inkblurt

Scully on memorials, and the impact of organizing information for humans

April 12, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

At the IA Summit this year, there was a lot of talk about whether or not individuals organizing information was still relevant (which is an absurd question on one level, but I suppose it’s important to work through this identity crisis together as a community).

There are some things that a designer’s understanding of context can do with information that a hive mind or a universal standard simply cannot.

It hit me with a thud as I read this interview: A Monumental Discussion with Vincent Scully | Metropolis Magazine.

Scully explains one of the design features of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC:

The other brilliant move was her determination that the names on the memorial reflect the chronology of their deaths. The authorities wanted very much to make it alphabetical. But I’ve heard people standing in front of that wall, pointing up to a cluster of names, and saying: ‘They were all killed by the same burst.’ The memorial is very close to the sequence of how people died. So it’s the whole story of the war. And in a way, symbolically, it starts out with the first casualty, and then it goes in the depths of the war, where the casualties were massive, and then it goes to the last.

There’s the human story. And there’s how stories get told and resonated with how we shape information. It happens every day, in many contexts much more mundane than this … but all of them are meaningful, all of them change us.

Presentation: Clues to the Future

April 1, 2006 by Andrew | No comments

IA Summit 2006 Presentation

I presented on the topic “Clues to the Future” at the 2006 IA Summit.

Here is the link to the presentation, in pdf format with notes. It’s 12.8 MB. https://www.inkblurt.com/media/hinton_iasummit06.pdf

It’s also available at the conference site.

If you download the presentation, could you leave me a comment HERE? Just to satisfy my curiosity. Thanks!

————————————————————–
And, here’s the messy list of stuff I’ve been reading from:

Working “Bibliography” Links:

These are most of the sources for research I did when getting thoughts and ideas together for the presentation. I’ll finalize and categorize the list once the Summit is over.

From here to the CD-ROM list are new links I’m possibly referring to as I work further.

Another blog on MMOGs (one post in Oct questions Castranova’s Norrath GDP calculations — but it’s still a pretty high $450 or so)
This is the original one, which continues to be his casual blog
http://www.walkering.com/walkerings/
This is the new “virtual worlds” focused one:
http://3pointd.com/

Can’t believe I missed this: Jane McGonigal’s AvantGame
http://www.avantgame.com/

A new-media wiki page with a great bibliography
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php?title=User:Paul_Fitzpatrick

Philip Bell Associate Professor of Cognition & Technology
“learning scientist” / teaching science in internet environments
http://faculty.washington.edu/pbell/
his syllabus on “everyday technologies in youth culture”

Playgrounds of the Self: Christine Rosen
excellent article on how people form identities and evolve/experiment with them over time — and how that now plays out online
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/9/rosen.htm

Click to access EDCI505-Winter2005-syllabus.pdf

Radio Open Source entry on “Living in Game Space” and a lot of great links in a sidebar

Living in Game Space

Alternate Reality: The history of massively multiplayer online games.
http://archive.gamespy.com/amdmmog/week1/

First Monday article: The Impact of Digital Games in Education
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_7/xyzgros/index.html

Constance Steinkuehler’s site
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/

Selection of presentations and papers given at the “Com Work” Conference
including one by Richard Bartle, the guy who invented MUD in ’78, as well as Julian Dibbel!
http://game.itu.dk/comwork/itu_program.html

Richard Bartle’s site
http://mud.co.uk/dvw/

A nice discussion of Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree” and concepts of semi-lattice vs. hierarchy, etc.
http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_day/_w2004-05-23
and Shirkey’s mention of it http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/04/26/a_city_is_not_a_tree.php

Article on the legal / tax implications of virtual bartering & “income”
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2006/feature_dibbell_janfeb06.msp

Terra Nova — a blog on virtual worlds
http://terranova.blogs.com/

Mostly solid overview of Sherry Turkle’s work on identity (ends up a little judgmental and oversimplified)
http://www.transparencynow.com/turkle.htm
and an interview: http://www.priory.com/ital/turkleeng.htm
and an article: http://www.prospect.org/print/V7/24/turkle-s.html

A Testbed for Evaluating Human Interaction with Ubiquitous Computing
(looks at how Quake and other multiplayer environments tell us things about how people behave in ubiq. computing )
Environmentshttps://www.cs.tcd.ie/Dave.Lewis/files/05a.pdf

The Xerox PARC research landing page (esp embedded collab computing, community knowledge sharing, and game ethnography sections are of interest)
http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/csl/default.html

PlayOn — the PARC blog on game research
http://blogs.parc.com/playon/

The “Serious Games Summit”
http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/home.html

