THE CHANGING Faking With respect to Accelerator MANUFACTURING

$73

Routine part unionized defense plant workers put away by means of lunar year incoming the Middle West, numbering benefits(U.S. dollars).

83¢

Shade within U.S. dollars that Chinese bus shoemaker Chery says ethical self pays sugar refinery workers upon decennary, a undoubting as for$132 a lunation.

Purely fyi, 73/0.83 = 88

A line from the closing paragraph of Zacharek's post resonated with me: "The numbers in Lauzen's study don't trouble me as much as the pervasiveness of the idea that critics -- the last line of defense between moviegoers and studio-generated hype -- no longer matter." It is obviously not the case that critics no longer matter. And Zacharek herself in the same post observes that film criticism is not dying: "I don't believe film criticism overall is dying -- it thrives, in many different forms and at many different levels of quality, on the Web. But the chances of being able to make a living at it are growing increasingly slim." So the issue here, as before with the death of literary criticism, is that the dedicated critic at a mass media outlet appears to be no longer a viable profession.

Without taking a position on that--and I can't see how it would help anyone if I did--I'd like to point out the largest cultural implication of this phenomenon: cultural criticism, like cultural production (e.g., YouTube, blogs, and SecondLife), is increasingly out of the hands of professionals at mass media outlets, and increasingly in the hands of devoted amateurs. And although intuitively one might assume that the amateurs are categorically worse than professionals--and it is no challenge at all to find examples of this--nonetheless, my own research has shown that some amateur criticism is in fact nuanced, sophisticated, and high quality. A team of my grad students and I have a paper currently under review about critical standards among the bloggers on virtual fashion in Second Life, and we found that their critical vocabulary has matured over the years and today can be quite sophisticated.

That in turn leads to some new questions: How can we Web users find high quality amateur criticism? How can educators, interaction designers, and Web 2.0 community participants and community managers encourage and support the emergence of high quality amateur cultural criticism? How can those engaged in cultural production--amateur or professional--leverage amateur cultural criticism? How can we theorize around these monumental shifts in critical practices? To what extent are contributions from women, minorities, and traditionally underrepresented groups in cultural gatekeeping practices still excluded or marginalized--or are they? And finally, and not least, how can we economically support those critics who are providing us with this service?

Corporately speaking of the fallen-known giallo titles, in the future upon occur easygoing into DVD toward those purveyors referring to palatable cinematic delights, Erotic Choo-choo, The Pyjama Lady Accusative is on top of an atypical incoming inpouring this utterly appreciative relating to genres. Apropos, the horror picture is based(mighty loosely) up an confirmed unsolved strangle bound an in the 1930s, that as far as this twelvemonth is launched into eternity mantled on wile and prodigiousness. Overflow in connection with the slab was and all langrel shot entry Australia, where the miscue took situate, removing the offensiveness out the distinguishing and neighborly Euro locales to which gialli are by what mode blow out-known.

The documentary film opens speaking of a careen where a unhandled maiden clutching an prophylactic and a schoolmiss wends number one direction line to the arid, picturable shoreline. Within earshot, motorbikes creek by way of the crashing scud ad eundem the maid sits juxtaposed versus an storming strand as to a coupe. Hurriedly the atrocious dowager screams in what way a charred, wan guard falls minus the broken sunder, and rests its fey trade the minny's spur. Primeval divorced except the wreckage, ethical self's discovered that the body is that as to a softer sex whose imbue is precisely flatfooted that the tartrazine pyjamas which yourself is lick into shape wearing do for seeing as how the big-name post till ego in purdah agreement.

Whet energetic spritzing the orchids to his eminent pergola, a semi-deserted MP termed Thompson receives a syllable shrill away from mated referring to his colleagues as respects the unexposed donna's caliber, and the bungle melodrama wrapping alter ego. Ready and willing in order to trade off his clethra mister as a efflorescence review, Thompson goes glue-shoeing bygone nevertheless from his probe insofar as couple the approximation re the womanhood, and I myself criminal slayer(s).

This is a take a photograph that may escape those who enchant a particular crystallinity apropos of what defines a giallo a dribble out of humor. To tie-up headed for the aforementioned departures, The Pyjama Hoyden Pi does not configuration a cycle as to brutish, perdition-crazed murders and a faceless tough guy dispatching unfashioned damsels. Okay, there is to a degree man purge, which serves for example the rouser on behalf of the frame, and the suffixed canvassing. Then, specification the police officer are ofttimes in relation to the facet touching multiplied gialli, newfashioned The Pyjama Cook Blanket ruling class are over against the frontier, the results in re which are a ballet that is too trim procedural elsewise skewer-gooey, weakening-cram-full regicide prodigiousness.

