NPR reports German social networking site StudiVZ is being sued by FaceBook for User Interface (UI) infringement. This suit marks a shift in thinking towards the value of a user interface. In previous posts we’ve talked about UI as not being defensible. If this lawsuit is successful, we’ll be eating crow. We’re thrilled! Bring on that savory crow fricassee!
(Thanks Adam!)
This is a wonderful story about a clever man connecting with voters (a type of consumer, right?) using very simple and viral techniques.
“Democratic strategists told first-time political candidate Sean Tevis he would need at least $26,000 to have a shot at beating a Republican incumbent.” Read about his success for yourselves.
We love the caption under the first illustration, “Called Running for Office: It’s Like a Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner, the comic is filled with nerdy Internet inside jokes.” A Flamewar with a Forum Troll? WOW! We are sharpening our +7 battle axes of hyperbolic retaliation just in case.
(Thanks Adam!)
For the past few weeks a campaign has been filtering through the blogosphere with exciting speed, reaching the likes of Inhabitat.com, BrandRepublic Treehugger.com and WorldChanging.com.
The ColaLife Campaign started as one man’s idea; to tap into the hugely powerful distribution muscles of multi-nationals such as Coca-Cola, and ask
them to distribute medicines to dying children in developing countries. Through a simple group on Facebook, ColaLife Campaign founder Simon Berry has gained international support and is now in conversations with Coca-Cola! Maybe there is something to this social networking thing after all?
(Thanks Travis!)
Significant real-time data immersion is not available for the consuming public yet. More data is available than ever before, but the traditional web browser experience has to grow up quite a bit before it begins to tax the cognitive capabilities of the average human with regards to information flow and memory. Sure, bad design is overloading us already, and yes you can watch real-time posts to DIGG, but imagine 7 to 12 real-time feeds simultaneously informing the user of the state of a given system. According to Micah Endsley [1] we can handle it, now we need to design it. One of the core principles of real-time information design is the establishing and maintaining of situational awareness.
Wickens defines situational awareness as “the continuous extraction of information about a dynamic system or environment, the integration of this information with previously acquired knowledge to form a coherent mental picture, and the use of that picture in directing further perception of, anticipation of, and attention to current events” [2][3]. The Air Force Research Laboratory similarly, and perhaps more simply, defines situational awareness as “how accurately a person perceives his current environment relative to the reality of that environment” [4].
Applying situational awareness to the goal of improving user interface, Davenport identifies three key areas of awareness encountered by the human participant: systems awareness, task awareness, and spatial awareness [5].
Interestingly, because situational awareness is the process of aggregating understanding it becomes evident that a failure at any time during aggregation can cause a series of failures much like a highway pile-up. The aviation community calls this cumulative effect of related incorrectly executed action loops a “Chain of Errors.” The National Transportation Safety Board has documented that a catastrophic failure, like a plane crash, is seldom caused by a single incorrectly executed action but instead by the cumulative effects of multiple incorrectly executed actions.
Situational awareness becomes even more critical in dimensional immersive experiences but we’ll save that discussion for another day.
References:
It’s been a little over a year since we made our voyage to Beijing for HCI International and the dustball we witnessed has transformed into an event to be watched by the world. You can join in too on your mobile phone with the help of Google’s new Olympic updates feature. If you suddenly have the urge to shout an obscenity in another teams native language you can use Google’s new mobile phone optimized translator service.
Maybe I’ve been thinking about this topic because of the recent arrival of my twin sons Pascal and Thibault, but it seems to me we are about to take the next evolutionary step in the digital world with regards to replication. Digital replication, creation, or programming, has traditionally had a steep entry curve, requiring very smart people with very specific skills to create anything of value. Today games like Spore™ and LittleBigPlanet™ are replacing yesterday’s object oriented programming languages and are making online content creation accessible to a much larger audience. Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft™, Second Life™, and even the upcoming Diablo III MMORPG offer trading and even sale of your creations for fun or profit. Inworld artifact and content creation doesn’t represent the end, the next-generation replicator will allow users to create self-sustaining, independent objects that can exist outside (outworld) the domain of their originating world. These objects will be able to easily travel between devices (including mobile platforms) in ways that are relevant to their creator. Perhaps these objects themselves will contain within themselves the ability to replicate, perhaps even evolve?
Post back if you’ve already seen this in the wild and have a great weekend!
Most virtual worlds have have fans/residents that use the world, creatures, and other residents to create Machinima. Second Life is special because you get to do set design instead of location hunting. The concept is interesting but it seems they still haven’t figured out the mouth part yet. EWWWW! Learn more about the behind the scenes for this project here.
Today the edges between digital and real were blurred a little further (thanks Brad) as man and data interact in real time and real space. This slight-of-hand was created using a compelling combination of Musion Eyeliner and some clever motion cameras. We want to see it from the point-of-view of the guy on stage!
The folks at Microsoft Surface have begun to play further with their advanced multi-touch display. We are THIS CLOSE to getting one of these coolies to play with but now our desire has been captured by this new globe version. I think we were all amused by some of the “creative” demonstration apps they built for it, but the virtual tour demo left us wanting it purely because it looks like a crystal ball and who doesn’t want one of those???
Welcome to the spill. The overflow buffer for the passion we have for interaction.
Spill is the blog from Tanagram, Inc. a technology innovation and design company based in Chicago, Illinois.
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