Cool Sci/Tech News in my Local Paper! (Links, videos, and more)

My local paper, the Charlotte Observer, has a great Science & Technology section every Monday.  Each week, it includes a wealth of interesting news. Although some of the information is culled from other sources,  there usually is a local twist.  For example, on Sunday, our newspaper came with 3D glasses, just in time to view 3D pictures in print, and online.

Below is a sample of recent "Sci/Tech" related articles in the Observer, along with related links.  (At the end of the post, I've added a few more links to other interesting "scie/tech" items of interest that recently crossed my path.)

3D and the Charlotte Observer

Why 3-D? Just because it could be fun (Rick Thames, Executive Director, Charlotte Observer)

Charlotte Observer's 3-D Gallery  (Online and in the paper.)

Graphic:  Fooling your mind with 3D printing

Article: Toshiba unveils glasses-free 3-D TV  (Associated Press, 10/5/10)

Thin skin for sensitive robots

"Engineers have developed a pressure-sensitive electronic material that could one day serve as skin for general purpose human-like robots".  The skin is made from a mesh of pressure-sensitive electronic nanowires made out of germanium-silicon. The mess provides information about force to sensors under the "skin". 

Original press release: Engineers make artificial skin out of nanowires (Sara Yang, UC Berkely News, 9/12/10)

(Images: Ali Javey and Kuniharu Takei, UC Berkeley)

NELL :  Never-Ending Language Learning System

Computer teaches itself on the Web (Steve Lohr, NY Times)

NELL is a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Google.  The project uses Yahoo's research supercomputing cluster to do the heavy work. The research goal of this project is to "build a never-ending machine learning system that acquires the ability to extract structured information from unstructured web pages. If successful, this will result in a knowledge base (i.e. relational database) of structured information that mirrors the content of the web."


The project's progress and knowledge base is available on-line: http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/resources Tom Mitchell, the Fredkin Professor of A.I. and Learning at Carnegie Mellon, is involved with this research.  

Below is a demonstration of Tom Mitchell's work in the area of "thought reading" with his colleague, Marcel Just: "We are specifically interested in algorithms that can learn to identify and track the cognitive processes that give rise to observed fMRI data."

"Professor of psychology Marcel Just and professor of artificial intelligence Tom Mitchell demonstrate how they are using brain imaging and machine learning to predict a subject's thoughts." -Carnegie Mellon University YouTube Channel

HTML 5

Latest Web code offers far more ways to track what you do online (Tanzina Vega, NY Times)

HTML 5 will make it easy for "them" to track your every Internet move, and raises concerns about online privacy and security.  

Charlotte Observer/Scitech    Highlighted Blogs:

He looks into the minds of animals, kids (T.DeLene Beeland, Charlotte Observer 10/10/10)

This article is about Jason Goldman and his research in the area of developmental psychology.  His research focuses on social cognition, which he writes about in his blogs:

Thoughtful Animal Blog:  http://scienceblogs.com/thoughtfulanimal

Childsplay Blog:  http://scientopia.org/blogs/childsplay

OTHER INTERESTING LINKS

Navigating the Aural Web
"The PI's goal in this project is to establish advanced design strategies for the aural navigation of complex Web information architectures, where users exclusively or primarily listen to, rather than look at, content and navigational prompts. Conventional on-screen visual displays may not work well, if at all, in many situations. The most obvious instances occur when persons who are blind or visually impaired need to use technologies designed for sighted users. A much more common situation, however, occurs with users of mobile devices. These users are often engaged in another activity (e.g., walking around a city or driving a car) where it is inconvenient, distracting or even dangerous to continuously look at the screen...." -Award Abstract #1018054

Digital Graffiti Wall, by Cyan Design
Twenty Things: More Awesome and Geeky Graffiti

Digital Graffiti Wall at Ingenuity Fest 2010 from Chris Yanc on Vimeo.