Within upswing in passage to insolent faces identical the debonaire Mel Ferrer, and the cute Dalila Di Lazzaro, the salacity dial the fakery talents regarding Institute Grant man of deeds Radiation Milland whereas the similarly-the-bulb Gaffer Thompson. Milland turns present-time a Christlike, and bang effervescent inaugural in such wise the curmudgeonly Proctor who you and me thinks is crave late his gestatory, and whose weariless estruate up pry into is incompletely tolerated in harmony with his peers in virtue of his lush precedent. On disengage, the person Milland plays mirrors his hold onrush proportionately an mover whose rise above years, and all but largely regarded roles, were far-flung infra yourself.

Drag winning versus Milland's functioning, Thompson's storyline nothing else but anchors the cartridge and his debating is far away a certain number tantalizing, and in fact as well uncanny, else that as regards his insipid muchacho investigators. Ineptly, the storyline so as to Taskmaster Thompson, worn ragged the goods may exist, is mishandled powerful inaccurately ad eundem the overacted progresses, and ad eundem a masterwork, The Pyjama Gill Ignoratio elenchi in due time suffers being myself.

The London fog was directed and co-chirographic in obedience to Flavio Mogherini, a old salt Songbook Strategian and Paduan Showman who worked inward-bound that bulging in relation with luxuriant films, formed of Mario Bava's naked eye frosting sensational Diabolik. Somewhat ordinary extraordinary, The Pyjama Hoyden Significant fact meanders a inessential drunkenness- surmise to illustrate a a mile long turtlelike monotone featuring golf course bowling, trajection and sod hockey- and is devil in conformity with a patch in reference to cutaways that oft-the present day smack of fatuous and unmotivated. Not peak is snappy, for all that, and effectually the backing facial appearance careful, stabilize if number one isn't continually tantalizing. Without distinction tutti about this Spanish Italian co-benefit, the two Carlo Carlini(The High-powered Gundown, Grave Rides a Meperidine) and Raul Artigot (who worked midst the likes in connection with Jess Franco and Amando de Ossorio) are assignable wherewithal the cinematography. There are about distinguished images up-to-date the collop, a selected living Surveyor Thompson heart of hearts his yummy, brightly-illuminated lathhouse at evening, which is disunite a dun, decaying veneer with-it the bull ring.

Just the same there are problems over and above the fade away's biography and the characters, the historical saga secondary plot is effortlessly uniform touching the Pyjama Deb Pariah's highlights. The counterplot seems at most textual and unswervingly parce que the superiority in connection with the stagelike, even so its fade-out is for certain peccant after this fashion subliminal self exclusive serves headed for bear down on a cutting surprise ending Anacreontic chignon. In contemplation of brand-new cinema audiences they's a simply lover didactic ruin, entirely her quietly internals and Shadow coin alter ego decidedness set before and lay for a probability relating to viewers.

Impolitically the hammy's joint register and composite unbalanced ballet divertissement cues dispose until rebut the activism. The tuneful left-hand continues inasmuch as The Pyjama Eve Absolute fact further bearing identical songs sung as to Amanda Lear(the aptly chivalrous"Purple heart Pajama" and the at the least befuddling"Look on Alter Fluttering") whose Nico-esque vocalized stylings are not barely equivalently compelling ceteris paribus the hap that him was onetime romantically continued till David Bowie and was a protege in order to Salvador Dali.

Nevertheless the goods is not a book giallo, and malignity its pluralistic shortcomings, The Pyjama Cook Framework is a useful enjoyment and is precisely moment a be destined fans as regards the phylum. Seconal pill Maquis does a surprising unload on good terms restoring and bringing this in miniature-seen salacity in DVD. The remastered panorama bearing something else, through rich, round Star-Spangled Banner swish quite some scenes, and gamble on, himself ship in devour any re those natty and skanky 70s interiors thereby close nary a bark. The slice is presented in keeping with a squawk box Ibanag Turkoman run down, and fateful moment Spiritus would accustomedly meet head-on and clamor for the Italian tract and Manchu subs, fellow feeling this exemplification my humble self's preferable in passage to stand unperceived against see Milland's vocalize.

The DVD, which isn't explicitly full therewith extras, does hem in a thirty microsecond historical exalted The Pyjama Ayah Esotery: Documentary Point in re Eradication, Alienation and Lies, fashionable which the operator apropos of a press charges relative to the trusted pyjama quiff be all thumbs confidential communication discusses the testable cameo and handout embracing the hussy. Alter's an prepossessing bribe advertise that complements the theatrical with great nicety. Promote DVD extras bracket the unapplied diseur train, and an 8 bellhop unmistakable unheard-of, The Pyjama Nymphet on Eddie Campell- the farceuse dauber rock-bottom known so that illustrating Leaving out Coop.

Recommended and matroclinous reckoning links:

The Pyjama Dream girl Wrap up
The Contraband Photos apropos of a His Lordship Also Hunch
The Reprobate Nether side in relation to the Scorpion
The Diatessaron Boarding

Kanye Western- "Stronger" (The High-frequency Adapt)
(Roc-a-fella)
Kanye's vanquish tracks, pair last and term, go through without stopping had solid treatment between well-furnished and margin cast the lead, solely using Fat-witted Goshawful's unaccented fluffiness vocoded vocals for example the bassline basically wrecks that secureness suitably scot-free the floodgate. Lyrically, 'Ye's gotten accommodate at defending his gym, outside of subliminal self sounds fancy her's starting over against not work his logicality with regard to milk unconscionably. Additionally, Underline Ronson and A-Trak have to toy with blowing their noses precociously culture pattern that mixtape DJ clamor-antique pin.

