Interface Space
What is the Physicality of the Screen?
“You probably spend hours a day staring at this screen — working, playing, talking to friends, shopping. With so many creative people spending so much time on their computers it is no surprise that the computer interface itself has become source material for contemporary art. Daily immersion in a two-dimensional space has raised an intriguing question that many contemporary artists canÂ’t resist: what is the physicality of the screen? The ubiquitous interface experience has created a symbiosis between the metaphorical space of the computer and the physical world.
The boundary between the screen and life started blurring with the first graphical user interface. Architectural metaphors like the desktop and the window were used to make the screen more intuitive. But these interfaces have gained so much symbolic importance in our lives that they have left their metaphorical antecedents behind. In his series of scrollbar pieces Jan Robert Leegte makes luminous recreations of browser handles. The sculptures are reminiscent of Dan FlavinÂ’s work — both artists are interested in light and space.” From Interface Space by Dmitri Siegel, Design Observer.
Originally from Networked_Performance by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 2, 2007, 6:36PM
FSI Releases Spiekermann’s FF Mt
April 1, 2007, Berlin — FSI FontShop International proudly announces FF Mt™, Erik Spiekermann’s most economical typeface ever. Employing obscure but powerful techniques like vwl mmssn and cap reduction, FF Mt uses up to 50% less paper, screen real estate, and wall space than other text faces without a single condensed letter.
The German government has already incorporated FF Mt in their road sign system.
Before (left): Inconsistent hierarchy. Is Mönchengladbach less important than Münster or Dortmond? After (right): Clean hierarchy, increased legibility, 15% smaller sign saves costs.
In addition to its conservationist benefits, FF Mt also enables the generation of buzzwords, product names, and Web 2.0 domains as the user types.
Finally, FF Mt prepares us for the future. English is changing. With the popularity of MMS and internet chat, spelling reform is occurring at a quickened pace. FF Mt accommodates this new condensed written language now. Any copy set in this advanced font will conform to next-generation standards, yet still pass present-day spell checkers.
FSI FontShop International believes this tool is so revolutionary and beneficial to the Earth that access should not be limited to the few. Starting today, April 1 2007, the cross-platform OpenType font is available for free at FontFont.com.
Syndication sponsor: Use this link to buy fonts at Veer and they’ll turn your type love into Typographica support.
Originally from Typographica
reBlogged by michael on Apr 1, 2007, 9:38AM
Reactive Environments: Gestural Control for Navigation and Understanding
In the words of a recent song, I’m not dead, just floating. After a busy travel period, I settled in to get some reading and other writing done, hence the pause in Smartspace content. Spring is here, and content will now bloom like the trees outside my window.
BusinessWeek carries an interesting feature on motion and gesture technologies in its latest edition. The article ties together threads that have been ongoing in the area of gesture-controlled media and interfaces (particularly in the area of advertising), motion capture for film and games, and new innovations such as multi-touch, which has gotten hot since the announcement of the iPhone.
Of course, most folks are all excited about the applications in marketing, such as with the interactive ads from adidas and Target the article describes. Less talked about but more interesting in the long-term are public infrastructure uses for gestural interfaces. Imagine being able to use a gestural interface to find your way around a foreign city or airport, based on your own orientation, not that of a flat map (could have used this when I went to Switzerland and back recently – the Geneva tram maps were a pain to understand to me). Or in public health care environments (show the doctor where it hurts, particularly if its inside – a first step before a costly MRI to locate a problem in 3D space). Or in museums (flick through a catalog of art, skip along a timeline, or explore an ancient building).
More and more, interface designers are looking at how to use gestural control to get around issues of literacy and language, and also age and ability. Most of us can point, and move an object to find another. Hopefully interface designers looking into this area will get together more often with information designers to collaborate on projects such as those I mention above.
