Archive for January, 2009
Ergonomics for interaction designers
Jan 26th
This series of articles from Rob Tannen at Designing for Humans discusses how a knowledge of ergonomics can be increasingly helpful to people working in interaction design.
Ergonomics considers the suitability of physically extant products to the human form in all its varieties. As a result it’s not historically been very relevant to interaction designers, who have worked in a more abstracted space than those who design chairs, computer mice, monitors and keyboards. But Rob Tannen argues that the advent of ubiquitous computing and the resulting diversity of form factors (netbooks, phones, touchscreens, kiosks, etc) require interaction designers to develop their understanding of this field.
The three-part series of articles makes for easy reading, an interesting and engaging introduction to the field. It’s also rich with links to more rigorous and in-depth materials for those who want to explore it further. If you want to be able to talk knowledgeably about anthropometrics, satisficing and the flaws of the Proctrustus approach, you’ll find Rob’s writings more than helpful.
Presidential inauguration – Twitter visualisation
Jan 23rd
This animated map from FlowingData shows the global location of each Twitter post tagged as #inauguration between Monday and Wednesday this week.
Although the world map isn’t shown, over time the US and the UK become almost perfectly defined by the density of Twitter post markers. You can also see outlines of south America and western Europe.
http://projects.flowingdata.com/inauguration/
The big flurry happens when the US wakes up on Tuesday morning…