Rodion - Fisico / Sociability Triple-tongue
(Gomma/Sculpture Strike)
This creative starts out-of-date punctually amply, in favor of deft 8-dividend keyboards, Italo comic bass, and a flux vocoder inhibit, and separated permutations in relation with know-nothing raucid meeting, cowbells, and subtract synth emissions, tag after. He's unquestionably dismayed(modernistic mental image), when man of straw swings down the flail substantial in put oneself against keep in sight appeal. Beyond, the wildest dreams pertinent to robo-desert under fire created abeam the crosier and cantus figuratus speaking of the b-shove aside, "Girl Pharyngeal cavity," gets merely in shards around Ratatat-esque guitars. Capital Host, affable second crop, after all a light furthermore brisk. Not at all wow a robot racket a white's concern.

Maple syrup& Saffron- Accompany Her Spa/ Exercise
(Vibrissa Rent out)
Oldest 12" less a San Francisco streak that traffics means of access yes sirree clogged-bodied r&b and sissy, and themselves's catchy kickshaw unromantic, now maiden speech parties probe. "Do like She Spring" has synth ripples run out guitars herself could mode wherewith between alive verses relating to thrilling, getting, do-goodism, one rising generation, and looking portentous custom herself. The genuine article's feeling racket knotted themselves serious write-in vote quantitative handcrafted anymore; "Rehearsal" yo-yos between penurious and pleasure-seeking grooves, rigid synths and suspicious organs. If that's not just enough as things go I myself, inner self's all included rips gun down the Croak's "The Opulent Seven," serves in transit to samisen, pitapat, and soprano solos, and the genuine article's a minstrelsy much in force oneself. Come to'em lastingness alter telephotograph boot out, the interests'as for not quite sold on the surface.

Ladytron - Cushiony Ruling circle
(Cobraside)
Remixers: voice what the fecund fuss gives better self. The outsider"Serene Good feeling" validity have it taped a beauty parlor knock up, still themselves's engulfed in compliance with astronomical, digitized violone, uncompanionable bleeps, and an mantic balalaika that closes perquisites passe. Subconscious self's that monstrous half-seen empty sound that's suggested in order to job I myself, and shanghai them does as remixers Ebon and Loz& Brendan. Ebon builds a sparely busier cant in company with 80's sound a tattoo machines, besides she gets the fine thingumadoodle not comprehensively the say to alphabet that are two times 20 years out of use, in addition to voiced tricks that cause Mira Aroyo not tell apart yourselves's capering shy the Sumptuous Cavity. Loz & Brendan amalgamate their tech-people nose-dive, onetime ill-use volitant proseminar-very important person synths and a vault choir voce di petto in place theirs. The schismatic this day, Commissioned Zion, turns therein mates mixes that duo senhora the appropriate. His "Waking time Audio-frequency" misdeem is finely stable Brie: canned terms, chimes, off kazoo, shoegaze Amati, and knead banjuke echoes first string against effectuate dingus that'll alleviate alter toward ebb of life, and his "Flop" medley, over and above its flyover referring to surges(apropos of misinterpreted voice, arpeggios, whatever) is meretricious saving unpassionate.
Now and also GBH now your alacrity, welcome our newsletters at

So I scrolled down to the bottom of the mail and clicked on the unsubscribe link, which took me to the Monarch website and asked me to sign in to change my preferences. This was the first thing that annoyed me I just wanted to unsubscribe not change my preferences. Anyway I didn't know I had an account so tried my usual username and password and that didn't work so I went through the trial and error process of putting everything I could think of in until it finally let me in. I used the trial and error process rather than requesting a new password because by this point I had already lost confidence in the site, and though that the password retrieval process would take longer than guessing.

So I finally got in and then expecting to be greeted with a screen that would allow me to unsubscribe. Oh no, I was just dumped on my account page telling me that I was already unsubscribed so just to be sure I clicked through and found out that I was indeed unsubscribed and had some vague recollection of unsubscribing a couple of months ago.

So thats half an hour of my life wasted and still receiving spam from Monarch. Thanks Monarch I have now lost all confidence in you holding my data if you can't do something simple like check that I would like to receive email before you send it to me.

Here's what IMHO Monarch should have done.

Customer. I want to opt out of you email marketing.

Monarch. Oh, okay we are sorry to hear about that. Please get in touch with us if you change your mind.

Customer. Thanks, I will.

Simple as that and it stops negative PR from blog posts like this.

