A Golden Rule for Interactions and Life
Most of us have experienced a relationship in which the other person constantly assails you with their problems, yet when the tables are turned, their response …
147 Posts
Interactivity
On Users, Customers, Interactors, Participants and Roles
Jack Dorsey’s post about reconsidering the word users and preferring the word customers has been doing the rounds of various popular tech blogs. John …
Understanding Interactivity Through Play
Some months ago I officially became Dr. Polaine (Andy Polaine, PhD. for you Americans) and have been planning to write a series of posts about the main themes …
Teaching, Learning and Mazes
The COTEN project is gaining momentum and there are some excellent discussions going on. A lot of the conversation is about different teaching and institutional …
Flap to Freedom
Flap to Freedom from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo. Battery hens flap to help battery hens in the Flap to Freedom installation that Chris O’Shea and …
Interactive Dangerous Australians
Let’s face it, all Australians are dangerous on the sports field, but the the Australian Museum has a new interactive installation called Dangerous …
Multitouch with a cardboard box
Whilst we’re on the multitouch subject (is it multi-touch or multitouch yet?), here’s a short vid from Seth Sandler showing you how to make your …
3M Interface - Reverse Multitouch
My brother, Matt, just e-mailed a link to this interface on the 3M website. Given the multitouch hype at the moment, it’s quite a clever little riff on …
Core77 Broadcast interview with Troika
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sebastien and Eva from Troika, the studio behind the Cloud and All The Time In The World installations at new …
Playful Revolutions Presentation
After my Flash on the Beach talk last year I promised to put the recordings online of my talk and the others that I had listened to. I completely didn’t …
I Want You To Want Me by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who created one of my all time favourite interactive pieces, We Feel Fine, have a new piece called I Want You To Want Me …
Podcast interview with Jason Bruges
My latest Core77 Broadcast interview with Jason Bruges from Jason Bruges Studio is now online. In a slightly echoing room in Jason’s studio, accompanied …
Programming for children
Following on from my post and Nigel’s comments about Clicktoy, I just found Scratch, which is a simple multimedia authoring environment for children. It …
Maze Frenzy
Some little games, like Line Rider are simple and instantly addictive. Quite a few of my students have tried to build something like Maze Frenzy in the past, …
ClickToy - A game for two year-olds
Image: ClickToy Interactive Inc. Old skool interaction designers will remember Grandma and Me and the rest of Broderbund’s Living Books series. Those …
Jackson Pollock Interactive
Once again proving that the simple interactives are often the most engaging and playful, this Jackson Pollockpiece by Miltos Manetas and Stamen has apparently …
Game Controller Family Tree
From the old, beloved Atari 2600 joystick to the Wiimote, how did we get from there to here? The “Sock Master’s” family tree of controllers …
Website Navigation Via Camera Tracking
The website of Publicis & Hal Riney uses camera-tracking in Flash for the navigation - the first website to use it as far as I know. Although described by a …
37signals versus Don Norman
If there was ever a clear example of the generation gap between those who have been steeped in digital culture from the start and those who have had to adopt it …
iPlay - interactivity without the flab
Chris just posted an interesting find called the iPlay. It’s basically an interactive playground frame game, which means that children have to run around …
Troika is on Cloud, er, Five
If you haven’t already explored the background behind Troika’s cloud for BA’s Terminal 5 - “a five meter long digital sculpture whose …
Wii remote for a head tracking display
Here’s an interesting video of inverting the Wiimote and infrared sensors to create a surprisingly realistic optical illusion for a single user. A lot of …
20,000 Processing Particles
I’ve played with Processing a fair bit over the years, but never really got stuck into anything solid - most of my time has been spent fixing up my …
The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris
Whatever your opinion on commercial whaling, substance whaling is a totally different affair. It’s been part of aboriginal Eskimo life for thousands of …
Benettonplay's Video Grid
Proving that the oldies are indeed the goldies, the Fabrica have re-made their video grid idea in Flash for your online interactive enjoyment. Amazing how …
Poke's Never-Ending Web Page for Orange
I meant to post this last week but was travelling and forgot. Take a look at the never-ending web page that Poke designed for the Orange Unlimited campaign …