New Grants Aim to Boost Computer Science (Education Week, 10/8/10)

"Two federal grants that were just announced will together provide nearly $27 million to advance computer science education. The announcements come the same week that a new report was issued raising concerns that the subject is getting short shrift in schools. The National Science Foundation is providing a $12.5 million grant to UCLA to promote new and innovative computer science instruction in high schools through the use of mobile phones and Web technology. (The effort will also use that technology for standards-based math and science classes.) The project, dubbed MOBILIZE: Mobilizing for Innovative Computer Science Teaching and Learning, is a partnership between two UCLA centers and the Los Angeles Unified School District."  MOBILIZE website

Designing for Multitouch Tables and Surfaces, by Erin Rose, Open Exhibits Blog

If you are interested in exploring collaborative tabletop applications, take a look at the Open Exhibits blog. Erin Rose's recent post, "Designing for Multi-touch Tables and Surfaces", is a good overview of lessons learned over the past couple of years in design, development, and implementation of multi-user interactive tabletop applications.

Although the focus of Open Exhibits is on applications and systems designed for museum exhibits, many of the design challenges hold true for similar applications in other settings, such as classrooms, libraries, and other public spaces.

Erin's post explores each of the following topics in more detail:

• Don't forget that the table is omni-directional.
• Individual control of objects encourages multi-user interaction.
• Promote collaboration, founded in healthy competition.

(Erin Rose is a developer and community liaison for Open Exhibits.)

RELATED
Exhibit Files
Jim Spadaccini
Visitors Explore L.A. in Google Maps and Flickr Mashup.

Project: Interact "Invent, Design, Change" - A 10 week after-school program teaches high schoolers how to use design to change their communities

Below is a brief description of Project Interaction, a program developed by Katie Koch and Carmen Dukes to teach high school students to use design thinking to change their communities, and also to inspire students to think about interaction design as a possible future career.

Support Project: Interaction on Kickstarter! from Project: Interaction on Vimeo.

RESOURCES

Project: Interaction Vimeo Site, includes video interviews of people who work in the field of interaction design.

Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers, and changemakers: How to apply game thinking to your business challenges (Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo)


How would this play out at a rural high school?


I'd like to try something like this at my high school. It is located in rural N.C., in between two small towns, not too far from a larger "small" town.  Charlotte, N.C. is the "Big City", but it is is about a 75-100 minute drive, depending on the traffic.  The challenges the students face in a rural/small town area might not be the same as those of teens living in the middle of densely populated NYC,  but that is OK.   It is important to remember that design thinking and interaction design can address a wide range of problems that beg for new solutions, even in the countryside.


It would be awesome if I had the time to implement this at the school. I wonder if any interaction designers in the Charlotte area would be interested in taking a trip out to the country to help get something like this off the ground!

SORT OF RELATED - RURAL EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY
It occurred to me that I hadn't read much about "rural" education lately, although I pass horses and cows and cornfields every day to and from work. With access to cell phones and the Internet, and cable/satellite TV, young people who live on the outskirts have more access to urban trends than in the past, yet it is difficult for school districts in rural and small-town communities to attract and retain highly qualified teachers, especially math, science, and special education teachers at the high school level.
"Boon, Not Boondock:  With enrollment in rural schools on the rise, will education in small-town America finally get the attention it deserves?" Elaine McArdle, Harvard Graduate School of Education Ed. Magazine, 2008
In my own state, North Carolina:
NC State Works to Turnaround Rural Schools Through Leadership
National Research Center on Rural Education Support (UNC-Chapel Hill)
Two of the four research programs of the NRCRES:
Distance Education Program, which examines the role that distance education can play in rural schools, especially for enrichment andadvanced level courses. Rural High School Aspirations Study, which examines rural high school students’ aspirations and preparatory planning for postsecondary education, career training, and adult life."