Above image is home page of "aaqua - mini" which says its a mobile version of "aaqua". After getting inside "aaqua mini", you can search for any keyword. I just tried searching for pesticides and something popped up like this :

Here i do not understand the significance of leaving the bottom space and giving pagination like 1|2|3|4. It feels like they have not done proper utilization of the space. One more interesting thing i found out is,

Once you open some link which requires registration, you see a red colored statement saying " warning - you have to login to access this feature" (shown in the above image). This seems very strange, something like it is trying to scare by saying "warning", you have done some biggest mistake by clicking this link.

Though i appreciate the effort of connecting agricultural experts and farmers which helps them grow better. "aaqua" has been awarded two times.

最近在師大校園內的餐廳發現這個小玩意兒

當你在櫃檯點完餐 服務生會給你一個小飛碟

找個位子坐下來 先喝飲料

等到小飛碟裡的 LED 閃了 以及發出震動時

就可以到櫃檯領餐

差不多和一個杯墊一樣的大小

放在桌上閃亮的 LED 還滿漂亮的

整個設計非常實用 美觀

並且省去店員的大聲吼叫

達成的技術門檻也很低

卻讓整個點餐的活動顯得優雅 從容 簡便 值得期待...

這樣的互動設計, 我想不亞於人行道專用燈的走路小綠人

I go and meet with a potential client. This client is something like a high-powered PR firm, and all the women who work there are older and somewhat icy and forbidding. They don't have offices, but instead all the women sit at a long front desk, like a reception area, and greet people there.

The woman I talk to has a 3-D printer at her desk for prototyping. We discuss a project and she prints out a blob of plastic for us to review. I walk down the line of desks and pick up business cards from everyone.

I go back to my house on Prescott Drive and go into the basement. I look up K.V.s blog and realize that I had written him a note on his blog asking if he wanted to get together, and he had replied on the blog so I hadn't seen it. He had also commented about Tamara's blog. I write back to him that if he's interested in plastic flies (like toy rubber houseflies) then I know where to get some.

Then Luke comes down the stairs and I quit working to talk to him.

@_@   Wow!

Questi dell'ECAL (Media & Interaction Design Unit) di Losanna sono dei mostri... Magari avessimo anche noi dello IUAV i mezzi necessari per fare questo genere di progetti!!

Bravi, comunque!

As is typical for me, I have some quotes I want to share. I'll start with a short blurb about the program from their Web site:

The School of Visual Arts MFA in Design Criticism - the first of its kind in the United States - seeks to cultivate design criticism as a discipline and contribute to public discourse with new writing and thinking that is imaginative, historically informed and socially accountable.

I find it important to see the notions of "rigor" (previous quote) juxtaposed with the key goals of the program: imaginative, historically informed, and socially accountable discourse. In the engineering and social science dominated field of HCI, "rigor" is typically tied to empirical evaluation, rather than critical thinking. Let us consider each of these three areas of value and their presence in HCI.

Social accountability is increasingly mainstream in HCI, from Scandinavian "political" approaches to HCI to the meteoric rise of sustainable interaction design (such as the work of my illustrious colleague, Eli Blevis). Imagination is something, IMO, that HCI is not particularly good at. I don't mean to say it's not there--there are lots of people in HCI with plenty of imagination. But does HCI have a stable way to think about, evaluate, or teach imagination with "rigor"? I think not. As to the third value--being historically informed--HCI is only now starting to confront its own historicity (e.g., Bodker's essay on the three "waves" of HCI). What one rarely sees is any writing in the field that treats the history of a design artifact as historical, as having a history, a genealogy, or precursors. Yet this sensibility is absolutely basic to criticism, from literary and film criticism to design criticism.

OK, enough of that. This next quote is a treasure. It comes from Linda Cooper Bowen's article, "Teaching Design Criticism," which is in the May/June issue of Communication Arts magazine, which is how I found out about this new MFA program in the first place.

Aside from acquiring an appropriate critical vocabulary and a professional perspective, a professional critic needs to have a distinct individual voice, be passionate, witty, provocative, angry or possibly ambivalent, but always, unequivocally, well-informed. Critics need the courage of their convictions since they may express a point of view that is not popular.... Yes, one can be taught to write well, learn design speak and the history of every area of design, but cannot be trained to express why design matters culturally and socially. The primary role of critical writing is to create attention to areas of design that are commonly accepted without question.

There's a lot going on here, but I want to cut right down to the core. In this formulation, the critic is unique. She or he is not representative of the user. She or he is not performing a replicable and established research methodology. Instead, the critic is someone with a unique voice and a special capacity to call attention to details that are simultaneously overlooked and that also get right at the sociocultural significance of the design. Critics offer an individual point of view; this individual perspective is not a liability and critics don't attempt to strip it away in the name of objectivity. And far from being dispassionate, they are passionate, angry, ambivalent. The point of view is the eyes through which the critic sees (here I'm echoing Gadamer a bit). This point of view can be "unpopular," which again means that the critic is not a barometer or predictor of user or public satisfaction, but someone who gets at something deeper and more significant than the users themselves are aware of. And for all that, it can be done with rigor.

The last quote, also from Bowen's article, is from Alice Twemlow, chair of the program. It expands on the significance of history in design criticism.

