A small summary of my Twitter messages from October - December 2010:
The book Designing Interaction from Bill Moggridge was already published in 2006. Even it is quite old for a technology book the content is still valid. The first six chapters give a perfect history background of human-computer interaction. The evolution of input devices and the computer itself is very good explained. Also the original comments from the designers and engineers are very interesting to read. In the end the reader gets a very good introduction how and why the computer evolved as it is today. Even the described history is a strongly based on the authors view. The chapters Adopting Technology and Multisensory and Multimedia gives a nice introduction into tangible interaction. It also helps beginners to understand how to leave the desktop metaphor. The whole book describes very easily how product designer, industrial designer, psychologist and engineers working together for developing the new devices. The texts about their development and thinking processes gives a very good insight. The last chapters about The Internet, Futures and Alternatives Nows, and People and Prototypes are nice to read, but with some comments I can't agree. For this reason, the aspects of Emotional Design and Prototyping are little bit weak in my opinion. However, reading the first six chapters is very useful for human-computer interaction beginners. It makes their knowledge around the history of Interaction Design more stable. The last chapters are nice to read, but not very obligatory. Unfortunately, the multimedia CD of the book I never really checked. So I can't say if it is good or not. For professional interaction designer is almost nothing new in this book, so I can't recommend it for them.
Now I am almost studying Interactive Art for one year. Me, as a Flash and Flex Developer, like coding with audio-visual and interaction-based content. But if I am honest, in the last time I did not use Flash in my projects at all. I had to deal with some other powerful creative coding tools. Some of these tools provide me, as an artist, much more freedom than the Flash plattform can ever provide. For example, creating a visual output for multi-displays applications, programming on hardware (arduino), some real-time video tracking (face detection) experiments, using special Open-GL Renderer for 3D graphics and so on. But I also ran into problems, which I would never have with using Flash. Especially, when I worked together with unexperienced programmer. For this reason, I will describe some of these creative coding tools with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. After this article you should have a good overview about the available tools in creative coding.
Creative Coding Tools Overview
During my master studies at the Interface Culture department of the University in Linz I visited the great lecture SENSEWARE - How to Create the Experience's Architecture by Hide Ogawa. In this lecture we learnt and discussed how we can integrate and reproduce emotions + experiences in our technical-based environment. Furthermore, we discussed the roles of the different interactive design disciplines - e.g. Product Designer, Industrial Designer, Interaction Designer, Visual Designer, Experience Designer etc. - and how they work together in the domain of SenseWare products.
During the first semester of my study Interface Culture at the University of Art in Linz I had to write some papers about interactive art. My first papers dealt with the history of interactive art and continued with some different art movements in this domain. In some cases I am more or less satisfied with my papers. Anyway, I think every 2page long paper contains some interesting points for Interaction Designer, Web Designer, Web Developer, Web Artists, Computer Scientists etc.. That is the reason why I want to share my written work with you.
Please consider that all my papers here were an assignment for the master classes of Interactive Art by Christa Sommerer. My papers don't meet the requirements of a scientific work despite the fact that the format seems to be scientific. All my texts represent partly more my own thoughts on the different art topics, so please interpret my papers as a short essay or summary. My thoughts are mainly based on the first and second references, which are mentioned at the end of each paper. I highly recommend to read these references, because they are a very good collection for delivering an introduction in the domain of interactive art. Thanks Christa for this great collection of references and the introduction!
For every project you should check your skills before you start. It helps a lot for preventing possible problems and makes the life easier. Thus I highly recommend to do a self-assessment before your start as a Flash Independent Developer. After this self-assessment you should have a very clear picture about your abilities, skills and of course your weaknesses. It is very important that you know your weaknesses because you can outsource some of this problems to your network buddies. An independent team-oriented working approach works in this case very well, because it replaces your weakness with a strength of another person. It works like the Captain Planet or the A-Team metaphor 😉
Skills-Mindmap Flash Independent Developer
Die letzte Runde im Projekt Masterstudium ist erreicht. Alle Bewerbungsbedingungen und Aufnahmeprüfungen habe ich mehr oder weniger erfolgreich absolviert, und die Ergebnisse sind nun auch schon alle eingetroffen. Erste Wahl war eigentlich die FH Potsdam, danach das HPI in Potsdam. Das lag zu einem an deren beidem guten Hochschul Ruf und an der sehr facettenreichen Stadt Berlin zum Wohnen. Leider fand ich die Aufnahmeprüfung an der FH Potsdam nicht so cool, und die ganze Kommunikation rund um die Bewerbung war mir nicht wirklich sympathisch. Daher ist es vielleicht sogar gut, dass ich von der FH Potsdam eine Absage bekommen habe und auch vom HPI... Mit diesen Absagen war Berlin für mich erledigt, und es blieb mir noch die Kunstuni in Linz und die Uni Konstanz übrig. Da fiel mir die Entscheidung am Ende nicht mehr so schwer. Da ich über mehrere Wochen hinweg ein gutes Bauchgefühl von der Kunstuni in Linz hatte.
Hier eine kleine geordnete Zusammenfassung meiner wichtigsten Twittermeldungen: