Like tweets, but with grammar.
For my capstone project, I’m exploring ways to help outdoor enthusiasts maintain a connection to the outdoors when they need to be inside. Sadly, not everyone can work as a ski instructor, mountaineering guide or tree planter their whole lives. As these people make their way into the great indoors for the majority of their working lives, how can we make it a less alienating experience for them?
More sketches are available in the Capstone gallery at my Flickr account.
I spent a great deal of time this past summer turning the idea of “analog interactions” over in my head, carving and sanding and refining it through a series of essays.
It largely started in my post Analog Interactions, where I discussed my recent forays into Arduino and my increasing interest in historic, richly tactile interactions. Following that, in Scope I offered a brief summation of my obsessive excursions to the Musée Mecanique (caution, the link is LOUD) in San Francisco, studying their incredible collection of turn-of-the-century penny arcade machines.
Most recently, last week Adaptive Path published my blog post regarding my vision for the future of computing, as an embedded series of tangible, tactile interactions that reimagine the input and output devices we traditionally use to interact with computers. Off The Desktop and Into The World is thus my latest effort to describe a world of computing that naturally integrates with our rich human tradition as physical, feeling beings that exist in a physical, richly sensual world.
In pursuing my capstone project this year I’m continuing with this line of inquiry, but within a more specific context. As I move to introduce a level of academic rigor to my interest in these analog interactions, I believe Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms is going to be a key on-ramp into the conversation.
UPDATE: Holy shit. Did I read this paper in a dream or something? The parallels are uncanny. For instance:
As an example, they described two cold steel benches located in different cities. When a person sits on one of these benches, a corresponding position on the other bench warms, and a bi-directional sound channel is opened. At the other location, after feeling the bench for “body heat,” another person can decide to make contact by sitting near the warmth.
What Ishii describes here is effectively a networked version of the Hot Seat:
Ironic that this article at CNN.com, which cites a study that reveals multitasking may harm one’s ability to filter out distractions, is interspersed with five headlines and hyperlinks to irrelevant articles on Health.com.
Today I saw a gal riding a bicycle in high heels. “How did that work out for her?” you might ask. The answer is apparently not well at all, as her right ankle was all scabbed and bandaged up.
I biked out to Ocean Beach this afternoon via Golden Gate Park, and spent some quality time in the Botanical Garden. It’s truly a beautiful, remarkable place, all split up in worldly biomes that let you trot the continents without leaving your skinny jeans and All-Stars. Really, it was the orange construction fences, road cones, weed whackers and front-end loaders that made it such an enlightening experience. I don’t know where I would have been without the delightful serenade of heavy machinery in reverse.
Gah. You ever wear the coat of sarcasm for so long that you don’t know how to shrug out of it? No really, I loved the Botanical Garden. The redwood forest was almost spiritual, with its cool damp air, soft mossy ground and towering trees. The garden even features all sorts of fun, interactive exhibits:
Some of which border on the truly ludic:
All in all I biked about 17 miles today. It’s reassuring how quickly I’ve been able to abandon that bullshit graduate school lifestyle and instantly reengage with my formerly active self. It gives me hope that if I can endure one more year of satisfying the sedentary demands of academia, I can actually enjoy being myself again.
I have at least three projects due in the next week, each of which demands that I know a different piece of Adobe® software, including Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign and After Effects. My love affair with Adobe® is well-documented, as is their software, which features tons of videos put together by kind people who explain things slowly, and in basic terms that I should be able to understand.
Nevertheless, after spending the entire evening trying to learn After Effects, I have thusly concluded that I cannot be taught. For me it will have to be scissors, construction paper and lots of hand-waving, from now until the foreseeable future.
There’s just something kinda cool about being in the ACM Digital Library:
If you’re a hopeless nerd, that is.
But it is ours. Hooray for fame!
Now if only I could hire someone to help me cash all these giant cardboard checks…
UPDATE: The IU Home Pages newsletter for Indiana University has picked up our story!
A few notes before Kate and I dash out the door for spring break.
I am really enjoying the new shows that Phish played last weekend. According to The New York Times, Phish loved Phish circa 1995. I, too, loved Phish circa 1995, and I’m glad that’s the Phish they’re bringing back. And geez, that’s a fast turnaround in getting those shows online! Props to Brian Cash for the find.
I love my SIGG water bottle. It’s obvious they put a lot of work into getting the shape to feel just right on your mouth. The fine smoothness of the threads, the volume of the lip around the edge… kudos.
During the little free time I have each day, I can’t stop playing Zen Bound:
Beast Pieces is the amazing blog of Studio On Fire, a letterpress company in Minneapolis who does work so beautiful it makes me want to drop out of school and sort California job cases all day.
Our group got into CHI, which means our six-page extended abstract will be published at an academic conference. In April we will be traveling to Boston to present our design for WattBot, a home electricity feedback system, in front of some of the most awesomest people in human-computer interaction. Here’s a preview of our poster:
Have a good spring break, ya’ll!
UPDATE: Yup, it is just a coincidence. Our proposed WattBot system is by no means affiliated with Wattbot, a home energy advisor that is available for realz!
Yesterday we celebrated Jeff’s birthday in his favorite “Hello Kitty Goth” fashion. Binaebi and Emily baked him a pink watermelon Jell-O cake, and Lynn got him, among other things, a pink balloon that said “Princess”. This was in reference to an email that Lynn had sent him once, where she accidentally called him “Dr. Bardzell.” He replied that never, under any circumstances, should anyone call him “Dr. Bardzell.” Further, one could go so far as to call him “Princess Pumpkin” on his birthday, but never “Dr. Bardzell.”
And so, Princess. Meanwhile, Brandon rickrolled Jeff the moment he walked in the door. The entire event was all very experience-y and was definitely “an experience,” as defined by Dewey. Perfectly appropriate for our Experience Design class.
Dane Petersen is an experience designer who enjoys playing outside, talking loudly and waving his hands around. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in human-computer interaction design at Indiana University. He spent this past summer in San Francisco, riding his bike and working as an experience design intern for Adaptive Path.
Dane is excitable and has trouble sitting still. He's worked as a wilderness guide, snowboard instructor, windsurf technician and envelope stuffer. Recently he was the web director for Big Winds, and before that he ran his own freelance web design consultancy. He loves tea, saunas, typography, photography and homebrewing.
Dane's portfolio at Brainside Out will give you a great idea of the range of work he does.
You can email him at
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