reVerve

This project was quite interesting, they took movies and tv shows and tagged elements of the frames where the actors where fashioning purchasable products. I quizzed them a bit about their tagging process and for now it’s manual, not very scalable but you could see some real time user generated tagging going on and some business rule around X number of tags = a real product. One of the more practical projects at the event

remmbr

remmbr had a very straight forward premise: have you ever had trouble remembering an event and the details around that event? remmbr allows you to take pictures from your camera phone and have them sync to the remmbr site to help you recall what you did. Enjoyed a great bottle of wine? remmbr it for later. The project creator wanted to make it relatively private but I thought along the ambient intimacy lines some people might enjoy a public view of the stream as well.

ChattyTime

ChattyTime lets users coordinate their browsers in real time. Users opt in to the service and once connected one user can send another user a direct link right away. Need to know where the restaurant is? I’ll send you the yelp link direct to your phone. What would be really neat is if there was a collaborative aspect to it where people could see each other interact with the page.

Plott

Plott allowed users to follow an audio narrative of a city mashed up with Google’s street view. There were very interesting parts where the audio tour would mention a building and the street view would move to the object that was being described. I didn’t get to see if it was location aware too but definitely necessary to make it useful in real time.

Anti-paparazzi fashion

If you’re like me then the paparazzi follow you everywhere! No they don’t but for the top 1% of this country they may want to walk around with Anti-paparazzi fashion. Basically when a photo is being taken you lift your fashion piece up and it reflects most of the flash back to the camera man. Take that!

Chickabiddy

A therapeutic little bird that bounces around your screen as you play with a physical egg shaped object. Don’t bounce the egg to hard the bird gets mad

Wheelbug Exhibit

This little critters walk around autonomously with a few simple rules. Most of all they want the food, secondly they’d like to meet and greet each other, and lastly they’ll just meander randomly (hey they’re human!) The creator used electromagnectic fields as attractors and deterrents depending on the critter’s mood. In the end they usually go for a massive free for all for the food.

Stars Chairs (Sit, Tap, and Rock)

Technology has really dehumanized our surroundings but this project wanted to use technology to do the opposite. Sit back and relax in the chair and depending on your movement you will get some interesting natural ambient sounds in the background. Some great therapeutic applications, although dynamism needed to be tweaked for a more natural range but the gist was there.

Dra”Wii”ng Jackson Pollock

This was kind of fun. Take a Wii remote and use the gestural motion and turn them into paint blobs. Now repeat that motion in a general way. Take a look at your screen you now have your own stochastic process Jackson Pollock.

There were a lot of great projects and the room was packed full, so it was difficult to get around to every event but what I saw I liked. Lots of great nuggets that you can pull from for inspiration, really inspires you to go back to school to remember the fun you use to have designing.

Registration is in January and calls for submission are currently being accepted!

Dave Gray, Founder and Chairman of XPLANE.

Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world’s leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public.

He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

Brandon Schauer, Director of Experience Design at Adaptive Path

Brandon Schauer is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. He speaks, writes, trains, and practices experience design as a differentiator for business strategy.

Brandon’s passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World. This insight with customers — plus a solid grounding in business analysis and a mastery of design methods — allows Brandon to help organizations define and design more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Brandon has over a decade of experience developing new products, services, and user experiences for the web, desktop, and devices. He’s keynoted, presented, and conducted workshops at such conferences at Business to Buttons, IA Summit, Designertopia, and UIE Web App Summit. Brandon is a co-author of Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.

Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal, Yahoo! and LukeW Interface Designs.

Luke Wroblewski is currently Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, a product strategy and design consultancy he founded in 1996. In 2008, Luke published Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Luke has also authored a book on Web interface design principles titled Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability and numerous articles on design methodologies, strategies and applications including those featured in his own online publication: Functioning Form. He is also frequent presenter on topics related to Web startegy and design and a former member of the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association.

Lisa Anderson, Microsoft Surface.

