Ethnography considered harmful

This paper is about how these guys think ethnographies are this angelic gift that should not be tainted by trying to do them in a new way. They want it to be kept to traditional practices. 

As far as this paper talking about how how ethnographies need to be done the way they have always been done, sure...okay. But the people who wrote this paper need to stop writing papers or get someone who knows how to write papers to write one for them because they suck at it. Maybe then it will actually seem like it is written in english.

CHI '09 Urban Pixels: Painting the City with light

Ben

Nick

Patrick S

In this paper the guys were trying to make a new form of urban art that was interactive. The display they came up with is called Urban Pixels and it is basically a bunch of balls with white lights inside that can be placed on any surface and that can also communicate to each other and have a wireless network so they can be accessed from a laptop. You can also interact with the pixels by using a flashlight and shining it on them to turn each on individually or use a mobile phone to send a signal to them.

Overall i thought this paper was pretty interesting and it seems like the idea is cool. Since they are dealing with just low resolution arrays of these pixels you cant really make any patterns that are very detailed and that is kind of a downer.

Uist 07: Multi user interaction using handheld projectors

Ben

Devin

drew

This paper was about some guys who made a handheld projector system. The system works with these staple gun like projectors that you hold in your hand and the interface that is used is explored in a flashlight-like manner. Meaning you have to search for the things you want to find by moving the projector around, this is shown clearly in the video. The main thing they wanted to do was try and make file sharing and things like that easy to do, but I really only see this being used for entertainment purposes, mainly amusement parks. Although it did look kind of useful in office meetings, i just don't think i would want to have a projector shining in my eyes while giving a presentation. They also integrated things into it like privacy settings and a feature where the projector will shut off if it is pointed at someone, but that someone has to be holding a projector themselves.

Emotional Design

Ben

Brad

Josh

This book was about Don Norman contradicting what he said in earilier books. He goes on about how robots need to have emotion and how the design of things evoke emotions in people.

I thought this book was fairly interestingin the way it reminds me of other things that are interesting. His ideas on how robots need to have emotion so they can learn and adapt is a little scary. Although in Terminator and The Matrix the machines don't seem to have emotions they're just cold killers. He goes on and lists some rules for machines that he ripped from I, robot. Which kind of says to me he really doesn't have any original ideas in this book it's all already been explored in Sci-fi.

Diagram for Mini-Project

Larger

CHI 2008: Heuristic evaluation for games: usability principles for video game design

adam

ben

brad

This paper was basically about these guys who are trying to figure out general problems with usability in games and try and make this heuristics, or categories, of the problems that come up and how they can be found and resolved.

They looked at 108 PC game reviews for single player games in 6 major game genres from the Gamespot website. Once the read all the revies and listed the problems that came up the invented some categories for the basic problems as follows.

And then from this they defined some hueristics for how these problems could be avoided defines in this next table.

Once they had the heuristics they tested them with people to see how they would be used to identify problems and which heuristics would be used the most, and here were the results:

So they found that heuristic 9 was the most common problem, which is a lack of a tutorial or help. And overall the testers thought the heuristics were very useful for finding problems.

Overall I think this is a pretty useful system thet have come up with but right now it only extends to single player PC games. So they need to get console and multiplayer games taken care of as well.

The Man Who Shocked the World

Josh

Brad

Adam

This book was about Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who came up with some ground breaking discovers relating to how people think and act in certain situations. The book is basically his life story and goes over some of his most famous experiments as well as his personal life.

I thought the book was a pretty interesting read, Milgram had some ideas that just seemed to turn things upside down so that things could be seen in a different way. He definitely thought outside the box. As to his experiments, I thought that his work on obedience brought a new light onto how people percieve authority and how much pain the are willing to inflict just because an authority figure tells them to. Another famous experiment of his I actually heard of first as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", which is a game where Kevin Bacon can be related to another actor through a series of film roles. And I thought this was a very interesting concept and I want to try and do it myself someday.