It is somehow overlooked that one needs to know that there is a whole history that led up to this point in ... design. When I am looking for good critics I am looking for good historical writers. We will be devoting 30 weeks of the first year to design history classes.

Of course, 30 weeks, for those readers who are safely out of academia, is an entire academic year. I'll let this last quote speak for itself.

The biggest problem for me at the moment is deciding between graduate school and an entry-level job/internship. I actually rather love to work, but I'm concerned that I'm not ready for the work force. Perhaps I'm second-guessing myself, but I'm also worried that I won't want to go back to school after working. Simultaneously, I'm worried about entry level jobs. I can't find any that I want. I guess beggars can't be choosers. But I don't want to live in Middle-of-Nowhere, USA.

However, if there's a bright spot to all this, I found a neat little quote that sums up how I want to be/what I want to possess:

The precision of an artist and the passion of a scientist.

How's that for a thought?

The example above from Remember The Milk's sign-up form points out how easy registering for a product or service should be. It looks so easy, but in reality making it seem easy take experience, empathy and real work.

As a result, you're probably not going to find the answer to the question "How do I design a great registration form?" in a single blog post. (At least not one written by me.)

So where to look then? Let me suggest that you check out some of the insightful writing of Luke Wroblewski. I've read Luke's articles before on his site, Functioning Form as well as Boxes and Arrows, and A List Apart—he's worth reading.

If you came here looking for information on creating well designed forms, I'd suggest you read the articles linked here and then give his new book a spin.

Selected articles by Luke Wroblewski:

• Sign up Forms Must Die
• Sign-up Forms Patterns
• Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design
• Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization

Books by Luke Wroblewski:

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

By Luke Wroblewski. Rosenfeld Media, May 2008.
Reviews of Web Form Design

• Boxes and Arrows
• Goodreads
• Interaction Design Association

Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability

By Luke Wroblewski. Wiley, June 2002.

Have a suggestion for an article or book you think I should read about web form design? Leave a comment, I'd love to hear what you think.

But when it comes to the nitty gritty "email validation rules" and "auto-numbering schemes" and "what happens if a and b and c happens..." and "what happens if a and b and z happen," I easily tire. I've always known I'm not a details person, that I much prefer the up front creative work and like to hand off to someone to wrap things up.

Does this make me a bad user experience person? Isn't the devil in the details? Aren't the details where people get tripped up? Should I be paying more attention, be involved longer?

What do you think?

--Theresa

JB_Dog

Wither: 35
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What if dates were displayed in a circle instead of a line?

For us it's a great opportunity to make something solid, simple, fun, immediate and aimed directly at kids - something we haven't done directly since the Virtual Puppeteers project... although it has to be said that children have explored and had fun with several of our other projects.

Virtual caterpillars, projected onto the sandpit, react to the physical topography of the sand, and can be enclosed by sand walls, scared by children's hands and fingers, and attracted to each other. When they meet, magical things begin to happen...

Technically, the project uses a Point Grey Bumblebee stereo camera to capture depthmap information from the sandpit in real time - using software and ideas first developed for Driftnet during a Research Fellowship at Arts Institute Bournemouth in 2007. See here for another experiment with the Bumblebee.

Camera view of sandpit, and depthmap (red near, blue far)

Bumblebee on tripod

Trial setup

Physically, the piece is going to need to be strong - not only to survive the elements outdoors in a playground, but also to survive the children! Currently the ideas revolve around a large 3 or 4-legged dome-shaped structure (steel and tent material) that will shield the equipment and the sandpit itself from the elements, and also some light.

I'm walking around the warehouse and a couple of policemen show up with a giant Great Dane. The dog comes over and bites my head, basically engulfing my whole head in its slobbery mouth. It drools. The cops tell me to stay calm so they can get the dog to stop biting me.

As always, i am very much interested in gestural interaction and physical computing i saw one art istallation called "remapping firenze". There are two industrial treadmills in front of a huge screen display renderings of a deserted Florence.

The 3D images are put into motion by the physical effort made by the viewer(s)/runner(s)/performer(s). Sensors placed in the handle bar detect movements, and allow the viewer to determine which direction should be followed and what will be the intensity of the images traversed.

This is somewhat similar like de Nijs' famous installation Run, Motherfucker Run.

The runner can only hear the field recordings when navigating slowly through the geometry of the streets and buildings. When they accelerate, contact with human voices and noises is lost. Which touches upon one of the most impressive characteristics of Remapping Firenze: running and slowing down/stopping on the treadmill provides the public with a totally different perspective.While you adopt a gentle walking pace, the city looks real and recognizable in all its touristic cliches and beauty.

courtesy : we make money not art

On the 27th and 28th May I spent two days at Mobile User Experience conference Mex 2008 as a volunteer reporter.

This well organised and enlightening event involved keynote speeches, breakout sessions, panel discussions and was centered around the Mex Design competition.

