Monday, March 15, 2010

Thinking like a storyteller

One of the great things about being an IXDA member is the nearly 18,000 other members and the resources that are shared.

Cindy Chastain-Thinking Like a Storyteller from Interaction Design Association.

"Storytelling is all about engagement. Designing with a narrative in mind can make a difference between a product that merely functions will and one that engages the minds and emotions of users. This session will explore how an understanding of narrative techniques can make us better designers."

As interaction designers we do well at facilitating the complex dialogue between people and the interactive products they use. But we often neglect to consider the story that evolves through the interactions people have with the things we make. Designing with a narrative in mind can make a difference between a product that merely functions well and a product that engages the minds, emotions and imaginations of users.

Drawing on personal experience, narrative theory and examples ranging from interactive products to film, this presentation is a call to action for designers to equip themselves with a deeper understanding of narrative techniques. It focuses on core aspects such as theme, scene-making, and sequencing to illustrate how thinking like a storyteller can make you a better designer. You’ll also learn how this approach can be a powerful basis for holistic design.

Cindy Chastain-Rapp has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. Just recently she took on the role of Creative Director, Experience Architecture at Rapp, a global, full-service agency based in NYC. She has led projects for clients ranging from BBC Worldwide to Showtime, Fuse, Madison Square Garden, Coca-Cola and Unilever. Read Cindy's blog here:

Posted via web from bitpakkit

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Making Money.

A simple and concise animated tour through the development of our the modern monetary system.

Posted via web from bitpakkit

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Handy meter

You never know when you might need the handy device below:

(I tried it out this morning while reading the latest plea from Tiger Woods' college girlfriend, public feedback on the Canadian federal budget,  speculation on the iPad, and the spotty past of Jihad Jane)

 

Posted via web from bitpakkit

Scobleizer chats with Adobe about the Flash Platform on mobile




Scobleizer chats with folks from the Adobe Platform BU about Adobe Flash on mobile phones.

Covers three recent announcements:

1. A new 10.1 Flash Player for Android and Palm, with other platforms coming soon.

2. A new compiler/converter for packaging Flash apps up and shipping them on the iPhone and iPad.

3. A new AIR runtime for mobile phones so developers can ship AIR/Flash apps like Tweetdeck or Seesmic directly onto Android or Palm without doing additional work.

Erik Schonfeld's post gives a good tour of the issues and important points.

Posted via web from bitpakkit

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Handvetica - comp-y awesomeness

Found this great font for decks and docs around UX and UID work. I know it would be good for the right site or print piece as well, but this definitely keeps the handmade approach without having to resort to all the comic sans lookalikes which are hard to take seriously.

You can make a title png or grab the whole font here.

It was handmade in Switzerland by Studio Kmzero, who have authored a few more excellent contemporary and well designed fonts. You can see those here.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

10 Common Misconceptions about UX

UX @ Mom 2.0

UX @ Mom 2.0

Cindy Chastain on UX

UX Paris 10/02/10

UX Paris 10/02/10

UX Paris - 10/02/10

2010 - and where are they now?

I've been thinking a lot about user experience lately and how it ultimately underpins every aspect of adoption in the tech space today - from platforms through to internal government applications, our users are increasingly picky, intolerant and bring realistic, informed and high expectations to the table for what they want.

You have a choice - make it work, keep your promise, and help people get stuff done - or fade away forever. It's never the whole story, but bringing a pure internal, ivory-tower, self indulgent, ICT-lead thinking approach to new products and strategies ensures you will have more of a chance to fail than ever before.

On that note, I was following a Google Buzz outburst on "where are they now" and it netted out a random collection of links to stories and posts about the new new thing that was not to be. In no particular order (and I will let someone else rant about the benefits or bonkers-ness of each) some of the ones that came up were:


I know there's way more...what are they? Should some of these not be on the list? Why?

Someone else reminded me of the connection to this thread that sits squarely in Daniel Gilbert's book "Stumbling into Happiness" <-official site, not buy now link talks about our inability to predict the future. I love this quote from Gilbert's site, "Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan."

While we are not total failures, as evidenced by all our successes in improving the life of our peeps, I think we may cloud our view of the new new thing simply by focusing on the success of others sometimes. Call this a reality check...users will protect us from ourselves.

Now let's hope someone can turn this nonsense into an actually useful article.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Is Google the Next Microsoft and Microsoft the Next Apple?

Rather strange but provocative (clearly intentionally) POV in this article... http://www.technewsworld.com/story/69374.html  Former Forrester analyst Enderle does tackle the notion of UX in the various brands and why that matters but its a cursory and obvious take at best.

"Google, Microsoft and Apple appear to be playing a game of musical chairs, with Google taking the "dark side" throne away from Microsoft and Microsoft stealing the innovation perch from Apple. Where does that leave Apple? Perhaps it's the one still looking for its place when the music stops."

