March 2005 Archive

International Arts & Crafts show at the V&A, was an inspiring dissapointment. Two of my Design gods, Edward Johnston (he of the London Underground typeface, some original drawings ) and Aubrey Beardsley (for some reason projected, not actual drawings, maybe 1 print), were both just about represented.

Absent was the notion of Medieavalist Romaniticism. Most of Morrises concepts came from mis-reading medieval woodcuts, allegory as fact. The only displays with any impact seemed like something out of the Ideal Homes exhibition. …[more]

Communal (web) publishing platforms seem to be all the rage right now.
What with Yahoo buying Flickr and the the launch of OurMedia , it looks like a great time to sharing your content with everyone else.

I am slightly suspicious of these services. Not just because I tend to be cynical. Around six months ago I pitched an idea at some potential investors, who just didn't get it. Ok so it did need a bit of work, but the core-model is like so:

Let people publish online under your wing, for free. Then use the traffic data (visits, popularity, activity within certain genres) to extrapolate trends, sell the trend analysis to big business, who can use it to help develop products or communicate.

Thats exactly why Yahoo bought Flickr, so they could use it to improve their image-search, and claw back some of their business from the mighty Google.

But its not just search-engines, imagine how a service like AudioScrobbler could add value to the A&R/R&D departments of Sony, Warner and EMI. Hey look, the kids are listening to our back-catalogues of skiffle, lets release a new skiffle cd/mp3/video!

Its like any media (TV, Radio, Magazines), they exist to deliver an audience to an advertiser (the cover price rarely covers the cost of the paper its printed on, the real revenue is advertising). In the online model, its not just the audiences attention to visible advertising, but also information about their behaviours that can be captured and sold on.

Whats great about the 'share-your-content' model is that the magazine no longer needs to employ expensive writers, editors, designers, photographers, in order to generate content. The content is being given to them for free.

Another beauty of Flickr / Ourmedia /Blogger et al. is that not only can they read the trends from the late-adopter / consumer end, you can also pick up trends in the top of the pyramid at the innovator / creator end, giving a higher chance to see what will be happening as well as what is happening. Ever wonder how we got skifflel kittens advertising milkshakes?

It looks like a whole new media paradigm is opening up (again).

Essays with ‘paradigm’ in the title are nearly always good. Interface design: A semiotic paradigm (Mihai Nadin 1997) is no exception. Not only has a good (simple) introduction to semiotics (science of signs), but goes on to develop a viewpoint for the criticism of software. Its nice to read some semiology applied so something outside of graphics, advertising and literature.

This is Social Semiotic Contributions to the Systemic Semiotic Workpractice Framework (Rodney J. Clarke 2001), is as its title suggests, a little more academic. Importantly for the ideas developing elsewhere in this blog, it posits software as putting the user in a ’subject-position’, which while obvious if you think about it, starts to be (very) useful in describing an approach to both software design and the criticism of it, which is both user-centred and goal orientated (which I suppose is my goal).

Rodneys reading of a workplace discourse & behaviours, through its texts (software being one of them) was also interesting in so far as expanding the wider (societal) context of the components.

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

The site for Team Ico's second project Wanda to Kyozou is growing, slowly.

This is definately not Ico 2, whilst visually and musically, the style obviously simliar, from the videos the game seems much more kinetic than the critically acclaimed original.

There doesn't seem to be the opportunity for the same kinds of character interaction and emotional pull that made the first game the success (and failiure) that it was. The leads chracters being a 20ish guy and his horse, rather than a 9 year old, boisterous, adventurous boy and a waiflike 12? year old girl who babbles in her own incomprehensible language.

Kenji Kaido, Producer, talks about the horse - man relationship in terms of the horses steadfastness, (video interview). I can't help but be put in mind of westerns, 'Old faithful'. In one of the videos, the 'hero', points with his (big) sword, a contrived, posed heroic. Contrast this with Ico's intro-posing, standing on a broken column in order to get a better view of the monsterous castle he's trying to escape from, his figure echoing the statue of a horned man in the distance, Ico's own horns cut off.

The gameplay seems to revolve around fighting massive enemies, climbing up them, and whaking key points to destroy them, whilst this kind of boss fight has crept up in almost every gaming genre I can think of , the sheer scale here is massive. Whilst this might indeed provide more of a roller-coaster effect than the originals gloomily huge and vacant castle.

Still, it's probably difficult trying to follow up on a masterpiece, and judgement should really be reserved until its complete, and I'm looking forward to it.

Playstation.co.uk Ico2 video

The mouse pointer (alongside the cursor) is the most popular representation of the user in the electronic envrionment, and doesn't seem to have evolved much since it crawled out of Stanford Research Institute in 1963 by Douglas Engelbart ( see video demos), subsequently popularised byXerox Parc.

The fact that the mouse-pointer in most GUI's is just an arrow that points top-right all the time is (i find) quite annoying. Why doesn't it interact with the environment it is in?

The pointer could engage the user much more, tell them more about their place in the virtual world…

First iteration:
MausPointer

Second iteration (support for multiple nodes):
MausPointer2
You can also drag the nodes around, to kind of prototype a static link layout (put them all in a line at the top, and put one down the bottom to simulate a 'navigation bar' type link layout or dot them around randomly, just to see what happens.

There is some reasonably simple trigonometry going on, and some cheating with the actionscript, but its certainly getting where I thought it would be going. I think the final step of the MausPointer element is to capture the speed at which the user is moving it around, and change the speed at which it reacts to the environment accordingly.