Domus Academy, Milan, is offering partial, but substantial, scholarships for their Interation Design Master Course to “Technotalents”.

Having been myself one of their students years ago, I highly recommend it (I wish I had this opportunity!).

More info here.

Good luck!

Our mobiles screens are getting everyday bigger and brighter, my Treo, for instance, is capable of transforming itself in a light in not daylight contexts. This made me think of many ideas around the context of using the mobile display as a short range communication tool. Quite interesting the fact that it is meant to be for very long range interactions.
There are also situations in public where speaking becomes odd and also shyness can be an obstacle. If we consider that nowadays our environment is getting crowded of flat screen / projectors, why not to use our own?

In this first implementation the user can use the display to show text messages he writes, not sms. The size of the text of course depends on the display size. The user can then change the text speed if necessary. As you can see it’s a pretty banal application, but it could be a good start to investigate on the usages we could do of those big displays.

Following two demo videos, unfortunately not a proper scenario, I’ll leave it to your imagination (someone trying to approach a gril in a club, for instance, or suggesting something private to a friend in public spaces).

Due for technical limitations of the platform I developed the first prototype, many of my ideas are not yet implemented, but hopefully I’ll be able to do it soon or later (if anyone is interested on helping me, it will be of course welcome).

At the moment it has been developed a PalmOS version, thanks to the fundamental work from Jagat N. Mahapatra, and a FlashLite 2.x version, that I did by myself. At the moment I’m considering the eventuality of developing a J2ME version (that would make it much more accessible).

Any feedback is welcome.

While I’m finally reading Raskin‘s master piece “The Humane Interface”, I came across an inspiring article. Like many of the people working on IT I’m always involved in duscussions that compare Mac versus Windows, or Apple versus Microsoft.

Being in the past mainly a Flash Developer I had to switch from Mac to PC many years ago because the big differences in the performances with that technology. In these years I enjoyed very good performances and the possibility to easily develop with different and new technologies (like J2ME, Palm OS and Flash itself) that otherwise would have been almost impossible. I left the mac soon after Mac OS X was released. I kept an eye on it from far, of course, appreciating the introduction of features like Expose and Spotlight. When few months ago though, I had to use a new I-Mac G5 to do some video editing in the office I was very disappointed from the slow responsiveness of its GUI due mainly by the fancy visual effects. Working on interactive media I reckon I’m quite sensible to these differences and those fancy effects seemed to me more annoying than inspiring. Are they that necessary?

More recently due to the growing pressure Microsoft is doing to partners about the usage of WPF, we had to do some tests in the office with Windows Vista. Probably feeling so backward comparing to Apple, Microsoft tried to animate everything to make it look cooler. Animations are cool – who could argue with that? – but as soon they get cranky and repetitive they became unavoidably A PAIN. We tried Vista on a brand new Dell with 512 MB video card, unfortunately not very good with the 3D (Nvidia Quadro NVS), and the performances were so bad that if the computer was mine I would have removed ALL the effects straight away, my masochist colleague instead is still using them. A better analysis has been done by John C. Welch and is the article I was mentioned before. Despite I’m still convinced about the slowness in OS X GUI, I like his comparison between the two systems using the example of Evolution versus Revolution. It’s clear that Microsoft wanted to do something new, unfortunately not necessarely better. Of course when we design the update of a product we have to keep in consideration the knowledge people have about its older versions, so starting from scratch is clearly never the way to go.

I wouldn’t post an obvious thing like this if yesterday Apple didn’t try to “revolutionate” the phone. Apple, in facts, tried to reinvent the phone using a fullscreen multi-touch display. I don’t want to go into the market issues, we know that cell phones’ success depends a lot from the providers and iPhone could have easily issues regarding that. It’s also nice sometimes being able to reply to the phone without having to look a screen maybe just feeling the buttons. There is no doubt that this jewel will make people talk a lot about and that many fans will do all possible to put hands on in. My concerns are about the fact that despite Apple definitely tried to make users lives easier, I noticed too much the attitude on revolutionate instead of evolving. It seems they tried to add the most wow factors features, like its scrolling and zoom with the multitouch screen, without necessary consider the usability issues. The inertia when scrolling is cool but I’m wondering if it would be faster to scroll it with a kind of scrollbar (only a swipe from top to down to scroll the whole list) or maybe studing the usage of more fingers for that interaction, and others, to speed up the task. Scrolling images seems even weaker in my opinion, wouldn’t be quicker and less effort demanding, for instance, the pressure of a stupid button? Of course much less cool but I wouldn’t scroll 100 images in its way and I’m sure there could have been a cooler and more usable solution to scroll elements, at the end the I-Pod’s wheel strongest point was probably that (they could have done a virtual wheel also, like some patents they registered showed). Of course they should have done their internal tests, but I still have big concerns about the productivity of those interaction solutions.

Revolutions unfortunately don’t bring always to evolution and if they do it they don’t do it smoothly, creating useless issues that with a proper evolution we wouldn’t face.

