Technology... with personality?

Anna's Transformation project on the acceptance of technology and the phenomenon of Robots has caused me to blog this article. It is written from the point of view of interaction/experience design and gives a few good examples (looking at visual anthropomorphism for example) as well as insights into how to convey emotion. Turns out Experience Designers Shedroff and Noessel back up my point about R2D2, even though a practical non-anthropomorphic robot, appeals to the human emotion through his sound.

http://johnnyholland.org/2009/12/09/does-technology-need-personality/

Digital Magazine Experiments pt 2

This project by one of the MA DDM students, Anna, is really shaping up to be interesting - and looking at the recent developments could be a more than pertinent investigation. As Paul pointed out, the fact that Apple is intending to release a handheld tablet device could breathe new life into the e-reader and digital reading experience...

A more traditional (!) attempt by Wired Magazine, recreating page-turns and adding interactivity

http://www.wired.co.uk/promotions/sampler200907.aspx

Sports Illustrated designed to be viewed and interacted with on a handheld tablet device... the real estate of the screen is really being used in a clever way, and appropriately to the functionality of Digital Media. The interaction design is reflecting the essence of magazine reading - e.g. browsing, focusing - and not just copying the physical act of page turning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntyXvLnxyXk

Hopefully, Anna will find out more in her research about our relationship with and experience of magazines....

Embodied Interaction Workshop at IDC 2009

Keeping a look out for the conference on Interaction Design for Children, which I have been wanting to attend for years. My last chance was with a paper on MEDIATE, but got beaten to it by the most prolific disseminator in the project, Narcis Pares.

However, Alissa N. Antles's works sounds intriguing and I shall look here up some more (one of the co-organisors of the Embodied Interaction Workshop. The other two are Ylva Fernaeus and Paul Marshall, who I met at the Human-Centred Technology Workshop and who does interesting work on tangible interfaces and children.). Regarding Antle, particularly the key words "embodied schemata and conceptual metaphors in interaction design for interactive environments and designing to support epistemic action in tangible user interfaces." have caught my attention.

http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/alissa_n__antle.html