Distance Education Publications, NRCRES
de la Varre, C., Keane, J., Irvin, M. J., & Hannum, W. (2009). Social support for online learning in rural high schools. In Whitworth, B. & de Moor, A.(Eds). Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems (pp. 575-588).
Hannum, W., Irvin, M. J., & de la Varre, C. (in press). Extending educational opportunities in rural areas: Application of distance education in rural schools. In S. Mukerji & P. Tripathi (Eds.). Cases on technological adaptability and transnational learning: Issues and challenges.
Hannum, W. H., Irvin, M. J., Lei, P.-W., & Farmer, T. W. (2008). Effectiveness of using learner-centered principles on student retention in distance education courses in rural schools. Distance Education, 29, 211-229. 
Irvin, M. J., Hannum, W. H., de la Varre, C., & Farmer, T. W. (2009). Barriers to Distance Education in Rural Schools. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Irvin, M. J., Hannum, W. H., Farmer, T. W., de la Varre, C., & Keane, J. (2009). Supporting online learning for Advanced Placement students in small rural schools: Conceptual foundations and intervention components of the Facilitator Preparation Program. The Rural Educator, 31(1), 29-36
Keane, J., de la Varre, C., Irvin, M. J., & Hannum, W. (2008). Learner-centered social support: Enhancing online distance education for underserved rural high school students in the United States. In Whitton, N., & McPherson, M. (Eds). Rethinking the digital divide (pp. 39-48). Research Proceedings of the 15th Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C 20


Rural Education SIG of the American Educational Research Association
REL-Midwest:  Online Learning Opportunities for Rural Schools: Framing the Conversation:  Enhancing the Educational Outcomes of Children Through Distance Learning and Technology
Clopton, K.L, & Knesting, K. Rural School Psychology:  Re-Opening the Discussion.  Journal of Research in Rural Education, 2006, 21(5) http://www.jrre.psu.edu/articles/21-5.pdf

Michael Ogawa, Data Visualization Researcher, VIDI (UC Davis)

I followed a link today to Michael Ogawa's website and blog. He's a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at the University of California at Davis, where he participates in research with the VIDI (Visualization and Interface Design Innovation) group.

Here is a description of Michael's research, quoted from his site:

"My research focus is in software visualization. I am interested in bringing to light the efforts of software developers: How they work together on projects effectively to create some of the largest and most complex systems in the world. Complementary to that goal, I am also interested in designing visually appealing applications that capture an emotional aspect not seen in charts and graphs." -Michael Ogawa
I haven't fully explored Owaga's website, but it looks interesting.  Here is a video I found on his site of T.S. Elliot reading the "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".  The visualization of the poem is interpreted by Open Wordle, an open source library for Processing, available at  http://code.google.com/p/openwordle/



RELATED
Owaga is known for his work on the Code_Swarm project, "an experiment in organic software visualization". Below is a visualization of the commit history of the Eclipse IDE project:

code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
(Music: "Orange" by Etherfysh)
Open source code for Codeswarm: http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm
Kwan-Lui Ma, iMichael Ogawa's advisor

News and Publication Links from the VIDI website:

• VIDi paper "An Exploratory Technique for Coherent Visualization of Time-Varying Volume Data" has been accepted to EuroVis 2010
• Wei-Hsien Hsu, Jianqiang Mei, Carlos Correa, and Kwan-Liu Ma received a best paper award at ArtsIT 2009.
• VIDI papers accepted to this year's IEEE Vis, InfoVis and VAST conferences.

Interview of Gillian Hayes: Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Autism

Gillian Hayes is an Assistant Professor in Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Science and the School of Education at UC Irvine.  Some of her research has focused on the use of interactive technologies with children who have autism. She recently was interviewed about a feature article she co-authored that was published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing:  Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Autism.

The interview can be found on the following Facebook Notes page:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=439770255457&id=179582945448&ref=mf

Gillian is the editor of an upcoming  special issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing on the topic in of technologies for autism.


RELATED 
Some links from the interview:

Gillian's paper in PUC 
(Personal and Ubiquitous Computing)
PUC theme issue on Technologies for Autism
Gillian Hayes
STAR
Gillian talks about autism and technology

Reactable Mobile - Music Creation and DJ-ing On-the-Go : This is why I need an iPad!

