Entries from Orange Cone tagged with 'magic'
Animism and Italian Design
When I was in Milan for the Furniture Fair/Design Week I took a break from all the current design talk and looking and went to the Triennale for the inaugural show of the new design Italian museum hosted there,...
Information Shadows in children's experiences
There are two projects I've become aware of recently that represent the explicit linking of physical objects to their information shadows, both in children's products. This kind of thing has existed before, but its prevalence seems to be on the...
Sketching Smart Things 3, borrowed purses and smart hammers
I spoke last night at Berkeley's School of Information Future of Interaction Design lecture series, presenting the "Sketching Smart Things" talk I gave at BayCHI last month and at CHIFOO the month before. I'm evolving this talk, rather than doing...
Sketching Smart Things 2: the BayCHI version
Last night I presented a version of the Sketching Smart Things talk I gave last month at CHIFOO to BayCHI. It was an honor to be invited to speak there because BayCHI is such an institution in the HCI world...
Magic ring prototypes
Hideaki Matsui's ring-based concept made the blog rounds this week, and it's only the latest of a trend of ring-shaped ubicomp devices (as helpfully cataloged by Yanko Design): Right now they replicate simple functions that may be done better by...
Sketching Smart Things, a presentation for CHIFOO
(photo from Flickr, (cc) dailydog) CHIFOO, the CHI forum of Oregon, invited me to speak at their January gathering, and it was an honor and a pleasure to accept their invitation. Their lecture theme this year is "From Ideation...
My 2007 ETech keynote in MP3 and my book in Japanese
My keynote for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference last year has been posted to ITConversations. The talk is called "The Coming Age of Magic." It's an argument for the use of magic as a user experience design metaphor when creating objects...
Harry Potter spell voice control and smart furniture from Pottery Barn
Ruth points me to a voice control Instructable that's Harry Potter spell-themed. Voice commands for computers have existed in the periphery for a long time, and they have always had a kind of incantation quality, but it's interesting to see...
Magic and ubicomp in the Congo
In the latest Economist Technology Quarterly, there's a story about a SUNY researcher who is creating an RFID and metal detector system for rangers identify potential poachers walking the elephant trails in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Congo. This in...
Interactivos: Product Development and Magic
Steve sent me a link to the Interactivos? workshop at Media Lab Madrid. I'm sad I wasn't able to propose for it and won't be able to attend. The theme is "Magic and Technology" (which everyone knows I'm a big...
Sony gestural controller patent
It looks like Sony getting on the innovative game controller bandwagon with their hand movement controller, which looks like it's another attempt at creating gestural interfaces. I think that with the popularity of the Wii, a gestural language will...
Media vindication (of sorts)
Last Friday there were two surprising (to me, anyway) front page stories about ubicomp. First, the Economist has a special report on "The coming wireless revolution." The end of the first paragraph reads "In coming years wireless will vanish...
The Fantasy Economy
I'm reading The Design of Things to Come a book that advocates design as a competitive differentiator for companies. It came out in 2005 and the authors are from a (slightly) different world, the world of industrial design and business,...
Coming Age of Magic (Etech Edition)
This morning I gave a keynote at O'Reilly's Etech. It was an elaboration on the theme of magic in the design of ubiquitous computing user experience that I've been developing for a while now. The core of the piece...
Sympathetic Magic and the Substance of Style
I'm reading the entry about sympathetic magic in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences in preparation for my Etech talk. In it, they talk about the three "laws of sympathetic magic" set down by late 19th and early 20th...
Me on magic and ubicomp in Ambidextrous Magazine
The nice folks at Ambidextrous Magazine asked me to contribute an essay on magic as a metaphor for ubiquitous computing user experience design to Issue 6, which launches this week. This essay fleshes out my October dorkbot presentation. Here's the...
Philips Drag & Draw magic markers
Although the event at which the technology is described appears to be have happened some months ago, I just saw this video on YouTube about a Philips project called "Drag & Draw." It appears to be a projector and...
Origin of Magical thinking
Cassidy and several others pointed me to a NY Times article about magical thinking. [...] magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day. The appetite for such...
