Jon Hung

I know there’s some incomplete information in the last two blog posts.  They’ll be complete entries by the end of the day.  I just really wanted to stay on schedule.

Also planned for the day:

• reading up on card sorting for researching patients, doctors, and stakeholders at Children’s Hospital Oakland
• Getting ready for 31 day blogging challenge. He suggests a SWOT analysis and getting GOOGLE analytics (is this any better than the stats I get from WP?)
• JAVA homework’s due today… dah!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whU_YrZVhy0]

Today’s blog post draws inspiration from Jim Jones, founder of the People’s Temple, who lead a commune of nearly 1000 followers and brought them to their death by suicide (try doing THAT on Twitter).  The massacre at Jonestown shows us how easily the human mind can be influenced and makes a case for how researchers need to guard against it when studying human behavior. More after the jump…

This week’s mentor is Van Jones, who hails from Oakland and brings his message of building green collar jobs to Washington D.C. as recently appointed green jobs advisor for the Obama administration.  VJ is not only a local hero, aiming to bring men and women out of poverty through the creation of green jobs, but he’s also a wonderful example of how people can leverage the power of social technology to amplify their message and escalate it to the national stage.

Read more about Van Jones, and the marriage between the green and social, after the jump.

Today, like many days, I found myself listening to hiphop in the afternoons. Even the best days can use a little more rhythm and the spark of life, so today (as I do many days) I tuned into the guys over at Sanguine Sunday. Read more about their podcast and hiphop in general after the jump.

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Head to San Francisco this week and you’ll hear about the hottest trends and news in video game platforms, graphics, and interaction design at the GDC, or Game Developers Conference.  Multimillion dollar developers preview long-awaited releases amidst indie developers pitching their ideas hoping to be the next hot WiiWare game at this  exciting event.  But what you probably won’t find amongst all the buzz are discussions about the social impacts of these new interactive technologies. For instance, what do you think about the Wii-mote extension that mimics a handgun and trigger for Nintendo shoot-em-up games?

I’ll keep this post short because I don’t want to sound like an old man, and don’t intend to spoil the fun and enjoyment this conference is all about.  I have not yet researched whether there are conferences dedicated to exploring the cultural implications of video games and their development, so I can’t claim that all developers are ignorant of these issues (though I doubt many people in the industry would find such a conference as exciting as GDC).

However, I’ve not yet heard of any emerging companies stepping up and acknowledging their role in shaping our collective futures.  I would really like to see a ‘green’ gaming company that markets itself as a company that spends significant time developing socially responsible games that can improve our world, rather than provide distractions from it.  I would also like to hear a story about a ‘green exec’ on the board of one of these huge gaming companies.  Does such a role exist?

I know it’s Wednesday in most parts of the world (and even Thursday some places), but I honestly could not get my Tuesday blog post out last night.  Despite my best intentions, my house had a power outage due to some exploding transformers which forced me to push this post one day back.   So I’m sorry for the lateness.  Won’t happen again.

The power outage did manage to provide some material for the purpose of this post: feedback.  A device requiring user input usually has a built-in mechanism for providing feedback — a means of communicating a message to the user.  The message could be ‘hey user, the system has received your input’ (the buttons on an elevator); ‘hey user, give us a second we’re thinking about it’ (the hourglass icon in Windows or the progress bar in an web surfing application); or ‘hey you screwed up’ (when you get returned to the same page after entering an incorrect password).  With many means of displaying feedback to the user, some elegant (and not so elegant) designs have emerged.

Feedback can be informative, or can be utterly confusing. After the power was restored, of course all the devices in the house had blinking displays reading the imcorrect times (a method of feedback: blinking = incorrect time setting).  As I went to the microwave to reheat some chicken nuggets for lunch, the screen which normally displays the time was unlike the other time-pieces in the house. It now displayed a cryptic two letter message:

PF. What did that mean?  Please fix, promptly find, post-functional, parliament funkadelic?  Provide feedback?  Oh and the microwave worked fine: I cooked my chicken nuggets and the message disappeared afterwards, which further deepened the mystery.  And I still had no idea what was wrong with the microwave or how to fix it.  Bottom line – clear feedback: good for the system, good for the user

This week I take a look at some of the work of UC Berkeley professor Eleanor Rosch.  Rosch created a new paradigm in the field of cognitive psychology, known as prototype theory. Her investigation into the way humans employ categorical reasoning is important to understanding how humans are able simplify the complexity of the world into simple, yet meaningful and distinct concepts.  Anyone working with information architecture, product cataloging, or marketing might want to have heard of her work.

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White behind white

a tribute to spring.

These are some of the places I look  to drool over eye candy and have a shot at re-creating it.

http://abduzeedo.com – graphics, typography, and illustrations. Fabio Sasso, a brazilian designer, has put together his designs and work of another dozen contributors to create a blog with fresh daily content and instructive tutorials for creating compelling visual awesomeness.

http://www.colourlovers.com – a color and design blog. Great for browsing for web themes; colors are a huge part of design.

http://richditch.wordpress.com – absolutely stunning photography. Though less of a nature photographer than the author, I appreciate how he details his thought process and his approach to photographs in his posts. He is also a Nikon shooter like myself, and usually lists the gear he used for each shot.

Other sites
http://www.designvitality.com/blog
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
http://www.bittbox.com

1) Head nod to Boy in Static who mentioned my photos on their blog. I really dig their website which is full of great color and life. Their music video features a similar theme which makes for a wonderful and adorable narrative. They’ve got an album on iTunes this week – check em out!

2) If you’ve ever wanted to find a sweet bike route in Oakland, or whatever neighborhood you’re in, check out bikely.com. Here’s some rides in Oakland

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