Games, Play and Web Applications
[Dan Saffer’s](http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/new_archives/2007/10/presentation_ga.html] latest presentation called Gaming The Web: Using the structures of …
New magneticNorth website
Check out magneticNorth’s new website. As Brendan (mN’s Creative Director) says “Look beyond the site you see and you may discover …
IKEA Dream Kitchen
The multi-camera technique that freezes a moment in time, but allows you to pan around in space (popularised as bullet time in The Matrix, but it has quite a …
Interactive Gestures Wiki
Multitouch screens of all shapes and forms are really all the rage, but with them come whole new paradigms of interaction. Do you wave like a Wii or do the …
Podcast with Matt Clark from United Visual Artists
Following on from my last post about Hereafter, my podcast interview with Matt Clark from United Visual Artists is now online at Core77. We chat about a range …
Hereafter by United Visual Artists
United Visual Artists have a lovely new piece called Hereafter, which is very similar to elements of my Time Sketches in that it layers frames from a video …
This Happened, Once Again
As Knotty pointed out in the comments, Chris O’ Shea will be hosting This Happened in conversation with Crispin Jones, Rory Hamilton, The Science Of, …
Out of Bounds interview with Chris O' Shea
Chris O’ Shea recently completed Out of Bounds during his residency at the Design Museum. Chris also writes the very good Pixelsumo from which I …
Interactive Wall of 'Water'
Camera-tracking along with multi-touch seem to be unstoppable at the moment. This is an interactive wall of ‘water’ for Lenovo’s HQ in North …
Dan Saffer on Design Research Lies
Brilliant clip of Dan Saffer doing the start of his How To Lie With Design Research talk at the 2007 Design Research conference. If you’ve ever been to …
Light on Pixelsumo
Nice set of posts on playful, interactive household lights from Chris over at Pixelsumo. I’m particularly partial to Hector Srrano’s Superpatata …
Interactive Banner Ad from Adobe
I interacted with a banner ad today, and actually enjoyed it. Adobe’s Creative License campaign is currently on display at Coudal Partners’ Layer …
Touchscreen implications for mobile gaming
Interesting piece by Stuart Dredge on the implications that touchscreens (read: iPhone) interfaces have for mobile gaming over at Pocketgamer. Of course there …
Speaking at Flash on the Beach
I’m very pleased to have been invited to speak at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. FOTB runs from 4th- - 7th November and my session is on the last day. I …
Two-Way Tangible Interface: PICO
[](hysical Intervention in Computational Optimization) PICO (Physical Intervention in Computational Optimization) by James Patten is a tangible interface that …
A balanced view of Second Life
I promised I would stop ranting about Second Life and I will. Putting People First (the experientia blog) have a balanced post called Second Thoughts on Second …
Data Visualisation Approaches
There’s a great post on Data Visualization: Modern Approaches over at Smashing Magazine. Some of them are pretty well-known, like Newsmap and (one of my …
StumbleUpon is the Antirom of the Web
Or - In Praise of Randomness Whilst thinking about writing a post in praise of randomness in interaction design, I realised that StumbleUpon is, in many ways, …
Director Lives Again for Retro Games
Like all of us at Antirom, Macromedia’s Director was a revolution because it allowed a bunch of non-coders to make interactive ‘stuff’. The …
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design Opens
A year or so ago I heard about plans to set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and I’m really happy to see that they are now ready …
Where to now with multitouch?
I’ve been doing a bit of catching up with my blog reading recently and noticed Chris’s post on Pixelsumo about the HP giant Multi-Touch screen with …
Bad Remote
I saw this at Ray and Rachel’s house the other day. They had stuck the stickers on for Ray’s dad, but the point is that the interface should have …
Pixel popping on the phone
I just had an update from Karl Willis about a project called Twelve Pixels that he has been working on with Dr. Ivan Poupyrev at Sony’s CSL Interaction …
The playfulness of everyday things
As if they had been the perfect students of my Interactivity, Play and the Everyday project at the Bauhaus, art/design cooperative, BCXY have been working on a …
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer talk at the Tate Modern
One of my all-time interactive installation heroes, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, is giving an artist’s talk at the Tate Modern tomorrow. He is representing …
Leopard - death of the application?