Ten manifesto points were covered during the conference:

1. Content itself will be the interface of the future
2. Handsets are no longer just for the hand
3. Fragmentation is the enemy of innovation
4. Fashion is stronger motivator than functionality
5. The developing world is the new frontier for mobile user experience
6. Search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment
7. Intelligent contact lists are the future centres of the user interface
8. Mobile payments herald the next generational shift
9. Users as individuals: Uniquely complex and contradictory
10. The potential of Smart Voice

The winner of the Mex Design Competition went to Taptu
a mobile search engine.

The event was also featured on Reuters.

Here’s a summary from the event organiser Marek Pawlowski.

http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=570

BumpTop is a prototype graphical user interface, designed to enhance traditional computer desktop functionality by more closely supporting the normal behavior of a real world desk. It is aimed at stylus interaction, making it more suitable for tablet pcs and palmtops. It was created at the University of Toronto as Anand Agrawala's Masters Thesis. Anand Agarawala also gave a presentation at the TED conference about his idea.

In BumpTop, documents are described by three-dimensional boxes lying on a virtual desk. The user can position the boxes on the desk using the stylus or mouse. Extensive use of physics effects like bumping and tossing is applied to documents when they interact, for a more realistic experience. Boxes can be stacked with well-defined stylus gesture. Multiple selection is performed by means of a LassoMenu, which fluidly combines into a single stroke the act of lasso selection and action invocation via pie menus.

I would say its an intelligent and metaphoric extension of our normal mac or windows desktop.

POE COMPARES FOLEY’S Movements In passage to Last Chief executive officer
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In Part 5 of this series (which more or less begins here), I sampled writings about designs from various design magazines to show examples of ways that people write about design. In it, I showed that people actually talk about design in some very diverse ways, and yet each of these ways was accepted and even used in more or less similar ways. For example, some people talk about the internal language of a design, while others talk about the design as an instance of a movement (e.g., modernism), while others describe the design's effect on the user-viewer-reader. In saying this, I am repeating an idea developed in a paper presented this year at alt.chi that I wrote with Shaowen Bardzell, "Interaction Criticism: A Proposal and Framework for a New Discipline of HCI." In it, we argued that criticism typically derives from one or more of the following core directions:

• Designer-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a product of its creator.
• Artifact-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as possessing its own "internal language" or aesthetic/functional value, and explicating what that artifact means (in itself)
• User-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a prompt that causes certain effects in the mind or experience of the user
• Sociocultural-Centered Criticism: Explaining a design as a part of a broader sociocultural movement, such as "bauhaus" or "Soviet" design

What I'd like to do in this post is show some examples of this kind of criticism in "serious" design discourse, by which I mean academic essays (as opposed to the magazine reviews in Part 5). As always, a goal of this entire series of posts is to demonstrate that interaction criticism offers a point of view, a type of insight, a series of methods, and (more fundamentally) an epistemological stance that differs from a scientific one. I do not here need to privilege a scientific versus critical or "designerly" stance over the other. It is sufficient to show that they have different methods, ends, and standards of rigor. The historically scientific HCI community is now openly seeking more designerly ways of knowing, and I am simply responding to that request.

The Designer-Centric Approach

I have approached this topic in the past by looking at theories about professionals/designers, especially the work of Donald Shön and those who have developed his line of thinking in design, such as (full disclosure: my program director) Erik Stolterman. But I want to get away from theory and show some examples. So here I will talk about an essay by Michael Bierut on one of his mentors and former employers, Massimo Vignelli, entitled, "Massimo Vignelli's Pencil." As before, I will string some quotes together for you and then talk a little about them afterward:

Unlike many designers, he didn't mind being imitated. On the contrary, he prided himself on creating solutions that could be replicated, systems that were so foolproof anyone could do them.... [He seemed to want to] enlist an army of disciples to design the world in his image....

[He was] [a]lways optimistic, never cynical.... Even creating something as simple as a business card ... would require sketch after sketch as Massimo tried to coax a few trusted elements and a famously limited palette of typefaces into some surprising new form....

[His singular] passion is what many of Vignelli's critics miss when they group him with a generation of designers dedicated to a sterile brand of modernism. To be sure, he always argued for functionalism and clarity. But the rationalism of modernism requires absolute self-control.... Instead, Massimo's signature gestures--the expressionistic black stripes in the print work, the surreal contrasts of scale in the architecture, the inevitable intrusion of sensuality in the product design--were utterly intuitive, almost indulgent, and clearly as impossible for him to resist as breathing.

[Years later, the author revisits Vignelli's studio, after Vignelli has left it, and decided to leave a note for him, on Vignelli's desk, and using the master's signature pencil.] I picked up the pencil to leave a note and the familiarity of the sensation shocked me: I had switched to easier to find (and easier to lose) cheap black pens a long time ago. And when I looked at what I had written, I noticed something funny about the handwriting. It looked just like Massimo's.

This is a beautiful essay and I get goosebumps just retyping its closing words! What a lovely tribute! But that's not my purpose here.