Posted via web from bitpakkit

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

I've decided to play for change



On the plane on the way back from 5 days in the mountains and teaching a course at the Banff Centre I finally watched the whole Playing for Change movie. Impressive and it got me thinking...

Listening to music has formed the basis of a mass market industry and a state of mind which discourages, minimizes and even ridicules those who would rather play than listen.

A mother singing in the kitchen, a child humming absent-mindedly while rearranging her toys, a construction worker whistling - these are the remaining signs of a musical soul that has been somehow displaced over time; lost in our culture's senseless indifference and the boring clamor for sameness and a mundane albeit practical order.

What stops us from making it, from listening to and giving in to our inner music, and takes us down the path of purchases, makes us fans of the freedom instead of the stars of our free lives; and finally plastic wraps our solace and faith, propping it up in the bestsellers list for as long as we continue to conform in mass quantities.

Through cover music we can easily avoid the ridicule and excel through emulation (often exact) of those who have somehow previously escaped ridicule for creating and through the careful assembly of notes and words constructed to extract value from a constantly fleeting market - formulaic rock, country, gospel, etc - almost every genre has its share of this in the discount bins of our consumer worlds.

Great music only makes it to the discount bins in the worst parts of the world - horrific places like big box stores, late night TV and the credit roll portion of DVD soundtracks - places with no real depth, roots or tradition of any kind. The discount bin collects the detritus of lost dreams, broken hearts and the bastard children of greatness mashed into a bland, mushy soup of professional karaoke - at best.

So it should be no wonder that this bizarre oxymoron referred to as the "music business" is failing. No wonder people steal it in mass quantities. No wonder there appears to be no centre except the iTunes store or whatever money collection machine has the best scale. It has no centre, no sense of being and the location and point of contact to the music has little if any intrinsic value to anyone.

In much the same way we take french fries from a bag instead of from a potato, we have reduced one of our most spiritual, beneficial and collaborative gifts to another credit card purchase and forgotten how to create and sing ourselves.

Its not so much the fault of musicians, although if you believe this you will quickly realize that there are different kinds of musicians - those who deliberately participate in this veiled circus of marketing and hype and far more importantly those pure true souls who only have the most legitimate distribution and listenership through the collective sharing force of the like-minded, friends, family and movements that they play a role in.

These musicians and those who listen to it know that to play it, to truly play it, is to feel it and understand the feeling, to be pulled by strings that wrap around our hearts and minds, planting seeds that last forever in our fondest of memories.

True music lasts forever. Greatness supersedes the marketing machine capability. Sadly, music that plays for change, plays for peace, that brings tears to your eyes and joy to your heart has hardly any more place in the western music world that surrounds us today.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - @bitpakkit

Now as for Playing for Change, watch the latest episode...

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Pictures of Lily, Lily of Lily

Just found out about Lily, a Firefox add-on that enables users to create rich, complex applications within the browser. You create Lily applications by connecting functional modules that they call "externals" inside a document (program) called a "patch". Each object serves a single purpose, such as adding two numbers together, displaying an image or providing interactivity like a button. By connecting the output of one external to the input of another, it becomes possible to quickly build complex programs that do what you want. External objects are written in JavaScript (like Lily itself) and it's simple to write your own external to do whatever you want.

The Lily team have already built in over 180 externals objects:
- web service modules for APIs like Twitter, Amazon, Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo;
- UI modules that wrap web components from YUI, JQuery and Google Maps as well as the browser's built-in UI elements;
- modules that offer access to the network, SQLite storage, TCP sockets or the file system; modules to interact with the browser;
- modules to send and receive Open Sound Control messages or talk to the Arduino physical computing board;
- and, graphics modules that encapsulate the browser's SVG functionality and multimedia modules for playing sound and video.

Hello World from Bill Orcutt on Vimeo.



Now it's possible to use a browser-based program to make web or desktop mashups, allowing people with basic skills to visualize and animate data, modify webpages, play music, or connect to world outside the computer.

Another neat aspect is that your programs can be shared with other Lily users as text files or they can be run by anyone as Firefox add-ons or standalone XULrunner applications.

Math from Bill Orcutt on Vimeo.



Lily is free and open source, released under the MIT license. Lily runs on Mac, Windows or Linux, just like Firefox.

Find out more or get started at the Lily site - http://www.lilyapp.org/

The project is now available on Google code (recent change) - http://code.google.com/p/lilyapp/

Thursday, October 08, 2009

The Invisible Man

Lou Bolin becomes the Invisible Man with no Photoshop or camera tricks - just stillness for a moment and some very careful paint work.











These images were emailed to me and I have not been able to attribute them as of yet.

Saturday, October 03, 2009