Originally from Smartspace by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 26, 2007, 2:30PM
Table Recorder
In terms of its appearance, Frederic Gmeiner’s Table Recorder is slightly remindful of Laurie Anderson’s wonderful Handphone Table. But, while Anderson’s installation merely functions as a poetic playback device for pre-produced music, this table allows you to actually create your own sounds.
After having built a mechanically actuated musical alarm clock as a prototype for this project, his aim was to “create a playful object which may be completely integrated into everyday life”. Besides being a real, usable table, it will echo movements with sound. Below the surface, pressure-sensors feel a user’s touch and actuate custom-built solenoids which inside the drawers then bang on arbitrary objects, at the time including a glass, a plate, a xylophone and a saw.
In one mode, the table acts as a simple sequencer which will loop the recorded sounds in two-second intervals. In the other mode however, it will record movements and play them back with a delay of half an hour. When it is actually being used as a table, it might thus resonate its use, for example to someone who is just coming home. To erase what has been recorded, you simply – wipe it. 
What really impressed me during Frederic’s demonstration though, was when he lifted the tabletop to adjust the sensors with a screwdriver – it suddenly looked as if he was tuning a piano.
Another fun piece from the same course (Kora Kimpel and Dennis Paul‘s introductory course to the digital media class at UDK) was Julius von Bismarck’s still unnamed but camera-equipped blimp, which allows you to see yourself from above when you put on the accompanying space-age helmet that contains tiny screens. When asked about the idea behind this piece, he told me that he likes the top-down perspective of the original Grand Theft Auto-games and that he just wanted to try that out in everyday life. It really did look like GTA in the same weird augmented-reality way as U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi at SIGGRAPH. Too bad we couldn’t take it outside to hijack a couple of cars.
More projects included a moving golf-hole, an enhanced version of tic-tac-toe called Cmatch and another beautiful board game.
More on Flickr.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 15, 2007, 12:53PM
cartographic flow map layout
a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, & flow data between the nodes. flow maps aim to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network.
the advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. most flow maps are drawn by hand & there are few computer algorithms available. this particular technique is inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings & distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another.
see also pivotgraph.
[link: stanford.edu]
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Feb 20, 2007, 5:27AM
Documents and performances
This week, many students presented their thesis projects at the Berlin University of the Arts’ digital media class. Since all of them were quite good, we will cover them over the next couple days.
Lisa Rave has created a beautiful two-fold project which takes a look at the relationship between performance art and its documentation, strongly referring to works like Chris Burden’s Shoot.
For the first piece “Oak Frame”, Lisa cut down an oak tree (which would have been felled anyway) and photographically documented the tree, the process and the void that the tree left behind. These pictures were put into frames which she crafted from the same tree’s wood and put up on the wall. Since the wood is still fresh, the frames will warp as they dry and eventually destroy the panes of glass in front of the photographs, somewhat obscuring the images of the tree.
For the presentation, she got a humidifier from a Berlin museum which was actively working against this process and in a sense stretching the time-span of this part of the performance.
The second piece, “Zählen von 1 bis 3000 in absoluter Dunkelheit” (To count from 1 to 3000 in absolute darkness), plays on a similar idea – it is a photograph of Lisa who was standing still as long as the camera had collected enough light to produce a properly exposed image. The duration of the creation of the performance became the time of the creation of its documentation and vice-versa.
