In making stuff, we seem to increasingly be looking backwards as we move forward. Culture is less about making new things than how exactly to bring old things back in just the right balance. Stealing from the past can be dismissed as lazy, but it’s an extremely nuanced process with infinite variations – figuring out the compelling essence and which parts are just obsolete or incidental. The real work of the future may well be that of curator/creators sifting through all the junk (both material and conceptual) to retain and combine things of value that resonate with the present.
I’ve always been obsessed with new-old things. Add other obsessions like LA and spending too much time on a video game and you got LA Noire, the new release by Rockstar Games. It blends storytelling, new acting technology, painstaking production, geographic history, new music, old music, and political commentary to create a pop multi-media extravaganza that reconnects us to a time and place sorta similar and sorta different from the now.
You’ll have to play the game to experience a reality in which LA had light rail, local stores, no freeways, vacant land, Victorian suburbs, people wearing hats unironically and no mini-malls. But if you want to really be inside architecture showcasing craft and symbolism, see Spanish history, watch old movies and vaudeville, lament developer/transportation corruption, and hang out with junkie musicians, you can still find it in this handy chart of real sites seen in the game… :::LA NOIRE: IRL:::
Fitting everything into 10 or 15 minutes is challenging, but makes for a dense overview of new ideas. If anyone stopped by and has any thoughts to share please email or comment. It was difficult to find room for conversation during the session with so much going on.
This Hill Holliday video of users trying new connected TV technologies has been making the blog rounds so this might be a little redundant, but it sums up such an important point for people working on iTV products. See their original blog post here.
Beyond Scifi: Design For Surfaces and Big Screens touched on a few different ideas in contextualizing futuristic UI design for real world usage with current technology. Many of the new platforms we’re using like touch tables, touch walls, and interactive TVs, seem straight out of sci-fi movies. However, in movies they’re often used as cinematic props or storytelling devices. Things that blow us away at the theater might actually be boring or frustrating for an actual user. So I pulled out some common challenge areas and decision points that can keep futuristic platforms feeling cool and futuristic for users. The key areas I’ll be posting blog articles about are:
1. Communal Computing
2. Modes of Interaction
3. Leniency of Input
4. Modes of Free Gesture
I’m excited to announce I’ll be speaking at the SXSW interactive conference again this year. The talk will be on interactive TV and it’s scheduled for Monday, March 14 at 12pm as part of the Future15 session on convergence kicking off at 11am with Dan Shust.
I figure this is good a time as any to start posting some in-depth explorations of ideas from last year’s presentation Beyond Scifi: Design For Surfaces and Big Screens. Part 1 of 4 will be up shortly.
When I saw this campaign on a billboard, it broke my heart. Turns out there’s a whole series of stick figure folks abandoning poor little pals – and in animated form. Some animal shelter campaigns go over the top, but this one keeps it simple with everyday realities and still gets you…
Stephen Colbert expanded the constraints of reality with the following testimony in a house committee on immigration.
As important as it is, actual policy making seems like long, complicated, boring business. It’s like watching someone wireframe an application. The details make the design, but scouring for relevant details just makes for a day at work, not anything most people want to do in their off-time. So we all rely on news media to sum it up for us.
But news media has increasingly become its own entertainment, presenting clips and quotes from sources both official and self-scripted to fit it’s own narrative. It’s reality TV, only with extremely high stakes. Policy-makers then have 2 choices – to take the “high road” and be voted off or stir up drama to get a part on the show.
So it’s exciting when someone changes the game completely. Most celebrities try to use their fame for good, but not their talent. After getting a part on the political stage via other means, they often end up being the uncharismatic, self-righteous heels they are in their off-hours. Colbert instead offers up his talent and many more people start hearing about the complexities of the immigrant labor issue.
I’ll be speaking Tuesday evening in Santa Monica at a meetup hosted by UPA-LA (Usability Professionals Association). Here’s the info, and the agenda is below…
• Wendy Ficklin, Creative Director at Primitive Spark, will present general usability considerations for different types of touch screens;
• Gavin Bowman, Game Developer at Retro Dreamer, will show what it takes to successfully design or adapt games for the iPhone and iPad;
• Bernadette Irizarry, Principal at Velvet Hammer Design, will present special considerations for designing and testing multi-touch kiosks;
• Colombene Jenner, Sr. UX Designer at Schematic, will discuss large scale multi-user touch screen projects.
Last night Danish interaction designer Mikkel Michelsen gave a very interesting talk on the UX-iest of all UX – when design is a matter of life and death (or carries otherwise heavy consequences). His slides list some of his major points on designing UI for things like cockpits, medical equipment and finance terminals. Interestingly, his research, processes and documentation seem similar to that of us garden variety designers on more mundane tasks.
It did me proud to think of the care that those in our field put into their work and the potential to aid people in extreme circumstances. In light of so many recent man-made disasters, perhaps the future will hold a larger role for people with a knack for broad systems, crucial details, user psychology, contextual understanding and risk minimization.
Comcast showed off a great execution of multi-platform strategy for the new TV experience at The Cable Show last month with their program guide on the iPad. Is this the train of thought getting Steve Jobs to rethink the hobby status of Apple TV?
