- ARCHIVE / Complexity
- Designing What’s Next
A central theme of disconnection between theory and practice was meant as a call to HCI theorists to improve both the communication and the pragmatics of technique. That disconnection applies in the other direction, too, in how we perceive and intervene in the evolution of the World Wide Web. Perhaps we need a little more theory in our practice of predicting the future.
- The Human Brain Cloud
The game is simple: You see a word or short phrase from the 530,000 already suggested by other players, and you enter the first response that enters your head. Beyond being a great time suckage, the Human Brain Cloud has the potential to produce enormously valuable information for designers and marketers.
- Transparency of my recent failure
For the second year, an attempt to join the CHI Doctoral Consortium has been denied. Last year, I was focusing on barriers to entry in joining online communities, and this year I switched to merging complexity and HCI design. I share my reviews and reflection on the new failure.
- Stupid is as stupid does
There is an effort underfoot to filter stupidity from Internet discussions. Seriously. Although it sounds like it could be a headline from The Onion, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are actively collecting a corpus of data in the hope that some Bayesian analysis will generate a reliable tool to intervene before a commenter makes their stupidity public. StupidFilter got BoingBoinged last month without much reaction but popped back up in the blogosphere this week with some ferocity.
- Designing in Ten Dimensions
A book by Rob Bryanton, Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A new way of thinking about time, space, and string theory, provides an explanation of how the ten dimensions might be perceived. Like Charles Eames’ Powers of Ten—which illustrates relative size by imagining a voyage from a view of the universe and down to the vibrating building blocks of matter—the insight that arises out of this thought experiment is in the patterns that form when moving from one state to the next. While we aren’t necessarily aiming to satisfy users in alternative universes, there may be some benefit in approaching design in a way that anticipates future change and acknowledges constraints in perception.
- Practically, no particular
Our HCI Design Theory class has begun discussing the relationship between design and science. The latter is a quest to explain truth through repeatable observation, describing a predictable understanding of the general. The former, on the other hand, is about changing the truth through the creation of new things on behalf of specific others. If the design view of science criticizes it for a focus on an impractical general rule, then so, too, is a particular an impractical abstraction of reality.
- Big Tree Top
Two members of our IU School of Informatics community have been working for the past year on Big Tree Top, a networking tool designed to allow local businesses to think like major corporations and leverage the collective wisdom of their customers. BTT is on the verge of releasing a product into the wild after a summer of iteration, looking for a critical mass in communities like Bloomington.