Related: Safari by Lisa Rave.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 6:58PM
Follow-ups: 02-07-2007
Follow-up for The Minority Report Interface
Follow-up for Innovations in Search Result Pages
Follow-up for Social Web Application Design
Tags: search, social software, innovative UIs
Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM
Avatars in the Flesh
The logic of sites like Second Life comes to bear on the ‘first life’ in The Girlfriend Experience, a project by Martin Butler and his Liminal Institute. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings from January 26 until March 9, four members of the group, who have been styled to look like avatars in a virtual community, will inhabit a web-monitored space at Amsterdam’s Mediamatic space. Online players are invited to command the ‘flesh and blood’ avatars as they would their more common digital counterparts, using the borrowed bodies to interact with other users. Taking its title from a prostitution-related term for well-fabricated intimacy, the project creates a caricature of the personal yet anonymous desires underpinning relationships formed in virtual communities. For example, the control fantasy implicit in molding a detached, idealized second self becomes embarrassingly obvious when the avatars are humans who can resist a player’s will. Players can request any action they want, but the avatars ultimately decide where they go and what they do. Inevitable comic scenarios aside, the experiment offers a chance to find out what happens when we start to force the rules at play in our online social lives back onto reality. – Bill Hanley
http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-13553-en.html
Originally from Rhizome News
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 8:00AM
Web App Summit: Learning from Social Web Applications
At the UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, Joshua Porter walked through what designers can learn from the success of Social Web Applications:
- Most people tend to focus on visual design when evaluating the quality of Web sites. However, several highly successful Web sites (My Space, Craig’s List, & Amazon) are not designed well from a visual or interaction design perspective.
- These sites, while lacking in visual & interaction design, have great social design.
- When conducting a large-scale e-commerce study, UIE found that users often went to amazon.com before buying something on another e-commerce site to research their purchases. They called this the “Amazon Effectâ€.
- The content people used on Amazon was highly social: user reviews, recommendations, user-generated shopping lists, and more. In fact, Amazon had 11 social features on each & every product page.
- Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.
Design Elements: the lowest-level building blocks of design that can be used to form higher-level structures.
- Visual Design: line, size, color, shape, texture, pattern, light, value
- Interaction Design: button, input, link, screen, navigation, cursor, check box
- Social Design: messaging, sharing, collaborating, rating, reviewing, gossiping, recommending, voting, arguing, networking
Design Principles: higher-order guides that deal with the relationship between elements.
- Visual Design: contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity
- Interaction Design: anticipation, autonomy, consistency, readability, learnability, metaphor, explorability, etc.
- Social Design: motivation, identity, control, independence, privacy, authority, gaming, community, emergence
- Motivation: identify primary motivation & create a golden path to achieve it. (del.icoi.us bookmarking)
- Identity: let people manage their identity online like they do offline (MySpace profile)
- Control: Users want control though they may never take advantage of it (Facebook news feed)
- Independence: a necessary part of enabling the wisdom of crowds. If achieved, then popularity is valuable.
- Privacy: different for everyone but a key consideration for application design.
- Authority: built up over time based on agreement on who is right or in charge.
- Gaming: it is human nature to compete and a site can benefit (digg)
- Community: it is not a feature set. It is a feeling people get with shared interests or experiences.
- Emergence: effects over time & effects at larger scales.
- Personal benefit always precedes social benefit: the Delicious lesson.
Tags: social software, web2.0, interaction design
Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM
Flesh and blood avatars
During two weeks four avatars in flesh and blood will attend your orders at the Mediamatic gallery in Amsterdam.
The Girlfriend Experience, a work by Martin Butler, will let you choose a human avatar and make him or her walk around the space. You can observe them live in the Analog Villa. All that from the comfort of your home.
The project is of course a comment on online avatar communities, be they Second Life or World of Warcraft. In The Girlfriend Experience you have first to “explore” each other. Player and avatar explore what they can do for each other and the avatar has to think about how far he or she wants to go to comply with your wishes. In fact who’s in command is not always clear. You get ten minutes to play with your avatar, then someone else take your place.
The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, refers to the paradoxical nature of online social behaviour. On the one hand, the avatar provides you with a sense of anonymity. On the other hand, a close look at the characteristics of your avatar can reveal a part of your intimacy and the secret desires you might have. The best paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience.
Be a puppeteer from 26 January 2007 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 20.00 till 23.00 via the Mediamatic Internet site.
Btw, Mediamatic has a few interesting workshops coming up soon: Radio–to-Go, on February 14 and 15; Machinima, on February 27-March 02; Arduino Unplugged, March 12-14.
Via trendbeheer.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 12, 2007, 9:39AM
