I was a little unpleasantly surprised by the MOMA exhibit “Talk to Me” — ALthough the pieces were generally good, in many respects, the entire point of the overall exhibit — interactivity as art, seemed very lost. While some of the pieces did have real interactivity, even that seemed to be diminished relative to what [...]
The question of providing people with enough information to make a “good” decision, without either (1) trivializing / 0ver-simplifying, or (2) overwhelming the audience is a fascinating one to me and a genuinely serious issue as information becomes cheaper and cheaper and “attention” becomes the commodity. Both the reading from Nudge and the “Humans as Stupid [...]
Donald A. Norman’s book, Emotional Design is a great read and one that everyone in design, interaction and technology should read. His chapter on “The Multiple Faces of Emotional Design” discusses the visceral, behavioral and reflective aspects of design. In very simplified terms, visceral design is the appearance or “surface” quality of the design of [...]
Jonah Lehrer’s “How We Decide” provides a very interesting take on the nature of designing interactions, interfaces and general usability. He provides a story about a weapons operator on the USS Misouri during the first Gulf war. The operator was faced with the challenge of determining, with very very little time and *no* margin of [...]