I assume that most people interested in Apple, operating systems or UI design have seen Steve Jobs’s WWDC07 Keynote by now. He shows off lots of new …
Another Antirom RGB performance
I was clearing out some old CDs and found a Videobrasil XII one with this Antirom RGB performace on it. I think Gisela may have shot the footage as there are …
Photosynth
Nice to see Microsoft doing something truly groundbreaking, or at least acquiring something truly groundbreaking. The above demo of Photosynth and Seadragon by …
More Surface Information
Chris over at Pixelsumo just mailed me some more links to do with the background and technology behind the Microsoft Surface table. One is from Ars Technica and …
Microsoft Surface
I strangely don’t have a lot to say about the already well-blogged offer from Microsoft, Microsoft Surface. It’s obviously pretty and nice and …
Multitouch City Wall
The CityWall is a new work by the Ubiquitous Interaction (Uix) research group in Helsinki as part of the IPCity project. It gathers tagged images and video from …
Avant-Garde Tube
Nice post from Dan Hill over at City of Sound about finding a whole host of avant-garde films on YouTube, particularly Len Lye’s film, Free Radicals (see …
Draw on Walls, with Light
A while ago Chris O’ Shea wrote about the Philips Simplicity Project, which had a number of mainly light-based inventions, several of them interactive. …
John Maeda exhibition
I wish I was in London for it, but I’m not. John Maeda has an exhibition called Maeda; MySpace at the Riflemaker Gallery starting today. Maeda and Toshio …
Polar Clock
Clocks and calendars seem to permanently popular as interaction/Flash design subjects. John Maeda arguably started the trend, then Yugo did a few. This one from …
Type it in. Hear it sung.
Read the graphic for Let them sing it for you below: I wish I had the patience to cut all those song snippets up.
Human Computer interaction in Sci-Fi
I added the link to Michael Schmitz’s Human Computer interaction in Science Fiction Movies to my del.icio.us account a while ago when one of my students …
Reactable cacophony
Evidently Reactable has been around for a couple of years, but I hadn’t heard about it until one of my ex-students, Gabi, sent me the link. Undoubtedly …
Touchscreen Magic Mirror
The Big Space have added an ultrasonic system from Sensitive Object to their Magic Mirror to enable it to also be a touchscreen. Nice to see that collection of …
Cabaret Mechanical Theatre
I’m super happy to see Chris O’Shea’s post about his visit to the Kinetica Museum to see the retrospective exhibition of the Cabaret …
Big Switches and Panels
If you’re into interaction design you should already know of Dan Saffer, interaction designer at Adaptive Path and author of Designing for Interaction. …
Jonathan Harris Coolhunting Video
Following up on my recent post about Jonathan Harris’s new work, Universe, Mike alerted me to this video interview with Jon on Coolhunting. It’s …
Google Map anomolies and Twitter
Two posts in one, what a bargain. Karl sent me a link to Craig’s Flip Flop Flying blog because of his post about Google Maps anomalies. Basically as …
Reveal your Hidden Life
We all have inner thoughts, secrets and dreams that we fail to manifest and carry around with us like shiny gems hidden in our pockets. After a while they weigh …
Master of the Universe
I’ve written a few times about the work of Jonathan Harris and We Feel Fine remains one of my favourite combinations of data visualisation combined with a …
Gerwiiatrics
Following on from those thoughts about the Nintendo Wii, I noticed an Engadget re-blog of a Chicago Tribune story about folks in a retirement home getting into …
Periodic Table Table
Theodore Gray now has a whole range of the most beautiful Periodic Table posters for sale. Gray is well known for his wooden Periodic Table, erm, table. But …
Poke Wins With Cock
Thought that title might get your attention. Congratulations to Poke for their Digital Design - Commercial win at the Design Week Awards 2007 with …
Magic Mirror
The Big Space have created a Magic Mirror for retail environments. It utilises RFID tags and a rear projection onto a mirror (and, of course, magic) to blend …
Interview with United Visual Artists
I wrote a little while back about UVA and onepointsix’s installation at the V&A; called Volume and it generated some discussion about the work. I …