Magic watch
(from Engadget) Not quite using magic as a metaphor, but more traditional stage magic (i.e. a technological assist for what's a sleight of hand deception), Casio's magic watch assists in doing five different magic tricks. Stage magic and technology...
The Magic Smoke in Electronics
While writing the last entry, I remembered a tongue-in-cheek myth from electrical engineering, documented in Wikipedia, which says that there is a little bit of magic blue smoke in every integrated circuit, resistor, transistor, and all other electronic components and...
REXplorer: Magic as historical explanation metaphor
Researchers and designers at Aachen University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have a magical user experience design project called REXplorer. As described in their paper entitled REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software, REXplorer...
The Coming Age of Magic
Tonight I gave a talk at the San Francisco dorkbot meeting. It was a great opportunity (thank you, Karen!) and an honor to share the stage with Tim Hunkin. In the talk, I presented a short history of the...
Jef Raskin on interface and superstition
Tod pointed me to this excellent article by the late Jef Raskin, Macintosh catalyst, designer and author of The Humane Interface. He rightly identifies a lack of ways of comparing outcomes produced by technologies as supporting th creation of superstitious...
iPod shuffle animism: Steven Levy's experience
Cassidy points me to a book excerpt by Steven Levy, a writer whose work I've been following for years. In it, analyzes why his iPod, and many people's iPods, seem to have preferences of their own. He approaches it with...
Notes on Vernor Vinge's ubicomp talk
Ubicomp got a publicity boost this week courtesy of Vernor Vinge's commen ts on ubicomp, which have been linked widely since they were posted a couple of days. Much of what he says is right on (RFIDs, wireless networks, etc.)...
"As if by magic"
Video scenarios present people interacting with fictional technology by faking the actual functionality through the use of film techniques. I'm a big fan of the technique, since they can free designers from obsessing about the how of technology design...
Electronic sympathetic magic
Sympathetic magic is a common magical belief that I believe underlies much of the thinking behind animist relationships to the world. Essentially, it holds that something that resembles something else holds a magical link to it, and that resemblance between...
Magic mirrors
More evidence that magic as an interaction metaphor may be viable for some applications. Themeaddicts, a company with some former Disney people involved, is making a kind of home talking mirror, a la "Snow White." They're claiming it as potentially...
Sketching in Hardware 1: a retrospective
Every generation expresses their need to exchange ideas in person differently. For the Victorians, it was the parlor, for the Beats, coffeehouse culture, for Hippies, it was the Happening. Now, it's the mini-conference. I could go on about the...
More on Magic
An addendum to my Magic in HCI bibliography of a couple days ago: The list of references attempted to identify sources of discussion of magic as a metaphor for ubiquitous computing, but I decided to include some older sources which...
Partial Bibliography of Magic in User Experience Design
The recent interest (thank you Engadget, BoingBoing, Digg, and the rest!) in my recent magic wand prototype led me to think it may be good idea to start making a bibliography of magic as user interface. Adrian McEwen articulates the...
Eye of Judgement Augmented Reality Card Game
Continuing on the magic thread Sony demoed an augmented reality card game for the PS3 video game console at E3 called "The Eye of Judgement". Cards are, of course, an everyday magical element in myth, up there with wands, and...
Sony's LED magic wand patent
It appears that Sony was granted a patent in August 2005 on an optical magic wand idea. The description is for "an input device for interfacing with a computer" which "includes a body configured to be held with a...
How to make a magic wand
Why Magic Matters I believe that as technology becomes increasingly embedded in people's everyday lives, their relationship to it becomes increasingly animist (though I'm using a definition of "animist" that's not strictly anthropological, but referring to an explanation of...
The Wand of Ubiquity
At the recent NPUC there was a demo of the IBM SHARK gesture recognition system (pages with videos and a download of a software demo). As presented by Shumin Zhai, this is an alternate handwriting-based text input methodology. It works...
Technomancy appears in MP3 players
I've written about how I feel that given enough exposure to digital black box devices whose function is difficult to discern, people may likely start projecting psychology onto the devices, much as they project consciousness on the natural world. Gizmodo...
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