Ludology.org
http://www.ludology.org/

A Ludicrous Discipline?
“The information age has, under our noses, become the gaming age. It appears likely that gaming and its associated notion of play may become a master metaphor for a range of human social relations…”
http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/29

Game Culture From the Bottom Up (“Productive Play”)
http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/17

The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play / Nick Yee
“Using well-known behavior conditioning principles, video games are inherentlywork platforms that train us to become better gameworkers. And thework that is being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations. The microcosm of these online games may reveal larger social trends in the blurring boundaries between work and play.”
http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/68

Social Impact Games
http://www.socialimpactgames.com/

Game Resources Links (a lot of them are already on this list)
http://www.aaim.org/game_resources.htm

From PlayStation to PC
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_12770,294,p1.html

Game Mechanic Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanic

Communication Technologies as Symbolic Form: Cognitive Transformations Generated by the Internet http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5001893777

Internet, Emerging Culture and Design
http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/archive/newsletters/v97n2/computers/culture.asp

Kierkegaard on the Information Highway
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/kierkegaard.html

Ludicorp (creators of Flickr)
http://www.ludicorp.com/about.php

From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design
http://pcd.stanford.edu/winograd/acm97.html

Wikipedia entry on Ludology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludology

Eternal Gamer – weblog
http://www.eternalgamer.com/play/

Grand Text Auto: Georgia Tech’s blog on Game Studies
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/

Games * Design * Art * Culture (blog)
http://www.costik.com/weblog/

Below here, added on the CD-ROM file already

John Seely Brown (homepage and article trove)
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/

Gamasutra
http://www.gamasutra.com/

Nick Yee’s Research on Sociology, etc, of games
http://www.nickyee.com/

Nick Yee’s “Project Daedalus” on “The Psychology of MMPORGs”
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH)
http://www.ics.forth.gr/hci/activities_outcomes.html

Jeff Dyck Homepage
http://hci.usask.ca/people/jeff/index.shtml

Interaction Lab: University of Saskatchewan: Publications
http://hci.usask.ca/publications/??.xml

Learning from Games: HCI Design Innovations in Entertainment Software (pdf)

Click to access games-gi03.pdf

Building and Experiencing Community in Internet-Based Multiplayer Computer Games (Whitepaper)
http://industries.bnet.com/whitepaper.aspx?scname=Software+and+Games&docid=128802

On Integrating First Person Shooter Games and Ubiquitous Environments (Paper)
Find it here

Game Research site
http://www.game-research.com/

Hybrid Worlds: Social Cyberspace, Imagination and Identity
http://www.dlese.org/cms/qdl/jcdl05/11_Shumar/document_view

Changing Technologies, Changing Literacy Communities?
http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num2/murray/

Digital Games Research Conference 2003 — Presentations
http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2003/2003/index.php

DiGRA Games Conference 2005 Papers
http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/papers.php

DiGRA Site

Home

Academic Gamers
http://www.academic-gamers.org/

Marketing to Teens (not complete article)
http://www.emarketer.com/eStatDatabase/ArticlePreview.aspx?1003750

Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media (New journal — excellent resource)
http://gac.sagepub.com/content/vol1/issue1/

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Pew Internet: Teens and Technology
(See also all the work at pewinternet.org)
http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=162

Microsoft Research Gives Glimpse of the Future (article)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1033970,00.asp

Microsoft Social Computing Group
http://research.microsoft.com/scg/

Wallop
http://mywallop.com/

The Coming Age of Calm Technology
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm

Mourning Asheron’s Call
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/08/asherons_call_2.html

Business Whitepapers, etc.
http://industries.bnet.com/ENTERTAINMENT+and+LEISURE/Video+Games/Software+and+Games/

Information Technology and the Institution of Identity (paper)
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Articles/1610110406.html

Here is the proposal final version.

Proposal/Description

Clues to the Future: What the users of tomorrow are teaching us today.

What might Wikipedia have in common with World of Warcraft? And how might that affect design and business strategy today?

According recent academic and business research, there is an enormous wave of people on its way to adulthood that may very well take us by surprise. And while many designers may be aware of this, we still face the challenge of making it clear to our clients and stake-holders.

Beyond the hype and more obvious implications of the “net generation” are key questions that affect how business and design plan for the future. For example: the shift from hierarchical to nodal paradigms; the rise of new kinds of literacy (and authority); the blurring boundaries between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ economies; the splintering of identity; and users who, frankly, expect your web environment to be as well designed as the best games on their X-Boxes.

It’s important not to focus on the surface gadgetry, but to understand what is different about how these users think, how they solve problems and manage resources, how they socialize and organize, and how vastly different it may be from the assumed conventions of most business and design decision-makers (i.e. people born before 1985).