Muscle Memory and the Wii
What with all the cool things people are doing with Wiimotes I nearly bought a Wii yesterday, but wasn’t terribly convinced by the games. This post from …
Djing with the Wii
There’s been a whole lot going on about the Wiimote as an interface to pretty much everything. It’s very flexible, relatively cheap and easy to use …
New Arduino Goodies
Following on from my previous post about the new Bluetooth Arduino boards. Chris O’Shea has already got his and has posted some first impressions. Picture …
Desire of Codes
Apart from David Rokeby’s talk and Stelarc and a couple of other things at Transmediale 07, I spent an entertaining afternoon checking out the open …
Notes from Transmediale 07
In general the main exhibition of Transmediale 07 left me pretty unimpressed. But that may be due to my general cynicism (or arrogance - I prefer cynicism) - …
Bubble Sequencer
Adding to the ever-growing list of things that my ex-students now do much better than I, Karl D. D. Willis is working on a playful new project called Bubble …
Multiperson multi-touch interface
A while ago I wrote about Jeff Han’s multi-touch interface and of course it got a lot of attention off the back of the iphone’s similar interface. …
Everything is a Toy with RFID tags
I’ve already posted some thoughts about this project by Yuichiro Katsumoto on the Bauhaus blog so I won’t repeat here save to say that I like this …
Regine comes to the Bauhaus
I’m delighted that the very brilliant and extremely well-connected Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art.com is giving a talk at the Bauhaus on …
Apple iPhone
I’m going to join what will be an enormous club and blog about Apple’s iPhone. I nearly didn’t, just to not follow the crowd, but given my …
Light Tracer wins Tokyo TDC Award
I’m a bit late with this announcement due to the holidays, but I’m very happy to see that an ex-student of mine, Karl D. D. Willis won the …
UVA's Volume on YouTube
I wrote a little while back about UnitedVisualArtists’ new work, Volume, that is being shown at the V&A; at the moment. Joel from UVA sent me a mail …
UVA's Volume at the V&A
A bit of cross-posting from my Bauhaus blog here, but worth it. Chris O’Shea over at Pixelsumo has written up a good description of a new work, Volume, by …
Analogue In, Digital Out
I just read Brendan Dawes’s new book, Analogue In, Digital Out, in one day. A day when I was teaching all day too. I even stayed up late to finish it. …
Googlemap of Design Books
Markus Dressen has laid out a selection of his favourite books and created a Googlemap of them. Most of them are design and art books and provide an interesting …
Funtain - bad name, nice idea
I hate the name, but Funtain is a nice idea. It plays with water and sound and plugs into those strong childhood memories of playing with water. Thanks to Karl …
Antirom Performance
I love YouTube, it really is becoming the archive of the world. Here’s a bit of the RGB performance Nic Roope, Joe Stephenson and I did when we were at …
Pixelsumo links
Rather than cross-posting from my Bauhaus blog, I just want to point you in the direction of a post with some very good links on interactivity, environments and …
The Black Box Interface
As most of us know, phones don’t make brilliant music players or games machines. Sure, they can do that stuff, but the 0 to 9 buttons, tiny screen and …
Playful Interactivity
I have just read great paper called Adding Playful Interaction to Public Spaces by Amnon Dekel et al. from The Hebrew University Jerusalem and The Bezalel …
The Changing Nature of Play
I just stumbled upon Matt Locke’s post about play and technology, which is very much worth a read if you are interested in the intersection of play, …
Line Rider
Line Rider is possibly one of the coolest toys I have come across for some time since SodaConstructor or some of Fabrica’s toys. It’s a really great …
An Interface Too Far
I was interested to see this video on YouTube for the BumpTop interface that mimics a ‘real’ desktop. Interested but disappointed. The whole idea of …
Starting as Gastprofessor at the Bauhaus
I’m off to Weimar tomorrow to start a six-month stint as Guest Professor “Gestaltung medialer Umgebungen” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in …
Google and UNEP Map Environmental Change
