Showing only Notes + Links tagged interactionon creativity, art, & design

by Casey A. Gollan

meaghano:

I’ve never commented on the NYT before; that was kind of fun.

This guy’s like: “Oh god, can I Like this photo of people dying in Haiti?” and all of the Old People on the NYT are freaked out and suggesting new words, such as APPRECIATE (Marco: “because it’s better to APPRECIATE people dying it Haiti, right?”), and RECOMMEND or INTERESTED (wonder what that icon would look like?).

Also this is my favorite comment:

1. You don’t have to click on the Like button.
2. Instead of clicking on the Like button, you could have written something in response to the article’s posting.
3. You could have just done nothing — no one really cares about your opinion on their Facebook page posting.
4. Who cares?
5. Get a real job.

HAH. People are the worst/best.

Hah is right.

Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story? — NY Times

I recently “liked” a story about five people dying in an explosion in Connecticut.

I didn’t actually “like” the fact that five people had died in a terrible accident. Technically, I didn’t even “like” the story — I found the reporting and writing informative and the narrative engrossing, but not the contents of the piece. On Facebook, however, the only option I had to tell people I had read the article was to either add a comment or press the little “like” button that appears at the bottom of everyone’s status update.

The same act of “liking” something applies to the Web site Tumblr. Several weeks ago, when I visited a friend’s Tumblr Web site, at the top of the page sat a series of photos from the devastation in Haiti. There were images of dead bodies, of toppled buildings and of a child crying in the street. Yet below all of this there were a series of tiny icons with people’s names saying they “liked” this set of images.

You can also find these strange juxtapositions on Google Buzz and on the fan pages of Facebook.

Although these calls for approval have been around for a long time on social networks, they can still be jarring and confusing when this terminology is used in the wrong context.

(via infoneer-pulse)

Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy

Fact:

As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.

In other words, the iPad is (once the geeks get over it) the computer for people who don’t really care about computers. It sounds kind of antithetical because the device has caused such strong reactions among nerdy-types, but in the long term it opens the door for designers to create mind-blowingly intuitive, user-friendly* interfaces to accomplish simple real-world tasks (think reading, drawing, organizing; not hacking).

(via jenbee, who must’ve been reading my mind about what I was about to post)

* Where have we all heard that term before? It was, forever—and maybe still is—how most people describe the difference between Macs and PCs. Now “more user friendly” is the reason to switch from laptop to iPad.

A new class of content for a new class of device

In which Robin Sloan nails it,

Apple: you did not invent a magical and revolutionary device so we could read books in ePub format.

Think about what the iPad really is! It’s the greatest canvas for media ever invented. It’s colorful, tactile, powerful, and programmable. It can display literally anything you can imagine; it can add sound and music; and it can feel you touching it. It’s light and (we are led to believe) comfortable in the hands. The Platonic Form of the Perfect Canvas is out there somewhere—it’s probably flexible… and it probably has a camera—but the iPad is, like, a really amazingly good shadow of that form. And this is just the first one!

So, we’re gonna use the Perfect Canvas to… watch TV shows?

Seriously: ePub?

Now, connect the dots. For all its power and flexibility, the web is really bad at presenting bounded, holistic work in a focused, immersive way. This is why web shows never worked. The web is bad at containers. The web is bad at frames.

Jeez, if only we had a frame.

Now we do.

One of the projects I’m currently working on is translating a piece of music into a color relationship, but I’m having trouble unpacking the dense composition.

I was looking for a specific musical analysis tool that I wanted to use today but I couldn’t find it, so I decided to take a shot at building it for myself. It’s a super-simple Processing app (tentatively given the imaginative title of “soundline”) that augments note-taking for time-based media.

How it works

1. Tape a blank piece of paper to the wall.
2. Set up a projector to project the soundline interface onto your sheet of paper.
3. Select the audio that you wish to work with.
4. Press play, listen, and start taking notes or doodling as the projected line and timecode scan from left to right, in sync with the exact duration of the song.

Why use it?

• Imagine that the paper represents the song as a timeline from the start (on the left) to the finish (on the right). The soundline helps you place your notes and doodles in the linear context of the song.
• Want to remember a specific musical transition or recurring pattern? It’s easy and totally painless to capture the tiniest details and then return to them later. Simply make a dot or hatch mark on the page and write or draw a short reminder. When you want to return to this point to study it further, just use your computer to scrub through the song until the soundline is touching the mark. Hit play and observe your notes in sync with the sound.
• Write, draw, paint, use different colors, paste stickers, draw connections, use graph paper. The possibilities are endless.
• If something isn’t specifically related to a point on the timeline, nothing is arbitrarily stopping you from noting it anywhere you want at any time.
• The simple animation transforms your blank piece of paper into a time-based notepad that allows for densely layered, unobtrusive, and organized annotating, second-by-second.

The concept is sort of like Muji’s brilliant Chronotebook, a daily planner with a clock in the center of each page, allowing you to make radial time-based notes about the day:

In fact, maybe a radial interface would be another good experiment! I’m going to actually play with this tomorrow and see if it helps me understand the song.

Realism in UI Design - ignore the code

The button on the left is too realistic. The button on the right does not have enough details to be immediately recognizable as a button.

(via @daringfireball)

burntbythesun:

Choices at Pollak.