Notes on papers, books and blogs about Cognitive Ergonomics, HCI, philosophy of design and everything interesting
Khoi Vinh discusses the trade off between features and ease of use. Using Cooper et al (2003) curve on the distribution of experience of users (i.e. most users are perpetual intermediates), he posits the problems users face with products heavy on features:
On the other hand, products designed to map closely to the needs of experts […]
An interesting article in the relatively new journal “Artefact”. It examines the evolution of matching tile games (e.g. Bejeweled, Zookeeper etc.).
When refering to his own experiences in designing a similar game, Juul notes how players from different backgrounds appropriated the game in different ways:
During testing, it became clear that players understood the game very differently […]
A recent post in pasta and vinegar, touches the subject of delegation, namely the fact that pretty much most solutions to a problem include delegating it to a human or machine. He cites a very interesting article by Latour which points out that in the act of delegation, we equip artefacts not only with the […]
My brother pointed me to the works of Ezio Manzini, an industrial designer who is concerned with sustainability. Unlike many other thinkers on the subject, he possesses a deep systemic view:
The transition towards sustainability will effect every dimension of the socio-technical system in which we live (the physical one, as material and energy flows, the […]
In the insightful pasta and vinegar blog is an interesting discussion about the role of theory in interaction design based on the relevant discussion in a book by Nardi & Kaptelinin.
The problem is the one between reductionist, analytical approaches to practice and theory heavy, ethnographic approaches. The first translate easier to design and can be […]
A Strategy and Experiments in Mapping Sociospatial Practices
Mounajjed N, Peng C, Walker S
This paper in the relatively new journal Human Technology is about the use of ethnographic methods by artists. Ethnography is used as a tool for a growing number of disciplines, something that is essential for its prosperity (Marcus, 2003 cited in this paper). On the other hand it notes the increasing use […]
Gender and Design Cultures in Information and Communication Technologies (Oudshoorn et al., 2004)
 This paper describes the design of two “digital cities” in the mid-nineties, one in the public and one in the private sector. The focus is on how the designers’ conception of the user is shaped by their own identity. Both projects aimed at […]
I recently came across Jan Robert Leegte’s installations, and I’m hooked! There’s something about this materialization of the digital that fascinates, and maybe tells us something abou the nature of affordance (maybe not in the Gibsonian sense, but closer to Norman). What else to do but manipulate the scrollbars? Doesn’t the “selections” installation give a […]
This book by MIT Media Lab genious John Maeda is about simplicitly. On first glance, it’s uncontroversial: everything is better when it’s simple, right?
It appears that things are more complicated-even worse: complex-than that. The central problem is stated in the first law:
How simple can you make it? vs How complex does it have to be? I […]
Petroski is at his best when he brings forth the virtues of artefacts like the plastic “thing†that keep a pizza box top from touching the pizza, or the grocer’s brown paper bag. He considers that everything is designing, inverting the modernist tendency of the Design Methods people to that designing is decision making / […]
You are currently browsing the archives for the design category.
