Archive for January, 2012

Pinhole Camera Gallery Exhibit

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

A great opening reception at Durand Art Institute tonight by Stefano Cossu. Sparks, ghosts, and Coals. He built his own cameras seen below. All these locations from the Chicago streets at night. Dreamy and full of contrasts that force the viewer to see the landscape and the photograph as physical object at the same time. Wonderful!

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I find the night settings exciting. Forms take on a more dreamy cast with light sources emerging from cocoons of embryonic wombs of id darkness.

Unlike the modern digital renderings from websites that harbor no tracings of production, no context of construction, Cossu’s work stands in sharp contrast.
His work celebrates the mechanics and materials of art as much as the idea of sign. Today’s digital images are bereft of any birthmarks, nor embody any aspect of the photographer or the mode of production.

It’s is Cossu’s who brings the conversation back to exposing us in a beautiful way to seeing the simulacra we are building with digital modes of production.

Bravo!

Future of Learning Thoughts

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Good diner with the Future of Learning club last night at Aroy Thai.

Some interesting discussion topics

1.Two big challenge for future training is how to wade through large systems level data and designing leadership learning experiences.
2.Customer service can not be taught directly, only as part of some task.
3. Instead of education for individuals – education/schools/learning systems/environments for human machine teams. Augmented humans — how do we redesign “education” and training for the future of augmented humans?
4. Gamification and the importance of Open Badges and Mozilla. Badging systems like this are even more so effective to signal status and to encourage social promotion. Though a wider badge ecosystem will drive designers crazy.

Exquisite Corpse

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Last week at at GameOn team lunch we played Exquisite Corpse – a parlour game in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold to conceal part of the picture, and pass it to the next player to continue with the picture.

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Experience Design (UX) & Experience Points (XP), like peanut butter and chocolate

Monday, January 16th, 2012

User experience designers should look “experience points”, a gamification concept, to help them build and design better experience.

Experience points, of the different types of point systems in game design and gamification, are the most important element in a gamification framework.

Experience points are how you watch, rank, and guide your player. This gets to the heart of experience design and user centered thinking.

A good exercise would be to go through your webpages and assign experience points to every activity you want users to engage in. This way you make it explicit how important each is in relation to other actions across your entire web presence. This forces you to look at experience design above the level of page design.

See also

Prof Subs Grades for Experience Points

Reward Systems that Drive Engagement

Sketching & merchandising expensive jewelry

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

Look at how this store sells people by merchandising sketches of the product. Emotive and personal, conveying a different attitude than just a product image might.

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