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Reactible Mobile,  a fun "DJ" electronic music generator for the iPod and iPad, created by Reactable Systems, makers of the Reactable.  The Reactable is a multi-touch, multi-user system for music creation, sharing, and DJ-ing, but it comes in the form of a table. Even though one version of the Reactable, the Reactable Live! is portable, it is still pretty big.

In our increasingly mobile world, it's nice to know that now we can have something similar to take everywhere we go, with the Reactable Mobile that runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad. You can download and buy the Reactable Mobile app for the iPhone and iPad from the iTunes Store:  http://itunes.apple.com/app/reactable-mobile/id381127666?mt=8

The following videos provide a quick overview of how the Reactable app runs on mobile devices. The first video is a demonstration of "Verde", Le Freak Selector. The second video demonstrates the Reactable app on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.





Reactable Mobile (Reactable Systems SL) Description  (Taken from the iTunes website)

"Improvise and create music playfully with the Reactable mobile. Based on the award winning Reactable as used by Björk on her Volta Tour, this application brings the full creative power of the famous interactive instrument onto your mobile device."

"It uses concepts of modular synthesis, sampling, digital audio effects, DJing, and combines them with modern human computer interaction and multi-touch technology.Based on the very same audio and graphics engine as the Reactable, the mobile version brings a complete range of objects to multi-touch devices:"
A set of generator objects:
- loop players, with possibility to upload your own loops,
- synthesizers, with a large range of instruments to select from,
- oscillators, to synthesise pure and complex tones,
- input, to get audio directly from the device's microphone.
A set of effects to modify generated sounds:
- wave shapers: distortion, compression, and resampling,
- delays: reverb, feedback, and ping-pong,
- modulators: ring modulation, chorus, and flanger,
- filters: low pass, high pass, and band pass.
A set of controller objects to modify other objects parameters:
- sequencers, with step-by-step, matrix, or random modes,
- low frequency oscillators (LFO), with different waveforms,
- accelerometer, to fetch data from the movement of the device.
A set of global objects to modify the settings of the entire table:
- tempo, to change the speed of the table,
- volume, to lower or increase the loudness,
- tonalizer, to change the harmony of the melody.
"IMPORTANT NOTE: A graphic resolution issue with iPod Touch 4G prevents using the version 1.0.3 on this device. An update is on its way.  Note: as this application uses both graphic and audio resources extensively, recent devices will provide the best user experience."

RELATED
There is a Reactable in an exhibit at the Discovery Science Center in Charlotte, N.C.  I had a chance to play with it during my last visit, and it was... awesome.   For more information, including pictures and video,  take a look at this post:
Reactable Live! at Sonar Barcelona 2010 (You can play with one at Discovery Place in Charlotte, NC.)

Here is a very short video-clip of the Reactable at Discovery Place. (Because of the noise in the background, it is a bit difficult to hear what I was trying to play.)


If you are interested in tangible user interfaces, including the Reactable and other similar systems, take a look my previous posts on the topic:
Tangible User Interfaces Part 11: More Examples, Resources, and Use for TUI's in Education
Tangiblie User Interfaces, Part I: Siftables

Light Space: Interaction with digital content across all sorts of surfaces! (Demo video: Hrvoje Benko and Andy Wilson, Microsoft Research)

Hrvoje Benko and Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research demonstrate a system that uses 3D depth support tracking and interpreting the interaction between people,  It also allows for manipulating digital content across a variety of surfaces.

Information Visualization Meets Augmented Reality?

Watch the video to find out:

Child-Computer Interaction: A Featured Community at the Upcoming CHI 2011 Conference!

Last year, I attended CHI 2010 and participated in a workshop about the next generation of HCI and education.  It was a wonderful opportunity to share ideas with people from all over the world who are interested in emerging technologies, kids, and education.  I plan to attend CHI 2011 in Vancouver, Canada next May 7-11, and even though the conference is months away, I can barely wait.  The good news it that the Child-Computer Interaction community will have an important presence at the 2011 ACM CHI conference.  I wanted to share a little bit about this development on this blog. 