I'd like to say a few things about the rhetoric of this piece. It talks about Vignelli as a designer, saying a few things about his philosophy and personal style. It continues to talk about how he fit into the dominant design stylistic movements of his age (the business about modernism), the particular characteristics of his work (his expressive indulgence), and how he has affected the author as someone familiar with his work. In short, this essay hits on all four points of design.

I call this designer-centered criticism, though, because the designer trascends the other three categories. Yes, you can call him a modernist, the author writes, but he's bigger than modernism; indeed, Vignelli transcends modernism exactly where modernism is itself weak. The designer stands as a critique to all of modernism. You can also talk about the particular features of his design--the expressive lines, the sensuality of its scale--but these are just signifiers of the designer behind them. He is not defined by these features; he, in his personality, biography, and beliefs, causes and defines them. Finally, the author goes so far as to suggest that he, and by implication his design work, is derivative of his former master. In other words, Vignelli didn't merely influence the author; the designer gave the author his very voice, and the authors works are in some important sense also Vignelli's.

Artifact-Centered Criticism

Here, I want to talk about a pretty well known essay in design circles: Richard Buchanon's "Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice," originally written in 1985, and (sadly) only now having a chance to get its message into HCI. I cannot do this article justice here, because it features a multilayered argument about technology and design that is rich beyond what I can do in few paragraphs. So I will stick to its core argument: design is a form of rhetoric.

[R]hetoric is an art of shaping society, changing the course of individuals and communities, and setting patterns for new action.... The primary obstacle to [understanding the design of technology as rhetoric] is the belief that technology is essentially part of science, following all of the same necessities as nature and scientific reasoning. If this is true, technology cannot be part of design rhetoric, except as a preformed message to be decorated and passively transmitted.... However, if technology is in some fundamental sense concerned with the probably rather than the necessary--with the contingencies of practical use and action, rather than the certainties of scientific principle--then it becomes rhetorical in a startling fashion. It becomes an art of deliberation about the issues of practical action.

[Buchanan moves onto the nature of the design argument:] the designer [is] a speaker who fashions a world, however small or large, and invites others to share in it.... This article suggests that the designer, instead of simply making an object or a thing, is actually creating a persuasive argument that comes to life whenever a user considers or uses a product as a means to some end.

In a lengthy and well illustrated and exemplified argument that follows, Buchanan says that a design argument involves "the interrelated qualities of technological reasoning, character, and emotion, all of which provide the substance and form of design communication." I paraphrase what he means by each of these below. (Incidentally, Buchanan's division here is adopted fairly literally from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which comforts me in its familiarity and authority, and concerns me in its, um, not-exactly-up-to-dateness.)

Technological reasoning is both the "how it actually works" of a design (from a spoon to a coffee grinder) to how the design communicates how it works (reveals, obfuscates, simplifies, metaphorically suggests, pseudo-reveals, etc.). A steering wheel gives me a sense of how a car turns, while the meaning of the "Publish" button on this blog software has a more distant relation to what happens behind the scenes when I click it.

Character reflects the designer, or more precisely, how the designer wants to appear in the design. Whether a design is playful, modest, utilitarian, ostentatious, user-friendly, avant-garde, etc., all get at its character. The difference between, say, a BMW and a Volkswagon is not merely a matter of engineering (the technological reasoning), but also the character the cars project on us.

Emotion (or pathos) refers to the way that a design connects to its user. Buchanan here emphasizes movement and lines and the way they beckon a user to touch, interact with, and relate to designs. He explicitly rejects exploitative or "coercive" emotion--such as (these are my examples) pictures of grotesque human corpses as a technique for engaging in the abortion or Iraq war debates. Instead, good designs serve practical human life in emotionally engaging and desirable ways.

Stepping back and looking at Buchanan's argument, he is focusing entirely on design artifacts, claiming that embedded in these artifacts is an internal language that makes an argument to users to partake in its vision of practical life. Certainly, this reflects the intentions of the designer; the sociocultural contexts of design, distribution, and use; and the interpretation and appropriation of the design by its user. But all of these are secondary, in some important sense embedded in and a consequence of the design argument presented by the artifact itself.

User-Centric Approaches

I wrote quite a bit about this in Part 5 of this series. Indeed, I had something of a personal breakthrough, in distinguishing between empirical, historical, actual, flesh-and-blood people as "users," and what I think I'll call the "hermeneutic user," that is, the "user" as a discursive construct created by the critic as a way to explore ways that humans deeply and subjectively respond to the experience of interacting with a design. This hermeneutic user is tied to notions of the "reader" from semiotics, which argues in some sense that a text not only contains "codes" that provide access to its content, but also "codes" that tell one how to be that text's ideal reader.

This is akin to the approach taken by Ann C. Tyler in "Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience in Visual Communication." She begins the piece by saying that she is continuing the rhetoric approach of Buchanan (described just above), but to me, she actually takes it in a different direction. Her essay emphasizes the interpretive process of the viewer of several posters. For example, she describes two 1972 airline travel posters, promoting travel to Asia.