This presentation will:

1. Survey some of the current research and insights on the issue;
2. Explore some of the more challenging theoretical questions raised;
3. Discuss the practical business and design implications of those questions; and
4. Suggest how those implications might help make stronger cases for innovative design.

JOHO blogs inkblurt.

March 26, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

The splendiferous David Weinberger made it to my IA Summit talk and gave me a generous writeup… thanks Dave!!
Joho the Blog: [ia summit] Andrew Hinton: The future according to kids

(side note: this is actually pretty freaky for me, even as used to this technology as I am, that within an hour of it there’s a blog post and I’m blogging back… I may need a 12 step program)

Presentation status …

March 26, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

I just presented at the IA Summit, and it seemed to go ok.

I’m keeping a page about the presentation here.

It’ll take me a few days to get the presentation shaped up with notes to upload it if anyone wants to see it. For now, if you want to contact me about the topic, I made a handy topical email address: gamelayer at inkblurt dot com.

For those who made it, thanks for coming and listening!

Quick plug for Rosenfeld Media

January 24, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

Good luck to Lou Rosenfeld’s new enterprise: Rosenfeld Media – Publisher of user experience design books. If anybody can make this kind of thing happen, Lou can.

There’s also an excellent interview with Lou about his venture over at Boxes & Arrows.

IA Summit 2006 – “Clues to the Future”

January 23, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

Evidently, my proposal to this year’s IA Summit has been accepted. Now comes the tough part of actually having a presentation.

I have plenty of stuff to present on … that’s just the problem. The challenge is getting it all winnowed down into something coherent and useful.

The conference organizers say I need to have my presentation materials to them by 2/1 so they can go onto the CD-ROM. But my PP decks usually have a lot of filler that only makes sense with the verbal narrative — so it may make more sense to provide an abstract, an outline, bibliography/links to research, and a link to a page here where people can download the latest-greatest if they so please.

Here’s the final version of the proposal/description (which I’m not sure if I got in on time, so this may not be identical to the actual conference info):

Clues to the Future: What the users of tomorrow are teaching us today.

What might Wikipedia have in common with World of Warcraft? And how might that affect design and business strategy today?

According recent academic and business research, there is an enormous wave of people on its way to adulthood that may very well take us by surprise. And while many designers may be aware of this, we still face the challenge of making it clear to our clients and stake-holders.

Beyond the hype and more obvious implications of the “net generation” are key questions that affect how business and design plan for the future. For example: the shift from hierarchical to nodal paradigms; the rise of new kinds of literacy (and authority); the blurring boundaries between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ economies; the splintering of identity; and users who, frankly, expect your web environment to be as well designed as the best games on their X-Boxes.

It’s important not to focus on the surface gadgetry, but to understand what is different about how these users think, how they solve problems and manage resources, how they socialize and organize, and how vastly different it may be from the assumed conventions of most business and design decision-makers (i.e. people born before 1985).

This presentation will:

1. Survey some of the current research and insights on the issue;
2. Explore some of the more challenging theoretical questions raised;
3. Discuss the practical business and design implications of those questions; and
4. Suggest how those implications might help make stronger cases for innovative design.

Hopefully this won’t just be a retread of stuff people already know. The basic theme is that by studying how the net generation uses things like social networks and multiplayer game environments, we can see what their mental models are going to be like when they’re full-fledged adult users.

This theme may sound obvious to many… but I haven’t heard much of a call for looking to these sources for planning business and design strategy for the near term.

If it takes most coporations about five years to get any truly ambitious technology shift into a mature state (and that’s if they’re in the quick crowd), why not go ahead and think about what that mature state should be once seventeen-year-olds are starting their careers? There’s amazing research and theory-making going on about online games, especially. They seem to me to be perfect laboratories, e-petri dishes, for seeing how an electronically mediated community (and that specialized community — the market economy) functions.

Here’s a separate page where I’ll be keeping info about it, links to related articles and research, and the final version of the presentation (eventually).

Now that’s architecture …

January 22, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

In an article from the February 2006 issue of Esquire (that’s unfortunately not online), David Childs, the architect for the “Freedom Tower” to be built on the old WTC site, has this to say about the role of the architect:

“The client’s role, whether it’s a museum board or an individual who wants to create something and gets involved, is a critical factor in the ultimate result of what we do. Unlike a painter or a sculptor … we do it through all sorts of strange smoke and mirrors and all that other stuff. You have to be persuasive to get your way. And the best way to do that is not a head-on fight, but to develop your arguments, and any way you can get there is ok.
… People want to have the architect seen as an individual artist doing his sculptural form. I’m much more pragmatic … I believe that the fascination of the program, and solving the problem, is part of architecture. First of all, you’ve got to do that — and then you’ve got to make it beautiful, rather than making the sculpture and then cramming stuff into it.”

