A year in

It’s nearly a year since I started my PhD, (and coming up to three years since this blog was launched). Last week I had my end-of-year review, and, while I don’t often post about the minutiae of being a research student on the blog, I know that at least a few of you are in [...]

A ‘Behaviour Change Barometer’

This is a kind of exploration of some ideas I worked on a while ago as part of my research, and have only just come back to, in order to tidy them up a bit. I’m putting it online as a way – perhaps – to get some comments/criticism, and also to enable me to [...]

Going Underground – Capsule carriages
"…a train with individual passenger compartments… "something that everyone manages to do on the Tube without the need for physical walls"… Public transport without all the downsides of it being public." Thanks to Mags L Halliday for the link.
(tags: transport tube underground train design interactiondesign space userexperience personalspace spatial)

Living skins: Architecture [...]

Jesse James Garrett's Hidden Agenda
(tags: design architecturesofcontrol, designwithintent blog jjg aphorisms interactiondesign insights interaction usability)

Architecting and designing

         
Seth Godin asks ‘Is architect a verb?’, and makes an interesting distinction between design and architecture (emphases mine):
Design carries a lot of baggage related to aesthetics. We say something is well-designed if it looks good. There are great designs that don’t look good, certainly, but it’s really easy to get caught up in a [...]

links for 2008-08-05 [delicious.com]

Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research : Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Randi and Teller among the authors. [No longer behind paywall: thanks, Cory]
(tags: magic neuroscience psychology misdirection behaviour attention cognitivebias heuristics JamesRandi Teller)

How magicians control your mind – The Boston Globe
"As magicians have long known and neuroscientists are increasingly discovering, human perception is [...]

Salt licked?

UPDATE: See the detailed response below from Peter of Gateshead Council, which clarifies, corrects and expands upon some of the spin given by the Mail articles. The new shakers were supplied to the chip shop staff for use behind the counter: “Our main concern was around the amount of salt put on by staff seasoning [...]

links for 2008-08-04 [delicious.com]

INDEX: 2007 – User-centered design & innovation
Interesting writing, but the Issuu interface is completely unusable.
(tags: design interactiondesign userexperience usability usercentreddesign)

Vodafone | receiver » Jan Chipchase: Small objects travel further, faster
"Much of our research started out as an attempt to understand the similarities and differences to what we already knew in order to create products and [...]

links for 2008-08-03 [delicious.com]

Judgment and Decision Making, Journal
"Relevant articles deal with normative, descriptive, and/or prescriptive analyses of human judgments and decisions. "
(tags: decisionmaking heuristics biases cognitivebias behaviouraleconomics behaviour journal architecturesofcontrol,)

The asymmetry of the indescribable

Like the itchy label in my shirt, there’s something which has been niggling away at the back of my mind, ever since I started being exposed to ‘academic fields’, and boundaries between ’subjects’ (probably as a young child). I’m sure others have expressed it much better, and, ironically, it probably has a name itself, and [...]