By sid213 (February 1, 2009) (Question 2,Reading 2)

Respond to the Weekly Reading with questions, thoughts, and relevance to your own work.

I won’t go into details into this post, I will have enough talking (hopefully) this Tuesday in class.

About my work, the Lie to me and exposure experience reminded me a project I collaborated with Thomas Chan: Pantomeme. This was an online game version of Charades. In our user testing (mainly in the show) we tried to recreate the experience of Charades in a online live interface. But it seemed that a lot of the body language and rapport that is created in an person to person setting, was lost through a web-cam. People could not make the guesses. For example if you gave them the category of movies and make someone act “Billy Elliot” they could not act out the word, or the user in the other end could not understand what the other user was trying to act out. We had to try to simplify our guesses. We started with really known celebrities, known movies and it still did not work out. But as we explored other genres of guesses it seem that what work the best was emotions. This game experience reminded me a lot to Paul Ekmans game mett (Micro Expression Trainning Tool). It was as if a web-cam will be able to focus in mainly facial expression that can represent feelings.

About Lockton I mainly enjoyed his video where he is able to synthesize everything he writes in the post in the readings. What I like of his readings is that he gets out of the interface design sphere and gives product design, urban planning and architectural examples. Even tough I would like it to hear examples regarding the new user interfaces. His environmental approach (even tough he does not talk that much about in his post) made me understand what green design was about. I had not idea about the effect and responsibilities can be taken by a designer. Reminded me a lot of a discussion we had last semester in Softness of things where Despina will argue that designers are separated from the sphere of art. An artist can create irresponsibly he can have an excuse of a concept behind a structure or behind his work. In other words the work of an artist can have no use, or it’s use can be merely conceptual. But the work of the designer is usability and impact. Which are really different approaches.

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About being persuaded…
In texting. I hate to text! this all goes because I found it useless, it takes to much time to do so, write the text message while I can call and be really concise. But this week I did so. I even sign up online to the program of getting 500 messages per moth.

The persuasion came mainly from the voice message system annoying me taking to long to get to the beep to get to the moment where I could finally leave the message. I must confess that it also came from my friend not answering, and trying to find strategies to contact him.

I will definitely improve my phones interface to send text, it takes to long and mainly the ability to be able to change languages more easily.