Lisa C. Anderson is currently the Microsoft Surface User Experience Director. Previous to this role, she held similar positions at Intuit and Autodesk in the Bay Area. In years past, Lisa acted as User Experience Director for several other teams at Microsoft: Windows XP, MSN, Real Time Collaboration. She was also Executive Producer at Corbis for several years, where she produced award-winning, high-end documentaries on CD-ROM (Leonardo da Vinci;  Critical Mass: America’s Race to Create the Atomic Bomb; FDR; The Barnes Collection). Her background and education are in Design, Art History, English Literature, Writing, Editing, Publishing.

Dennis Wixon, Microsoft Surface.

Dennis Wixon directs research at Microsoft Surface. Previously he managed the user research team an Microsoft Games Studios which is recognized throughout the industry as a leader in user research methodology. Prior to Microsoft Dennis was usability manager in the Software Usability Engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation, where methods such as usability engineering and contextual inquiry were developed. He co-edited a book Field Methods Case Book for Software Design with Prof. Judy Ramey of the University of Washington. Dennis holds a PhD. in social psychology from Clark University.

If you haven’t already caught wind of the news. Interation 09 will be held at my old stomping grounds: the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU. Definitely looking forward to seeing the new grads, professionals and students at the school. I think all of you who do attend will be very impressed with the facilities. See you there!

Another small announcement is that I’ve moved to the Blast New York office. It’s a slight change of role but really a very fresh and exciting opportunity. Will be seeing a lot of you shortly at the many great local groups

]]> http://www.adrianchong.com/blog/archives/40/feed 0 http://www.adrianchong.com/blog/archives/35 http://www.adrianchong.com/blog/archives/35#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:21:11 +0000 Adrian http://www.adrianchong.com/blog/?p=35 As always, Jess/Gene and the gang are hosting CanUX, a Canadian User Experience workshop, Nov 25-27 in Banff. The lineup looks terrific:

• Lou Rosenfeld, founding figure in modern information architecture, author of the best selling Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and publisher at Rosenfeld Media.
• Dave Armano, VP, Experience Design for Critical Mass. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 20 media + marketing blogs according to Advertising Age.
• Derek Featherstone, leading authority on accessibility and its implications for user experience.
• Gene Smith, author of the definitive book on tagging, coming early 2008 from New Riders, and principal at nForm User Experience.
• The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble, world-renowned facilitators who work to help executives develop leadership capacity through the combination of the arts, creativity, and leadership principles.
• Kes and Sue Sampanthar, founders of Metamemes, producer of generative thinking tools and experts in moving beyond brainstorming for innovation.
• Jess McMullin, business and design evangelist, advocate for increasing practitioners’ influence in the organizations they serve, CanUX program chair and nForm User Experience founder.
• Brad Nemer, Product Portfolio Manager for Motorola’s Asian 3G business, and pioneer in combining business and design thinking.

If you’re want to find a very inclusive, intensive workshop with the beautiful Canadian Rockies as your inspiration, this should definitely be an event you consider.

Documentation Landscape

I’ve uploaded our presentation to SlideShare. There are some slides which had layers on them so I’ve made the presentation downloadable as well. For those who remember, at the end of our presentation we had a slide (the one above) that consolodated some of the documentation styles we talked about into a landscape.

I want to get your help in expanding this landscape, you can:

-Reference or summarize the documentation style
-Tell me what range of interaction complexity it’s useful for
-Tell me how much time it takes.
-Or You can download the AI file and edit it and send me the edited document.

I’ll keep a space where the document will be viewable. Please email any additions to me at adrian dot chong at blastradius dot com

Thanks!

Download the Presentation
Download the Documentation Landscape

Well, we got word last week our submission had been accepted so now comes the hard part of sifting through all the examples and creating a compelling presentation. We hope to touch on a range of documentation that people are currently using and hopefully show some concrete examples of successes and failures through case studies.

The current abstract for our presentation (scroll down to the “IA for Rich Interaction: Tools and Techniques from the Trenches”)

Hope to see you there!

If you have the chance to go to the event I’d highly recommend it. It’s an intimate venue set in an amazing facility (Banff Centre) with beautiful cascading mountains as your backdrop. It feels a lot less like a networking event and much more about getting together with your peers and growing your knowledge.

As for myself I’ve made as many attempts as I could to try to get to this workshop but it looks like I won’t be able to make it for this year. (BTW any pictures you see of me on the site most likely represent Adrian in an inebriated state.)