Google and the United Nations Environmental Programme last week launched an addition to Google Earth called the Atlas of Our Changing Environment, which allows …
Be A Good Friend
What a joy to discover Steven Blyth’s My Social Fabric project (thanks to Mike Coulter at Digital Agency). Essentially the My Social Fabric project gives …
Insights into Jonathan Ive
Businessweek have a great selection of in-depth articles about Apple’s Senior Vice-President for Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive and they give a real …
Benettonplay Toybox
Whilst we are talking about all things Fabrica, go and play in the Benettonplay Toybox - lot’s of amusing little interactive pieces to prove the point …
Interview with Andy Cameron
The ever-brilliant and plugged-in Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art.com recently interviewed my previous lecturer and co-Antirommer, Andy Cameron, now …
Timescope
] ART+COM have just launched a project called Timescope, which is allows you to visually travel through time using a telescope like the ones commonly mounted on …
Interactive Tedium from ISEA
I didn’t get to go to ISEA this year (not that I’ve been for ages) and I actually pretty pleased I didn’t. I really wanted to like the stuff I …
10 Years of Flash
Is it ten years already? I really am getting old. I remember the days when Flash was a really awkward little ‘Director pretender’ animation package …
Google Flight Sim
Okay, so once again I’m so far behind the curve on this one I’ve wrapped around and am in front again (I reckon). Mark Caswell-Daniels’ …
Location Aware Ads on London Buses
I’m a bit late catching up with this one (I have been working… remember that?), but I just noticed this post in Ad Age about Yell.com’s plans …
Interactive Architecture
The Graffiti Research Lab (the folks behind the LED Throwies) have just launched another project called Interactive Architecture. Basically it involves leeching …
Invitation to play at the Game / Play exhibition
I recently wrote a catalogue essay called The Invitation to Play (thanks to Mark Pesce for that phrase) for the Game/Play networked exhibition displayed …
Home Entertainment
colette_window.jpg The folks over at Fabrica have created a new interaction installation called Home Entertainment for the windows of “style, design, art, …
Time Sketches (2006)
Time Smear in action Time Smear and Time Slicer form part of a series of live video works called Time Sketches that experiment with interactivity and the …
Necessary Procrastination
Interaction guru, John Maeda suggests that procrastination might be useful after all (hey, I bet that’s what you’re doing right now right? Reading …
Get Smart with your metering
Quick post about the BBC’s story on Smart Meters - the meters, designed by More Associates show you exactly where all your energy is going. The theory …
Khronos Projector - turning back time
I’m having a depressing time for “things I wish I had made” right now. Karl just sent me the link to the Khronos Projector, which is a …
Taking the emotional temperature of the world
I feel very jealous, but also excited. Every so often, okay very often, someone makes a piece of interactive work that I really, really wish I had created. More …
Retrievr
Check out Retrievr - it allows you to search the Flickr image archive by drawing a sketch (or uploading another picture) instead of by tags. A kind of visual …
My 'Time Sketches' on display at the Powerhouse Museum
I’m very pleased to announce that two of my interactive works are currently on display at the Powerhouse Museum thanks to the wonderful people over at the …
Flagr - tagging all over the world
It had to happen: Flagr is a combination of Google Maps, Flickr and Delicious wrapped up in a nice AJAX interface. Basically it allows you to …
Cock-A-Doodle new from Poke
Check out the excellent and hilarious new offering from my pals at Poke called Cock-A-Doodle. Great to see Flash becoming less vector-shash and great to see …
More multi-touch interfaces
Chris O’ Shea over at Pixelsumo just mailed me with a great round-up of other multi-touch interfaces for those of you interested. (His blog makes good …
Beyond the single jab - the multi-touch interface
Robert just sent me a YouTube link to Jeff Han’s amazing Multi-Touch interface. It allows multiple points of contact, which means you can do things like …
