Beauty and Aesthetics in Interaction

Jonas Löwgren, the author of "Thoughtful Interaction Design" and some papers in INFX15 Compendium, has recently written a paper on how the aesthetics of interaction design can be handled through Interaction Criticism. This paper briefly states that:

"Even though the emerging field of user experience generally acknowledges the importance of aesthetic qualities in interactive products and services, there is a lack of approaches recognizing the fundamentally temporal nature of interaction aesthetics. By means of interaction criticism, I introduce four concepts that begin to characterize the aesthetic qualities of interaction.

• Pliability refers to the sense of malleability and tightly coupled interaction that makes the use of an interactive visualization captivating.
• Rhythm is an important characteristic of certain types of interaction, from the sub-second pacing of musical interaction to the hour-scale ebb and flow of peripheral emotional communication.
• Dramaturgical structure is not only a feature of online role-playing games, but plays an important role in several design genres from the most mundane to the more intellectually sophisticated.
• Fluency is a way to articulate the gracefulness with which we are able to handle multiple demands for our attention and action in augmented spaces."

Read this "beautiful" paper here.

Augmented Reality as one of 10 Web trends to watch in 2010

Pete Cashmore lists his 10 Web trends that we'll be talking about next year:

1- Real-time ramps up

2- Location, location, location

3- Augmented reality

4- Content 'curation'

5- Cloud computing

6- Internet TV and movies

7- Convergence conundrum

8- Social gaming

9- Mobile payments

10- Fame abundance, privacy scarcity

Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He is writing a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.

The story highlights:

• Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time communications trend will grow.
• The cloud-computing movement will see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010.
• 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated mobile payments market.

He states his idea about Augmented Reality in the next year as follows:

• It's yet to become part of the consumer consciousness, but augmented reality has attracted early-adopter buzz in the latter part of 2009. Enabled by GPS, mapping data from the likes of Google and the accelerometer technology in modern phones, AR involves overlaying data on your environment; imagine walking around a city and seeing it come to life with reviews of the restaurants you walk past and Wikipedia entries about the sights you see.
• When using Layar, for instance, the picture from your phone's video camera is overlaid with bubbles of information from Yelp, Wikipedia, Google Search and Twitter. The challenge for such services is to prove their utility: They have the "cool factor," but can they be truly useful?

Read more here.

Piano Stairs

Giving a lecture on the concept of "virtual dinner party" as the main theme for our creative practical project, Erik provided a simple, but notable example to explain how technology could make people happy while improving their life; here is that example:

An initiative of Volkswagen called "The Fun Theory" motivates and supports this kind of ideas and inventions. TheFunTheory.com "is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better."

Hello HCI Design!

I started this blog to reflect on topics about Human-Computer Interaction Design course, offered in the Department of Informatics in Lund University.

My personal blog is intended to present my thoughts and ideas related to the lectures, workshops and design work in our team.

This blog also seeks to have a contribution to make a better course with suggesting more updated scientific papers and web resources.