During CHI 2010, I signed up for the  "Designing for the iChild" course.  In one afternoon, I learned more than I had expected, especially the technique called "Layered Elaboration", a collaborative design strategy that involves inter-generational teams of children and adults.  

One of the leaders of this course was Allison Druin, Associate Professor and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland.  Dr. Druin's focus is in the area of child-computer interaction and how children can be meaningfully involved as partners in the design process.  

The quote below, found on the HCIL Children as Design Partners website, explains why this is so important:

"We have a chance to change technology, but more importantly we have a chance to change the life of a child. Every time a new technology enables a child to do something they never dreamed of, there are new possibilities for the future."  -Allison Druin

In my work as a school psychologist, I use technology with students quite often, especially when I'm at Wolfe, a program for students who have more complex disabilities, including severe autism.  I have been fortunate to have a new SMARTBoard at my fingertips, and access to the school's SMARTtable.  I learn from my students every day.

I believe that we are only at the "tip of the iceberg" with this sort of technology- and related applications such as the iPad and similar devices.   In my experience, well designed technologies and applications can open up a meaningful window to the world for children, teens, and others with disabilities.

Most of the information below was taking from the CHI 2011 conference website:

About the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) community:

"At CHI, the CCI community will want to attract papers and contributions that represent real advances in the understanding of, or development and refinement of methods for, child computer interaction. It will also seek to unearth groundbreaking innovations addressing the needs, capabilities and preferences of children that have the potential to become reference works for developments in this field."

"By its very nature, The CCI community will have to be divergent in its thinking at CHI; it must also be about two of the mainstream CHI communities – engineering and design, but will potentially also be concerned with many of the communities of technologies (Smart devices, surfaces, mobile), of experiences (Play, Learning, Communication) and of methods (participatory design, evaluation)." ....

"Child Computer Interaction is a new community for CHI. It is a place for contributions where a method or a design is proposed that is especially suited to children and that could not sensibly be easily adapted for adults.  

We are keen to have contributions to all the usual CHI tracks but are also offering four special tracks for our own extra special community. These are:

• Child Partnership Projects (CPP): A design competition for teams that include children.

• Participatory Papers: Scholarly publications that are disseminated for children readers. (i.e. written in a different way)

• Lessons from the Trenches: Targeting industrial cases and experiences. A lively venue where experiences can be exchanged, and researchers can be exposed to the realities of industrial practice in this domain.

• Theatre pieces: High quality video contributions, available in a library after the conference, of methods that can be re used and learned from."

Child-Computer Interaction Chairs:
Janet C. Read
University of Central Lancashire
Panos Markopoulos
Eindhoven University of Techology
Allison Druin
University of Maryland
childcomputerinteraction@chi2010

RELATED
Walsh, G., Druin, A., Guha, ML, Foss, B., Golub, E., Hatley, L (2009)  [PDF] Layered Elaboration: A New Technique for Co-Design with Children.  ACM CHI 2009 

BlackBerry's "iPad" preview video! -- PlayBook

Thanks to Seth Sandler for the link!

More about this topic later...

UPDATE: Getting beyond "Ad-Hoc" Ubiquity: Content Centered Networking at PARC

I recently blogged about some interesting work going on at PARC, "Get what you want, faster, through content-centered networks: Video - Jim Thornton, PARC"  After I published the post, I received a comment from someone from PARC with links to additional technical presentations about innovations in networking.  

Van Jacobson Explains It All

If you are interested in ubiquitous & pervasive computing - and creating seamless user experiences across locations and devices,  it  is well worth the 90-minute watch.   

A New Way to Look at Networking

View more videos from PARC, a Xerox company.

