a lot of variation in this.

One tricky thing I encountered was that it’s not easy to take a screen-shot that includes the cursor. The solution I found was to use the osx ’screencapture’ command line utility. The command I used was:

screencapture -m -C -T5 ie_2.png

(Command - Shift - 4) + Alt & Shift to constrain the selection. Space to take the whole window

Oh and also thanks to stikis user [Blake] for pointing out that the Chrome browser works with stikis (hmmm, perhaps that should be ’stikis works with the Chrome browser’ - I don’t want to sound like the whole internet revolves around stikis :)). I’ve tried it myself and everything does seem to work, but if you’re a Chrome user and you find a bug, please let me know.

This week’s lecture for HCI was about the theory of Distributed Cognition. I have made a separated web-page with the summary for this class.