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Sure, this game may be prone to potential injuries, but it was nonetheless great fun to experience it.

Produced by Ergonomidesign and developed for the Microsoft Surface, Sonicspree is a music quiz game in which players are presented with many upside-down album covers of various artists (rotating around the edges of the Surface). As a new song starts playing, players have to swipe the covers towards the middle of the table to reveal the cover-art of each album. Once the right cover is spotted (the one according to the song playing at that time) players must drag the album cover back to the “container” in front of them to collect that cover. Once someone manages to do that, a new song starts playing and the game continues.

I had the chance to play with this (as well as having my first encounter with the Microsoft Surface) at Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia (US).

Take a look at the actual gameplay to get a better idea:

(those random comments in Spanish you hear… yes, that’s me).

As you can see, the game itself can be loads of fun —especially when a really popular song comes up (e.g. Min 2:17).

This game ended up consuming a considerable chunk of my time that night. I played with it during one of the evening gatherings/parties taking place after the regular scheduled programme at IxD10.

As a audiophile myself, I can see myself playing this game for hours with friends (I reckon I would win in *most* music categories… except maybe Country or Hip-Hop). Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll ever be in the market for a Microsoft Surface, so I’d be interested in seeing if the same game could be exported to a different platform.

The iPad?… maybe if there is a way to hold it in place. Maybe a way for multiple iPhone or iPad mini iPod Touch devices to be connected via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi as everyone sits around in a circle could render a similar experience.

You can read more about the Sonicspree game (and music store) at Ergonomidesign’s web site.

(To clarify, “Latest” is purposely within quotes. I’m sure is not quite the “latest”)

By now, many have seen the much anticipated “Apple Tablet”, in photos, videos, or have read about it in your favourite blog/news source. Maybe you are burned out with the topic from skimming your Twitter feed alone.

But the device everyone had been talking about for weeks/months has been shown, and despite the various rumours about the names it could have been given (and the names some people were “so sure” would never be considered) it’s called the iPad.

(even the “female hygiene product” jokes seem overdone already… and it’s been only 2 days since the announcement.)

It’s a thin, gorgeous-looking mobile device that looks and behave much like a current day iPod Touch, or an iPhone. Yet despite having 3G capabilities, Apple has built the iPad without the chance of making/receiving phone calls. The similarities with the previously mentioned devices saves you some paragraphs to read in this post.

Nice, isn’t it?

Well, I’m mostly disappointed for a number of reasons —purely personal and based on timing. Others not. But let’s begin with what I reckon are *WINNING* points about this device:

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Just in case there are people who still doubt that Google’s Chrome OS may just be all we need in an ultra-portable computer, here is yet one more example showing that more and more things that previously required a proper desktop application running on a conventional operating system, can now be done through the web browser.

My professor and thesis adviser Dr. Davide Bolchini sent me the link to this video today, and I have to say I was rather impressed. Not entirely by the transition of the slides or the choice of Bruce Springsteen as background music (as it was on the original video —The video above was “enhanced” with music by music mastermind William Orbit). I was really impressed with the fact that it was apparently done in less than 10 minutes using something called Stupeflix Editor: an online video tool.

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I’m proud to announce that the current topic of my Master’s thesis at IUPUI’s HCI programme, has been published as an article in the current issue of Interactions magazine.

The article was co-authored between my thesis adviser, Dr. Davide Bolchini and myself, under the supervision of Dr. Anthony Faiola, executive associate dean of the school of informatics at IUPUI.

The topic? It’s about mobile user experience. More specifically, it’s about how to anticipate it with the help of simple paper prototyping —a familiar concept to most practitioners in the fields of interaction design and usability.

“Paper-in-Screen” in itself is a prototyping technique that allows practitioners to anticipate the mobile user experience without the need to create high-fidelity, interactive prototypes (which are generally time/resource-consuming).