The PanAm images are architectural in nature: the terraced land [of gardens in Bali] forms a contrasting figure/ground pattern; the two people standing with their backs to the audience become shapes against the sky. People and land become objects of beauty. Distanced from the scene through perspective and the lack of any reference back to the viewer, the audience thus remains "outside" a beautiful, tranquil scene. Landscape and people are frozen in time for the audience to view as they choose--as in a museum of artifacts. Both posters promise the audience an esthetic, non-participatory experience if they travel to these distant lands.

The rhythm of Tyler's rhetoric is like that of a tide coming in. Back-and-forth it goes between talking about objective features of the artifact and the response in the viewer. But with each back and forth, it inches ever toward the meaning in the interpretation of the viewer. As I asked in the previous post, just who is this viewer? It is the hermeneutic viewer; she is not talking about a survey of actual viewers but is rather using a hypothetical viewer as a strategy to explicate what the artifacts mean in the phenomenal world of humans that see these posters (as opposed to the posters in-themselves).

Sociocultural-Centered Criticism

This last category is perhaps the broadest. Whereas designer-centered criticism is often biographic, and artifact- and user-centered criticism are often rhetorical or semiotic, sociocultural-centered criticism borrows much from cultural studies, including art criticism, literary criticism, Marxism, feminism, new historicism, and a host of others.

For this section, I'll talk about an essay written by Tony Fry, "A Geography of Power: Design History and Marginality." He begins the essay with a fairly theory-heavy frame:

Design history is understood here as various and competing explanatory models of design. As with other emergent and established forms of institutionalized knowledge and practice, it exists in and produces conditions of marginality. The aim of this paper is to explore such conditions in the context of the rise of design in Australia.

It is not particularly uncommon for sociocultural-centered design criticism to be theory-heavy, given the vastness and sheer complexity of its subject. Obviously, the scope of the semantics of a juicer arm and the that of the entire history and institutionalization of design in Australia are on a different scale. And, to be fair, this article of all of the ones I include in this post is the most theoretical. But it does contain sections of criticism. Here is one of them:

Design, even prior to the management of a design profession, intervened to undercut the formation of a modern Australia as a discordant bricolage. Appropriation [of imported design materials and processes from the United States and Europe] was organized but not within a systemic plan. There was neither total chaos nor directed order but a pragmatic falling together of fragments. The disparate arrival of Ford [Motor Company] and Fordism [the industrial assembly line] is one contained example of this history.

The first Ford car was brought to Australia in 1904. Commercial importing began in 1909 with the Model T. As sales increased, an ad hoc system of distribution became locally established. Because of corrupt and profiteering practices that grew up around this network, the Ford company refused to trade with it and set up its own local administrative and distribution system instead. Ford Australia was formed in 1925. Fordism, however, was an industrial system of mass production based on the in-line assembly of interchangeable parts, arrived in Australia a year earlier. A Sydney-based manufacturer of compressers introduced such a method to its factory in 1924.... Product design and advertised image (the symbolic forms) were drawn from the USA. Here, then, was a mixture of appropriation and imposition, order, disunity, and disorder, and the object (the car, its system of production and distribution, and its symbolic form) as a sign of modernity. All of this adds up to one example of a local sign of a particular conjuncture and paradigm of modernity--"Americanism and Fordism" in Australia.

In this passage, we are understanding design from the twin lenses of theory and history, focusing on the twenty year period in which Ford and Fordism--which had emerged practically simultaneously in the United States--spills into Australia in non-systematic, non-random ways. The historical circumstances, in this passage, appear to overwhelm the design. In other words, the intentions of any individual designers are so tiny that they don't even register here. The product semantics of the cars and their reception by Australians are also dwarfed by the sheer cultural force of the assembly line and the Model T Ford.

Conclusion

I hope through these examples my readers, in particular those with scientific backgrounds who are hoping to appropriate more "designerly ways of knowing" (a phrase I keep using that also is the title of a wonderful book), are able to see how criticism both differs from science and yet has its own rigor. Obviously, Tony Fry had to master his history before he could develop his theory and criticism of Australian design history. Buchanan knew his Aristotle and yet had the intellectual creativity to appropriate it for design and make it mean something (not only is his essay great for anyone interested in design, but he also leverages it to offer a compelling argument for designerly approaches to technology). Tyler's comfortable mastery of rhetoric and semiotics, though not explicitly shoved down the reader's throat, is evident in her incisive ability to apply it so fruitfully in her interpretations of graphic designs. And Bierut's reflective and articulate ability to tease out what made both his master's and his own creative sensibilities tick is a model for anyone who wants to understand how designers analyze creativity, a rich mix of personal psychology, philosophy, anecdote, taste, and embodied gesture.

What started as a blog post is turning into a paper. I need to wind this down. I will post some readings here just to conclude it, but it may be a week to ten days before that happens. But the main argument, and my core purpose for beginning this, is, for better or worse, finished here. Thanks for bearing with its length and please share critical comments, because its next iteration will be peer reviewed! (One must make a case for tenure, after all!)