metabolo.org - interaction

Exploring gestural interface principles through Wii remote+Max/MSP granular synth mashup

gva — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:19:03 -0500

I developed this gestural interface prototype that offers an intuitive and performance-friendly interaction model. I'm exploiting the physicality of Nintendo's Wii controller by aiming to drawing out visceral, subtle, and "quasi-analogue" possibilities.

To build the prototype I combined functions from two existing Max patches: aka.wiiremote Nintendo Wii Remote Handler by Masayuki Akamatsu and granularized by Les & Zoax.

I chose the granular synthesizer because it provides a high degree of independent control of all sound variables, allowing the interaction design to access many parameters heuristically, looking for the most subtle and intriguing degree of sonic control. For example, pitch can be transposed independent of tempo and duration of sample playback. In terms of sonic culture, the quality of granular synthesis is less familiar and more more contemporary than, say, analogue modeling, or conventional sample playback. The sound of the granular synth has a "twenty-first century" quality that ties well with gestural control. The short demo video is not exhaustive or methodical but captures a bit of practice as I began to learn the characteristics of the system.

Thanks and shout out to Professor Joshua Goldberg, Brian MacMillan and other classmates at Integrated Digital Media Institute, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn.

designswarm | Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino | Interaction Design

gva — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:45:52 -0400

"Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, freelance interaction designer. I am interested in the way service design ties product design and interaction design together to create meaningful experiences for people both in the virtual and tangible worlds."

Architectures of Control v. Designing for Emergence

gva — Fri, 18 May 2007 13:20:20 -0400

In the course of research for my Media Law paper, on Creative Commons and designing for emergence in law, I came across this excellent blog. In many ways this site might be considered the opposite of "designing for emergence":

Architectures of Control
http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/

What are Architectures of Control?

[example images - Audi A2: The user cannot open the bonnet; Bench designed to prevent lying down: 'redesigned to face contemporary urban realities'; printer: Some HP printers shut down the cartridges at a pre-determined date regardless of whether they are empty]

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

This site aims—with readers’ input—to examine and analyse the ideas and techniques of these architectures of control in design, through examples and anecdotes, and by keeping up-to-date with relevant developments...

I plan to redesign metabolo.org later this summer and intend to emulate many of the successful features I see here...

Lineup for IDMI’s Hyperpolis 3.0 conference

gva — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:35:22 -0400

Below are the themes and speakers of a conference, hosted by the Integrated Digital Media Institute and Othmer Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, where I'll be giving a presentation based on the ideas in my paper with Robert K. Logan, "Designing for Emergence and Innovation." More background may be found at http://idmi.poly.edu/

The Production of Politics Thursday October 19th 11am to 2pm

Richard Rogers, Director, govcom.org, University of Amsterdam

Tom Keenan, Director, the Human Rights Project, Bard College

Karen J. Hall, Humanities postdoctoral fellow, Syracuse University

Atopia (Jane Harrison and David Turnbull), Urban research and design office, New York

The Art of Work in the Age of Post-production Thursday October 19th 3pm to 6pm

Rev. Luke Murphy, Artist, VP of Technology, MTV Networks

Greg Van Alstyne, Senior Research Associate, Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity, Ontario College of Art & Design

Ruth Ron, Architect and new media artist, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Florida

Blogging: around the table Friday October 20th 11am to 2pm

Jodi Dean, Teaches political theory at Hobart-William Smith colleges and maintains jdeanicite.typepad.com

Geert Lovink, Media theorist and activist, University of Amsterdam

McKenzie Wark, Author of the Hacker Manifesto and teaches media studies at Lang College, the New School

Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

The Politics of Production Friday October 20th 3pm to 6pm

Michael Liegl, Ethnographer, University of Munich

Eric Redlinger, Musician, network administrator, member of Share collective, New York-Montreal-San Diego-Wiesbaden

Michael J. Schumacher, Composer, performer, director of Diapason sound gallery, New York

Katherine Carl, Co-director, the School of Missing Studies, New York-Sarajevo

Sterling, Greenfield, and the Patchy Internet of Things

gva — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:27:44 -0400

I've heard Bruce Sterling taking issue with Adam Greenfield over the title of his book, Everyware (in this great IT Conversations podcast). I was a bit surprised, then, when in our OCAD lecture Sterling gave a big boost to Greenfield's book and said that they talk all the time and are now good buddies. Hey, things change. In any case that's not why I'm writing.

At some point I plan to take up Sterling's original argument, and maintain that the arrival of dataspace (as we call it at the Beal Institute) AKA the Internet of Things will not involve "everything" and "everyone" and "everywhere" -- it will be patchy and spotty. And I agree with Sterling that it may take 30 years to arrive. But I'm not writing about that either.

Actually I'm writing to point out a hard to find and thin but interesting discussion board about the emergence of ubicomp in Greenfield's site. Some nice examples of weak signals or whatever in there -- so, like, check it out.

The Birth of “Interaction Design”

gva — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 15:47:11 -0400

The term "interaction design" is attributed to a number of different parents, some from the academic and theory world and others more rooted in client practice.

Another example comes from the recent book Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer. There is also a "Definition of Interaction Design" post in Saffer's blog. The book offers the following account:

Back in 1990, Bill Moggridge, a principal of the design firm IDEO, realized that for some time he and some of his colleagues had been creating a very different kind of design. It wasn’t product design exactly, but they were definitely designing products. Nor was it communication design, although they used some of that discipline’s tools as well. It wasn’t computer science either, although a lot of it had to do with computers and software. No, this was something different. It drew on all those disciplines, but was something else, and it had to do with connecting people through the products they used. Moggridge called this new practice interaction design.

A recent paper by Wakkary and Budd traces the term's birth to Terry Winograd's “From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design” in Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing:

In recognizing the impact of the increasing role of computing in people’s lives, Terry Winograd at Stanford University was among the first to identify a design practice whose outcome and focus was a qualitative process rather than a thing or an object. He labeled this new practice “interaction design.” Winograd identified the need to focus on the perceptual and psychological aspects of human experience by rooting interaction design equally in graphic design, psychology, communication, linguistics and computing science.

And my fellow instructor at OCAD, Martha Ladly, suggested Nathan Shedroff in a recent discussion about this question.

Thoughts from the readership of this blog are welcome. To be continued?

------

After posting these definitions I received an addendum in the comments field, which I want to add here, to reward the commenter, amend my original post, and stimulate discussion:

Bill Verplank would like some credit as well... From his website:
http://www.billverplank.com/professional.html

"From 1986-1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at
IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user-interfaces into the product design
world; he started calling it 'interaction design' instead of 'user-interface
design'."