2006 PRESENTATION

In the video below,  Van Jacobson talks about ubiquitous computing, wireless, networking, research, and the challenges of making everything synced and seamlessly inter-operative in the future. In this video, Van Jacobson provides a good overview of the history of the communications/ networking industry, and much, much more.  Although the presentation was given in 2006, it is well worth the time to watch:

A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT NETWORKING

Here's info about Van Johnson and  abstract of the talk from the Google Tech Talks website:

"Google Tech Talks August 30, 2006 Van Jacobson is a Research Fellow at PARC. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist and co-founder of Packet Design. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist at Cisco. Prior to that he was head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He's been studying networking since 1969. He still hopes that someday something will start to make sense."

ABSTRACT 

"Today's research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows. Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content distribution, digital divide, third world infrastructure, etc., are all poorly served by what's available from either the research community or the marketplace. I'll use various strained analogies and contrived examples to argue that network research is moribund because the only thing it knows how to do is fill in the details of a conversation between two applications. Today as in the 60s problems go unsolved due to our tunnel vision and not because of their intrinsic difficulty. And now, like then, simply changing our point of view may make many hard things easy."

A similar post can be found on The World Is My Interactive Interface blog.

Get what you want, faster, through content-centric networks! Video - Jim Thornton, PARC

I came across information about PARC's work in an article written by Dean Takahashi, of Venture Beat (9/26/10) Xerox PARC has a plan to make the internet more speedy

Get what you want faster:
In the video below,  Jim Thornton, a researcher at PARC,  is interviewed by Dean Takahashi, from VentureBeat. Jim discusses his work in the area of content-centric networking, also known as CCN or Named-Data-Networking (NDN).  CCN is a way to work around the problem of internet "bottlenecking", something that happens when lots of people want to view rich multimedia content at the very same time.  


As it stands, content-delivery companies handle this problem by storing content in video caches, identified by IP addresses.  If you search for content via the CCN protocol, your search will lead to a memory node that is identified by the name of the content (or other information that identifies the content), rather than an IP address, and select the content that is closest to your location.


One of the objectives of CCN is to reduce internet bandwidth expenses.



PARC is working with nine universities on this project, which provides open-source software that can be found on the Project CCNx website.  


About CCNx:
"Project CCNx exists to develop, promote, and evaluate a new approach to communication architecture we call content-centric networking.  We seek to carry out this mission by creating and publishing open protocol specifications and an open source software reference implementation of those protocols.  We provide support for a community of people interested in experimentation, research, and building applications with this technology, all contributing to its evolution."


If you are curious, the open-source Content Centric Networking code can be found on the github website. If you visit the website, make sure you take a look at the "ReadMe" section. Also heed this warning, found on the Project CCNx website: "CCNx technology is still at a very early stage of development, with pure infrastructure and no applications, best suited to researchers and adventurous network engineers or software developers.  If you're looking for cool applications ready to download and use, you are a little too early."


RELATED
PARC Awarded National Science Foundation Funding to Expand Fundamental Research in Content-Centered Networking:  Part of NSF's new "Future Internet Architecture" program, the Named-Data-Networking (NDN) grant includes PARC and nine universities:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
University of Arizona
Washington University
Yale University
Colorado State University
University of California, San Diego
University of Memphis
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles


Networking Named Content (pdf)
Jacobson, V.; Smetters, D. K.; Thornton, J. D.; Plass, M. F.; Briggs, N.; Braynard, R. Networking named content. Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT 2009); 2009 December 1-4; Rome, Italy. NY: ACM; 2009; 1-12.J


"Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still can only speak of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network’s where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which takes content as a primitive – decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We have implemented the basic features of our architecture and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls."

SocialTV: designing for distributed, social television viewing (pdf)
Ducheneaut, N. ; Moore, R. J. ; Oehlberg, L.; Thornton, J. D. ; Nickell, E. SocialTV: designing for distributed, social television viewing. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 2008 February; 24 (2): 136-154.