Evidently there was also a Frontline episode about Childs, his firm, and the WTC project.

A house online

January 13, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

If you get as much of a kick out of “map vs. landscape” conundra as I do, take a look at mc.clintock.com, where someone has created an illustrated virtual directory of all of his possessions, mapped throughout his home, down to the postcares in the second bureau drawer in the second floor study.

A PIM Manifesto, of sorts

January 13, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

There’s a movement afoot to create an open-source personal-information-management application (PIM) called Chandler. Much like Firefox was developed from an open source effort, some smart people are workingon making something that we can use to organize our crazy info-heavy lives.

I haven’t really found anything that fits (or interfaces well with) the organic, messy nature of how human beings really work, and figured this thing would be similar.

Much to my pleasant surprise, there is a lot of very smart thinking going on about it. There’s an excellent page, written by the articulate Lisa Dusseault all about the “Vision” for the application, and it sounds like the kind of thing I wish we could write for every new development idea we have where I work. It actually reads like a combination of Design Spec and Conceptual Manifesto for personal information management applications in general.

Here is a taste:

Greater Productivity through Procrastination
So much of incoming information can’t be dealt with now. Sometimes we just can’t take action yet. Sometimes we need a different environment to read carefully. Sometimes we could take action but shouldn’t due to higher-priority work. Many items can and should be dealt with later. It should be easy for the user to defer action on email and have the client ensure that it doesn’t get lost. In Chandler the user gives the item a tickler, a trigger that will return the item to their attention later. When an item has a tickler it has been stamped as a task — this shows how stamping permeates the design. The word tickler comes from the David Allen task management system which suggests a manual technique for maintaining a set of reminders and a habit of looking at them to see which are due.

I think I’m going to print this thing out and make everybody dealing with any kind of internal “desktop” interface at work read it.

Space 1999 as design showcase

December 8, 2005 by AndrewH | No comments

I ran across a link to The World Of Kane today, and it’s really cool. Lots of design examples from the 60s-70s. And lo and behold, there were a bunch of stills from my favorite show as a kid, Space 1999. The caption says this is a “Sorella lamp by Studio Technico Harvey.”

Space 1999 designer lamp

Such a jolt of deja-vu. I haven’t seen an episode of this series in years. I may have to rent them soon, now. Especially now that I realize there’s so much cool design to look at … it did something for me as a kid (of 8 or 9) though, I’ll admit. But at the time it just felt *cool*…

But then again, anything looks cool with Zienia Merton standing in front of it. (I’ll confess, I think I had a tiny crush on her even when I was 9.)

via Boing Boing

Redefining “the edge”

November 17, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

On their book-brand site, John Seely Brown and John Hagel have a nicely articulate PDF up for grabs for anyone who wants to register. The article is called “Interest Rates vs. Innovation Rates.”

Here’s a nice bit:

In their relentless quest for efficiency, companies have tended to shy away from the edge. Edges represent uncertainty, while executives crave predictability. Edges generate friction as employees explore, experiment and tinker with unfamiliar needs and opportunities, while management roots out friction wherever it can. With appropriate management techniques, friction can become highly productive, generating valuable innovation and learning.

I’ve been hearing lots of level-headed, wise CEO’s lately say that they’re not interested in the “cutting edge” or that super-radical “bleeding edge”: that it’s not always prudent to be first or do something for the sake of novelty or hype.

But that depends on how you define the edges. The way they talk about edges, typically, is as a straw-man concept. (Who the heck *does* want to do something new for its own sake?? )

The problem is when that kind of thinking makes us comfortable with the status quo and slow, tunnel-visioned, incremental improvement. What I like about this article is that Hagel & Brown are redefining what “edge” means.

The point is that edges represent the intersection of established ways of doing things with new needs and new possibilities. It is this ntersection that creates a fertile ground for innovation and capability building. Employees are forced out of their comfort zones and pushed to question and refine traditional practices.

Asking hard questions about the edges is a great way to start.

The Haunted Mansion – Secrets

October 28, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

This is just grand: The Haunted Mansion – Secrets

An in-depth history and explanation of the Disney Haunted Mansion.

As a kid, I used to have some of the most delightful nightmares about this attraction. And in my child dreamscape I’d sometimes just have happy dreams of Disney in general, the Haunted Mansion was second only to the (in my dreams, hyperbolically fantastic) Magic Shop for causing fireworks in my brains.

Happy Halloween!!!

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