Ben Arent | Interaction Designer
Just a quick note to thank Dan Saffer from KickStudio for featuring jive in designing user interfaces.
I would recommend the book, but you can get a lot from the web. You can download the first chapter, and gesture stencils from the website. Ow. And don’t forget you can download the source to build your own magnetic user interface.
Its been a busy year, with over 31,000 visitors to benarent.co.uk. I have had some great experiences this year with three exhibitions and a job at TRIL.
The most visited page was my portfolio, and the top 5 pieces of blog content were.
Its seems like there is a lot of love for the how tos so expect to see more in 2009!
Design and Art thrive in Hard times
Just wanted to thank Katerina Karagianni for mashing up my Stealth Lamp. Katerina is a postgrad of IaaC in Barcelona. She mashed my up lamp as part of a course on Open Source design. She has sent me the DXF, but I really want to see what the final lamp looks like.
Presentation at TCU
Last night I got to see Alan at the SIGCHI Ireland Inaugural Lecture. Alan gave a very energetic talk, with the first half focussing more on the acadamic methods and paper / lit review for the CHI / HCI crowd. I felt that he said that there is a lot of work comming out the community, yet no one is really studying the roots of the work. Meaning the work wasn’t acadamicly sound.
The second half was interesting as he analyzied what was going on in community and how a service orientated software business would change the development of such HCI things. He touched on a couple of IDEO methods (not that he said that) such as looking at an extreme user and designing for peak experience. Alan describes peak experience as Baked Bean Vs Mars Bar design.
Here is the peak experience slide I stole from him.
If you are reading this Alan, I was very interested in your physicality in design..
I have recently been featured on MBC-TV the equivalent of BBC in South Korea. I had a great time making a small working demo of the energy tree and its been a great experience to exhibit in the Hague and be broadcast on national TV. This truly shows the power of having your portfolio on the internet.
Thanks to Gina and her team for letting me put the video up here.
A key part of any design profession is the Crit. Crits are normally in an open forum and give everyone a chance to give feedback on your work. I have created this blog post as a place where people can give me positive and negative feedback on my portfolio.
P.S. In regards to spelling and copy, I’m currently working through my site.
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is the latest book I’m reading. The book is very well written and is a easy read. Dan explains how humans make irrational decisions that aren’t irrational at all, and are in fact that irrational behavior is predictable. Dan uses MIT research studies to prove this. I would highly recommend this book to designers, and experience designers as by understanding irrational behavior you can convert a great percentage to the perfect usage scenario.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
As a working interaction designer I’m always looking for inspiration that I can extend to the rest of my work. This is my first UI’s in Movies section, and I hope to go back through and pull the best user interfaces from the world of movies.
All of the UI design was done by MK12, I’m always impressed by the high quality of the images, and the detail that goes into the interface. Personally I didn’t like the use of multitouch, but did like the use of a tangible user interface that allowed the agents to display different type of bank notes on the table.
I most liked the video wall [Screen shot taken from the TRS] , which worked very well as a multi user collaboration and search tool. The natural interface, and flow though screens was very nice, I hope to be doing some high spec tangible interfaces later this year.
I have contacted the designers at MK12, to try to find out more about there design process, I’m really interested as to how i can fit this into my workflow.
As part of my work as an ‘interaction designer’ I have found that in I’m having to do a lot of interactive prototypes and have found flash as the most versatile tool for development. While I already had some ActionScript experience I found that I had reached a wall with my coding.
I have found these three books a great addition to any flash designer, If you can afford it, get it all. But if you can’t I could properly loose the design patterns but its a good long term investment in long term code re usability.
Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential).
This is a great book that covers EVERYTHING and all of the smaller detials of the ActionScripit Classes. If you were to only get one book, I would get this one.
ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers
This book has loads of useful code snippets. This is definitely one to have by the best for when you need to do a specific task.
ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques (Adobe Developer Library)
This book is written more towards developers, but I have found it good practice to design code in a reusable and structured manor.
This is a second update.. I’m aware that things around here have been pretty quite for a while. I have a bunch of content that i’m looking to update on the site.
I’m planning to make the blog more focused on Interaction Design. I’m currently doing a lot of work that covers a broad range of interaction design issues.
Most of my current work has a certain amount of IP. Although at TRIL I’m currently working on..
So I plan in the coming months, I plan to
I would also like to thank all the visitors to the site.. I’m busy to update and fix all of my design conent.
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