"Media research has shown that people enjoy watching television as a part of socializing in groups. However, many constraints in daily life limit the opportunities for doing so. The Social TV project builds on the increasing integration of television and computer technology to support sociable, computer-mediated group viewing experiences. In this paper, we describe the initial results from a series of studies illustrating how people interact in front of a television set. Based on these results, we propose guidelines as well as specific features to inform the design of future "social television" prototypes."

Essential Interaction Design Essays and Articles: Dan Saffer's Lists, Don Norman, and Interactions Magazine

I came across a link about Dan Saffer's recent post, Essential Interaction Design Essays and Articles.  Equally important is Dan Saffer's List:  Top Ten Essential Interaction Design Books. 

Dan Saffer is one of my "important influences".  When I was taking HCI and Ubiquitous Computing courses, I bought the first edition of his book,  Designing for Interaction:  Creating Innovative Applications and Devices.  In today's world of technical convergence, it is an important read, as Saffer's content crosses a number of disciplines.

Thoughts:
It doesn't surprise me to learn that the #1 book on Saffer's Essential Interaction Design Books list is  list is Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things.  According to Saffer,  "there’s no getting around it: this is the book. Affordances, mental models, and other bits that have all become part of the general lexicon all started with The Don’s book. A must read." 

Don Norman's book was required reading in the Human-Computer Interaction class I took a few years ago.  As I read through the book, I sensed a familiar tone.  I later learned that Don Norman was the co-author of a required textbook for one of the psychology courses I took when I was a university student the first time around.    



Don Norman's thinking has influenced me for decades - he continues to be an influence, because he writes articles for one of my favorite publications, Interactions Magazine:



It brightens up my day when I open up my mailbox- the one at the end of my real-life driveway- and find my Interactions magazine, in all of its well-designed, well-written,  semi-glossy-paged glory, waiting for me to open up and read.   The September/October, 2010 issue includes articles on topics related to authenticity in new media, the complexity of "advancement", design and usability, and the politics of development. 


A must-read is Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards in Usability, co-authored by Don Norman and his collaborator, Jakob Neilson, 

Here is an excerpt from the article, which highlights some of the problems of rushing to get products with natural-user interfaces out to market:

"Why are we having trouble? Several reasons:

• The lack of established guidelines for gestural control
• The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.
• The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research, which results in their feeling empowered to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public"

(Interactions Magazine is a publication of ACM CHI -Association of Computing Machinery, Computer-Human Interaction interest group).


Other articles by Don Norman, published in Interactions Magazine:
The Research-Practice Gap: The Need for Translational Developers 
Natural User Interfaces are not Natural 
The Transmedia Design Challenge: Technology that is Pleasurable and Satisfying
Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf
To be published, available on the jnd website:
Systems Thinking:  A Product is More Than The Product  


SOMEWHAT RELATED
My resource pages:
RESOURCES: Natural User Interaction, InfoViz, Multi-touch, Blog roll, and More - a huge mega-list of links! 
Conferences, Research, Resources page


Living with Complexity
Donald Norman, to be release in October 2010



Interactions Archives


Here are a list of books/articles, suggested by Dan Saffer's readers:


Designing for Interaction – Saffer, D. (2nd Edition; 2009)
Thoughts on Interaction Design – Kolko, J. (2009)
The Humane Interface – Raskin, J.
Digital Ground – McCullough, M.
Inmates are running the Asylum – Cooper, A
Designing Interactions – Moggridge, B (ed.)
Everyware – Greenfeild, A.
Designing Social Interfaces – Malone & Crumlisch
Emotional Design – Norman, D.
Invisible Computer – Norman, D.
Persuasion Technology – Fogg, BJ
Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology by Jonas Lowgren and Erik Stolterman (Paperback – Mar 30, 2007)
Designing Visual Interfaces by Mullet/San
Steve Krug – Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Design Research: Methods and Perspectives edited by Brenda Laurel 
Information Architecture (“The Polar Bear Book”) by Peter Morville.


Thanks to Putting People First for the link to Dan Saffer's list!