The origins of this prototyping technique were within one of my independent studies from the past Autumn semester at IUPUI. Dr. Bolchini gave me the freedom to work on any design-related project of my liking. With “mobile interaction design” being one of my most salient interests, I decided to design an application for the Apple iPhone. That application is called Vertsumption.

In the process of prototyping the application, we discovered (practically by accident) the ability to anticipate certain aspects of the mobile user experience that otherwise, would have required a couple of lines of code and some time with Adobe Fireworks.

I will go into more detail about the technique itself and the results from testing it with practitioners when I’m finished with my thesis project (the topic is the same as the article). I still need to do some more affinity diagramming with the obtained results for it all to come full circle.

If you are a subscriber of Interactions magazine, you shall see the July-August issue soon in your post box. The article is also available in PDF format at ACM’s Portal web site.

I’m really glad to see this article in a publication like Interactions. I consider it the “norm” for people in my professional field. It is an honour in itself to be featured in the same magazine where Don Norman has a regular column.

If you are a practitioner in UX/IxD, I hope you find it useful, but regardless of your field of expertise, I hope you find it interesting.

Here’s an article I came across thanks to my (sometimes neglected) daily email Google Alerts on “Interaction Design”. It’s an article on Design Thinking by CEO and president of IDEO, Tim Brown. It appeared on the June 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review. I was lucky enough to come across a link to the article in PDF (Thanks, ideo.com).  

Harvard Business Review? Yes. That may be because design thinking seems to be just as valuable and applicable to business, marketing and product-development as it is to user experience an interaction design.

Tim Brown provides a couple of simple examples to illustrate what design thinking is:

[design thinking] - a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos.

This speaks directly to the need to go beyond the salient issues of a design problem or product requirements. It’s about more directly observing people’s lives, their wishes, their needs, their likes and dislikes about whatever is being designed.

That sounds rather compelling. And it should be. After all, user experience and interaction design never stops at the end-cycle of that mobile phone, that controller or that alarm clock.

This next example seems more concrete, in relation to a “real-world” example:

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By looking at this trailer, you might understand why I’d be so interested in Gary Hustwit’s documentary:

From the Objectified’s web site:

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

Clearly, this pertains almost any kind of designer: visual, industrial, web…

The sole thought of going deeper inside the mind of those who think about “what is going to happen” (quoting the trailer) and the reasoning behind the associations we make with the products we engage with are some of the key selling factors for me. They speak directly to my Psychology background.

I’m looking forward most particularly to the pieces featuring IDEO’s Bill Moggridge (responsible for making the term Interaction Design meaningful) and Apple’s Jonathan Ive (… —no explanation needed).

This movie should be coming out in DVD or online, after it’s select-cities tour around the world.

If you have had some sort of difficulty in the past trying to define what Interaction Design is (specially if you call yourself an Interaction Designer), this video shall help get you closer to that answer.

IxDA’s co-founder David Malouf leads the over 70-minutes long conversation, alongside fellow Interaction Designers Ted Booth and Jennifer Bove.

This video doesn’t only address where Interaction Design currently is, but mostly importantly, it attempts to provide a clear(er) idea of what is. I found this very helpful for various reasons. I think Jennifer Bove says it best during the video when she asks “Have you ever tried to explain to your mum what you do?”. My easy way out is to say “I design web sites”, but if you are reading this, you are likely to know that it’s not as easy to define your profession compared to Doctors and Lawyers.

The discussion touches on various topics that I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who had questions on. What is our clay? What is our tool? (Illustrator? OmniGraffle? Flash?); where do we land in the scheme of the product (or services) development? (Is interaction design more marketing? science? creative force? business analysis?) What exactly are we borrowing form Human-Computer Interaction? Ergonomics? Industrial Design? The discussion even brings in Agile Development into the mix —exploring how exactly interaction designers are placed within this new and widely implemented development process.

This video leaves you with many things to think about.

And voilà —the first post. I finish this welcome message with a rather appropriate song —made even more appropriate, as these Norwegian pair does it all through instruments + computers.

Welcome.