Widgets, in terms of concept, are getting quite popular. Not only because of the interest from Yahoo! when they bought Konfabulator more than a year ago, or their embedding in MacOS X and in the next Windows Vista, but now also Adobe with Apollo is “pushing” into that direction. A strength of a widget is that it can stay in the background providing subtle information, or something we should keep in mind, being this content visible every now and then (when we hide or close all the opened applications, for instance).

How does the happiness fit in? Recently, thanks to a couple of lectures I’ve seen on TEDTalks, I started thinking again about what makes us happy – who doesn’t? Basically happiness is a status that can happen in very different contexts and it’s not a result of an entire analysis of what happened so far, but it can be triggered, also if temporary, just by a positive thought. Doing a whole analysis about what happened to us we will always be able to find reasons to be happy and reasons not to be so. The first trick so it’s simply to think about the good things.

During a small research on the topic I found the reasons why people are happy very inspiring. Not only because sometimes you can think “hey, how can be this guy happy only because of that?”, and this can trigger a kind of self-consciousness that we should be happy also with smaller things. But what could be very helpful is to get some suggestions from there. For instance, if a person is happy because he helped a friend in troubles, if we are not happy, why don’t we try to help a friend? Happiness doesn’t always fall from the sky, sometimes you have to earn it.

So after these technological and social inputs I ended up developing a Yahoo! Widget (formerly Konfabulator), the Widget of Happiness.

As you can read I use the term “lucky” instead of “happy”, this is because the user maybe is not yet happy, but it should be after having remember the reasons. Probably the right terminology should be “I should be happy because…” but it gets too much explicit and pretentious in my opinion.

It has basically three simple functions:

There are some preferences you can set:

To avoid as much as possible any misunderstanding about its usage, I put some instructions that can be accessed using the right-click button menu.

Since a common aim for artists is to make people happy, if this simple widget will success on that, am I risking someone will start defining me like that?

As someone may know I always liked to talk about interactive design projects, I did it in different web magazines so taking advantage of my new html based blog I was definitely going on doing it here. But then I thought that maybe it was better to keep my personal stuff separated and also that someone could be interested in joining me writing some small stuff. By the way, here you can find the new tiny blog I just launched and will follow a small description grabbed from the first post.

—– start copy —–
In the last few years there has been an increasing consideration of new topics in design that were previously ignored. Technology has brought with it new potentialities but also new issues and new challenges. The experience of the user while reading and browsing digital information is of key consideration. It is vital that the user understands the data in the easiest, maybe most intuitive, way possible. Considering that almost every data can now be digitalised – even our DNA – the way we use this information and refine it according to user interaction becomes fundamental.

Everyday designers face these new challenges when trying to explore new ways on interfacing people with themselves or with data. Given the quickening evolution of technology, the “perfect” solution doesn’t exist, or at least can’t exist for long. So there is a continuous need for thinking.

ID-Review is born with the aim of encouraging thought and discussion about the new solutions thought-up by designers. We don’t propose to come up with finite solutions ourselves, but merely examine, evaluate and anticipate potential solutions as part of a collaborative process.
—– end copy —–

I hope to see you there soon!

My friends Leandro Agrò and Matteo Penzo, with the support of important sponsors like UXnet, Idearium, and Università Milano Bicocca, are helding for the second year in a row the interesting, and FREE, seminar named “Interaction Frontiers” (in Italian: Le Frontiere dell’Interazione).This year themes will be: multimodality, emotivity, and intelligent interfaces (more info here).

If it happens that you are in Milan the 16th of June 2006, and you don’t have critical engagement, I think it would be worth a look, don’t you?

After many rumors few days ago the news has become public. IDII will close its school in Ivrea and the students will move to Milan and will remain only Domus Academy. Very good thing for my former director Claudio Moderini. I’m starting envying future students that will be so lucky to take the best from the two schools.

Probably it wouldn’t so important if the acquirent wasn’t Google. With Dodgeball acquisition the mobile social networking makes a very big step forward. Nice move from google.

One of the Human Computer Interaction’s fathers has just left two days ago at 61. Fortunately he left to us many articles and researches to keep his pioneeristic spirit alive. Rest in peace big man!

Thanks to Interaction Ivrea Design Institute the 10th of November at 06:00 p.m. at Triennale Norman will discuss about his last book “Emotional Design”. In a sort of way he will try to explain why his previous books were so limited…

Yesterday I had with my friend Matteo the lecture about the User Experience in the Interactive Media in Padova at Webbit… It was ok, unfortunately there were very few people. I wish to say thank you to everyone was there! …I hope anyway to find more people in Milan.

Here the first lecture I’ll have in Padova at Webbit 2004 on the 8th of August. The theme is “User Experience in the interactive media”. I’m waiting many of you.

After the visit to the “Salone del Mobile”, where the most interesting place to visit was the “Salone Satellite”, I went to the opening of an exhibition by IDII at Triennale of Milan. They showed different pieces some by the students and some by the teachers… well, I didn’t receive any good explaination about them so I don’t want to judge them but I had really difficult to understand their utility. I hope just the Interaction Design has not to be relegated just to artistic exhibitions.