Emotive type

Typography requires distinct design metrics with which to evaluate and understand its aesthetic and semantic effect. As such, the attributes of each letterform can be discretely mapped to various meanings that they represent.


Emotive type

I chatted more with Daniela K. Rosner at Chi'07 today. She showed me some of her work, and I particularly loved her work on emotive type using text transformation to convey emotions. She also did user test the concept.

In experiments one and two, users viewed a series of 30 kinetic text animations chosen at random from four emotion-animation mappings; they were asked to report whether they felt the emotion evoked by the animation was similar to or different from the name of the emotion represented. In the third experiment, users viewed a series of 32 varying animations of the word “information.” They were asked to select the emotion from the list of 15 that they felt conveyed same emotions as the animation. (...) Based on the results of both the second and third experiments, positive animations were more than twice as likely to be reported by users as highly correlated. Although users reported correlations of varying consistency among animation-emotion pairs, animations that involved less graphic complexity also ranked higher than those that did not. Interestingly, the emotion-animation pairs that ranked highest in their user’s reported correlation value also made more explicit use of metaphor than those that did not.

Guitar hero becomes guitaroke

Aurelius Prochazka, a big fan of Guitar Hero, developped a Guitaraoke Revolution game. Apparently an amazing guitar and ear workout, he offers how to play the Guitaroke Revolution using a simple hack. Basically, "splice your Karaoke Revolution microphone so that the microphone ends in a plug and the USB converter end has a jack" ...
More details on .apb.

Culturally embedded computing and HCI challenges

At Chi 2007 I met with Lucian Leahu, researcher from the culturally embedded computing group at Cornell University. The group researches on affective computing by considering the cultural context in which people are in while interacting with computers.

We analyze, design, build, and evaluate computing devices in cultural context. We analyze the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, and design, build, and test new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities for technology. We are part of a community of critical technical practices [as coined by Phil Agre], or practices that integrate technical system-building with cultural, philosophical, and critical reflection on technical practice. We have a focus on reflective design, or design practices that help both users and designers reflect on their experiences and the role technology plays in those experiences. We work with collaborators in the Affective Presence coalition to develop an approach to affective computing in which the full complexity of human emotions and relationships as experienced by users in central to design (rather than the extent to which computers can understand and process those emotions) (...)

For instance, their ongoing Fear Reflector project aims to support emotional self-reflection of people while they expect to confront their fears. Using a combination of biometry and camera input, it takes pictures of situation in which the user "fears". People are then given the possibility to reflect on these "fear" contexts.

The group had a few papers being presented at Chi 2007. I attended a very impressive talk from their group How HCI Interprets the Probes. They discuss the research techniques of Bill Gaver called Cultural probes that uncover people's values and activities. They discuss how the HCI community craving for flexible design methods adopted and adapted the probes in their research. By Kirsten Boehner, Janet Vertesi, Phoebe Sengers, and Paul Dourish (from Irvine), How HCI Interprets the Probes.
.Pdf of the Paper.
Also a nice interview of Bill Gaver on Designing Interactions for reference.
Another very inspiring take on HCI is to look at Situationist art practice. The authors specify how the Chi community can be relunctant to consider these methods, or by reducing them to comform to Chi's ones instead of using the richness of these methods.
.Pdf of the Chi'07 paper by Lucian Leahu, Phoebe Sengers, Claudia Pederson, Jennifer Thom-Santelli and Pavel Dmitriev.
Of course, nice references on situationism with video and sound recordings of Guy Debord on Ubu. The most famous and studied book-movie of Guy Debord being Society of the Spectacle.

ReadyMade: How to Make (Almost) Everything

Beautifully designed ReadyMade book by Shoshana Berger and Grace Hawthorne.

Written by the cofounders of ReadyMade magazine, this is a book of all original material that revolves around the reuse of six building materials—paper, plastic, wood, metal, glass and fabric. This hybrid of how­to, editorial and historical content yielded a design that is simultaneously smart and fun, structured yet chaotic, sophisticated yet accessible.
In the spirit of ReadyMade’s reuse ethos, the book itself is a reusable object, with the spine serving as a ruler—inches on the front cover, centimeters on the back. Since the book’s content swings wildly from do­it­yourself projects and scientific diagrams to lifestyle articles, historical timelines and random sidebar nuggets of information, we deliberately pushed ourselves out of the usual structural comfort zones of contemporary book design—limited typeface use, repetitive grid structure, white space—to see how much variety the piece could sustain and still be coherent. - Aiga

Tilt and feel

Shoogle, created by John Williamson, Roderick Murray-Smith, Stephen Hughes at the University of Glasgow, UK, is an interface for sensing data within a mobile device.

It is based around active exploration: devices are shaken, revealing the contents rattling around “inside”. Vibrotactile display and realistic impact sonification create a compelling system. Inertial sensing is used for completely eyes-free, single-handed interaction that is entirely natural.

Download the Shoogle's paper for Chi 2007
Video of Shoogle

Stephen Hughes was previously a researcher in the Palpable Machines research group with Sile O'Modhrain at Media Lab Europe. The group published key papers on vibrotactile display and mobile multi-modal interfaces.


MESH an iPaq running a simple tilt-driven maze game by the Palpable Machines group

Tangible Programming in the Classroom

Tern: Wooden blocks shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces

Created by Michael Horn and Robert J.K. Jacob at Tufts University, Tern is a tangible programming language for middle school and late elementary school students. Children connect the tailored wooden blocks to form physical computer programs, which may include action commands, loops, branches, and subroutines.

Download Tern's paper for Chi'07


Quetzal

Prior to designing Tern, the authors created Quetzal (pronounced ket-sal), a "tangible programming language designed for children and novice programmers to control LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. It consists of over one hundred interlocking tiles representing flow-of-control structures, actions, and data. Programmers arrange and connect these tiles to define algorithms which can include loops, branches, and concurrent execution."

Also Oren Zuckerman from the MIT Media Lab created Systems Thinking Blocks for children to model and simulate dynamic systems.


Flow Blocks for children "to create 3D structures in space, that look like common structures in life"

SuiPo: the interactive poster

The interactive Poster “SuiPo” by Fuminori Tsunoda, Takayuki Matsumoto, Takeshi Nakagawa, Mariko Utsunomiya, East Japan Railway uses a combination of IC card ticket Suica and Internet accessible mobile phone where customers can get e-mail information by touching their IC card ticket on the reader located near the poster.

More on SuiPo

Japanese books

Cute Japanese books I found on amazon.jp!

Another book

Books I bought today ...



Sagmeister: Made You Look by Peter Hall, Booth-Clibborn publisher.



Envisioning information by Edward Tufte


Curious Boym: Design Works The discreet charm of the ordinary by Constantin Boym, Peter Hall, Steven Skov Holt

Refreshing ads

Nice for the summer! Via frederik samuel

In the Ibirapuera Park, there were vaporizers placed to refresh visitors. On the sides of these vaporizers, there is a place designed to propagate publicity. They used visuals of people coughing and sneezing with the message that “the flu is in the air”. Agency: QG, Brazil; Copywriter: Edu Marques; Art Director: Luis Tauffer