Placeopedia - linking Wikipedia with Google Earth
No idea why I didn’t blog about this a while ago, but I just pulled Placeopedia’s feed into Google Earth. Placeopedia links Wikipedia articles with …
Less Work, More Play - presentation at Neue-Digitale
I’ve just had a very enjoyable afternoon at Neue-Digitale in Frankfurt interviewing co-founder, Olaf Czeschner, for Desktop but also giving a presentation …
Ninja-Man hits the one million mark
Three of my ex-students, Adam Searle, Johnny Jei Le, and Jason Chow spent the last year re-building a Flash platform game called Ninja-Man that they originally …
Time Smear Demo
Along with the Flow paper I just posted I also showed a demo of my Time Smear piece, which uses a slitscan method that is rather popular in interactive circle …
The Flow Principle in Interactivity
The Proceedings of the second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment 2005, Sydney, Australia November 23 - 25, 2005 have been released online. The …
COFA Annual (2005)
Role: Interactive Director/Producer The Annual CD-ROM for the College of Fine Arts is always a significant logistical and creative undertaking. With almost 400 …
COFA Annual (2004)
Interaction Direction and Producer for the Annual CD-ROM of over 320 collected student works for the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. This interface worked on …
Fin Design Website (2004)
Creative/Interactive Director and Producer for HTML and Flash website for Sydney post-production company, Fin Design. Created in collaboration with Gestalt …
Biennale of Sydney (2004)
Interactive and Art Direction of a prototype CD-ROM for the Biennale of Sydney, 2004 in collaboration with my students. The project was unfortunately dropped do …
zspace Website (2002)
Flash website and content management system for Sydney-based visual effects company zspace (N.B. the current site is a new version). Created in collaboration …
Dreamlight Imaging Website (2002 - 2003)
Flash website and back-end content administration tool for Sydney digital-to-film recording company, Dreamlight Imaging. The brief was to create a site that had …
ABC FlyNet (2001)
Complete site design for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s youth portal, FlyNet (now in archive). Also included the development of Flash E-cards …
Animal Logic Portfolio & DVD (2000)
Interactive portfolio and DVD for visual effects company Animal Logic where I was Interactive Director from 2000-2001.
Dark Mixer (2000)
An experimental sound and vision mixer created in collaboration with Steven Scott and Kazumichi Grime. A version of this work was also used on Alex …
Juxta (2000)
A random text and image generator, originally created for Alex Proyas’s Mystery Clock Cinema website. It plays on our abilities and desire to create …
NatWest Bank website (1999)
Interactive Director / Creative Producer for NatWest bank website re-design, whilst at Razorfish, UK. Apart from the enormous task of re-arranging the …
Levi Strauss & Co. Interactive Shop Window (1998)
One of several iterations of in-store projects for Levis Strauss & Co. Ltd. This shop window used sensors on the inside of the glass that allowed passers-by …
Easi-Breathe Interactive Exhibit (1998)
An interactive exhibit for Norton Healthcare housed at the Science Museum, London. The exhibit used capacitive sensors that work through glass and explored the …
RGB Performance (1996-1999)
A performance of interactive sound and vision toys with Antirom members, Nicolas Roope and Joe Stephenson. Using two to three computers, vision and audio mixers …
Levi Strauss & Co. Choose Fun CD-ROM (1997)
Interactive CD-ROM developed as part of a marketing project for Levi Strauss and Co. Ltd. The CD-ROM was essentially a sponsored artwork as it was entirely …
Levi Strauss & Co. Kiosk (1995-1999)
Several iterations of an in-store kiosk for Levi Strauss and Co. Ltd were created over a period of four years. Each season (twice a year) a new set of …
JAM exhibition (1996)
Nine screen video wall installation for the JAM Exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London. JAM was billed as a “walk-in magazine” and featured …
Antirom CD-ROM (1994)
Where it all started. The Antirom CD-ROM, from which the Antirom, the collective, took its name, contained a multitude of interactive experiments intended to …