It’s hard to look back at 2009 and ignore the rather sudden blooming of augmented reality. What was it that made AR suddenly so popular? The rise of ‘mobile’ apps helped. But was that all there was to it? I don’t think so. … »

Nathan Shedroff is a leading author in experience design and the increasing value of design. His book subjects have included experience design (the 2001 experience-in-itself-book Experience Design 1), design thinking  (Making Meaning, 2006) and sustainable design (Design is the Problem, 2009). He is currently the head of the Design MBA Strategy at the California Institute of Arts (CCA).

Shedroff spoke to me about the difference between businesspeople and designers, his upcoming foray into sci-fi, and what designers wanting to get involved in sustainability can do.

… »

If interaction design really is the business of behaviour change I believe this must apply two ways. While it’s true that design can influence users and engender cultural change, this is always a product of our more tangible work: changing the behaviour of technology. As a user-centred designer of technology my goal is simple: to make its behaviour humane. But how should I approach this? … »

In our last article on Johnny Holland we talked about the ‘interpret’ stage of the Social Life of Visualization. This was where a visualization can be tweaked so that the meaning of the data can be seen in a different way and annotated on so that the individual insights that users create can be displayed. The final stage in the shared storytelling process that will be explored in this article is where the tweaking and annotations made to the visualization are captured so the insights can be communicated to others in the community.

… »

All social media involve a dislocation that de couples the act of communication or interaction from its artifact, which is a text or recording. This is a shame, in some respects, but one that creates possibilities that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the medium. The medium allows us to be always here and now but visible elsewhere anytime. It has a built in “anyplace, anytime.” … »

No single user is “special” – or maybe all users are? Either way you look at it, we as interaction designers will encounter contexts of use or knowledge domains out of the ordinary at some point or other during our career. In my experience, designers need not apply magic tools when designing for special situations. It is however beneficial to bear in mind some core differences between specialized use contexts and the mainstream use of a mass consumer product such as a social networking site or a mobile phone. And that’s what I want to focus on in this article. … »

In our previous article on Johnny we outlined the second stage of The Social Life of Visualization, which was the capture stage. If you missed reading it, it dealt with creating an interface that allowed a user to upload a piece of data, create a visualization that expressed an idea about the underlying dataset, and provide the visualization with an identity so that it can exist within an object-centred social network. This allows other people to join in discussions around it. In this article we outline the philosophies and design implications of the interpretation phases such as the notion of sensemaking. We also outline how people can use a data visualization as an interface to explore and make realizations about their data using interactive techniques like sliders and annotations as they go.

… »

One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It’s a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do. … »

I started wondering last evening what twitter would be like if in addition to followers we could also see who was actually being paid attention to. The groups many of us use in clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic, for example. So in the midst all of our positive talk of transparency and authenticity, I found myself chuckling at the opacity we in fact rely on to make it through the day. … »

In our last article on Johnny Holland we provided an overview of what a ’social life of a visualization’ might look like. Based on a person-centered social network, it showed how the identity of the visualization was important, and how having this allowed the underlying data to retain its integrity and facilitated the process of people interacting around it. Its implementation created a shared storytelling experience around visualization, and we broke this up into three phases; create, interpret and capture.  In this second article, we’ll delve more deeply into the creation phase of the ’social life of visualization’; including its rationale and the design challenges that it represents.

… »