Books on Interaction Design and Design Theory

Here's a list of the books that I have read recently whilst researching for an essay (or perhaps thesis chapter?) on the theory of both design and interaction design. The books are listed below in the same order as they are stacked in the photo above. Although I won't claim that this list is in any way comprehensive, I feel that there is a good range of books here for anyone interested in researching design, and interaction design.

1. "Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology" By Jonas Löwgren, Erik Stolterman. I recommend this to anyone interested in interaction design. This book is both readable and thought-provoking.
   
2. "Thoughts on Interaction Design" By Jon Kolko. This book gives a great overview of what it means to be an interaction designer without delving into the theory.
   
3. "The Laws of Simplicity" By John Maeda. This book should be a compulsory read for all interaction designers.
   
4. "Principles in Design" By W. H. Mayall
5. "What is a Designer: Education and Practice: A Guide for Students and Teachers" By Norman Potter
6. "The Nature of Design" By David Pye
7. "Notes on the synthesis of form" By Christopher Alexander. A design classic.
   
8. "Technology as Experience" By John McCarthy, Peter Wright
9. "How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified" By Bryan Lawson
10. "Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change" By Victor Papanek
11. "The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action" By Donald A. Schön
12. "Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency" By Jay David Bolter, Diane Gromala
13. "Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices" By Dan Saffer
14. "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design" By Bill Buxton. This book helps to clarify amongst other things the difference between a prototype and a sketch. Very useful, and a good read.
    
15. "Developments in Design Methodology" By Nigel Cross
16. "Design: History, Theory and Practice of Product Design" By Bernhard E. Bürdek
17. "Designing Interactions" By Bill Moggridge. This seems to be the place to start as an introduction to interaction design, particularly for the history of the field.
    
18. "What Designers Know" By Bryan Lawson
19. "Interaction Design: Beyond Human-computer Interaction" By Jennifer Preece, Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp
20. "Taking Software Design Seriously: Practical Techniques for Human-computer Interaction Design" By John Karat

Homepage back online

After a week offline, the server has been fixed and my homepage (http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~pbennett/index.htm) is back online... Sorry for the delay!

Homepage down

Apologies as my homepage (http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~pbennett/index.htm) seems to be broken at the moment. I think it may have something to do with a new server that's been installed in SARC, and it looks like whatever has happened has also broken all of the SARC PhD homepages too... Hopefully this will be fixed shortly!

Three links to doctoral theses that are relevant to my research:

• "Mechanical Constraints as Common Ground between People and Computers" James McMichael Patten (1999)
  
• "Tangible Interfaces for Manipulating Aggregates of Digital Information" Brygg Anders Ullmer (2002)
  
• "Graspable User Interfaces" George W. Fitzmaurice (1996)
  

Rhythm Ring

The Rhythm Ring is an interesting project by Brian Yung & Hanson Jiang (of Cornell University) that was partly inspired by my BeatBearing project. In their own words:

"The Rhythm Ring interactive rhythm sequencer is an engaging musical device that enables the user to create a plethora of rhythms and beat patterns with the touch of their own fingers.
Besides being fun to play with, the Rhythm Ring provides a tangible method of arranging a musical rhythm. In our design, the user can arrange beats and modify them in real time by moving steel ball bearings between holes—a physical representation of notes on a musical staff. The Rhythm Ring continuously loops up to three tracks, each with its own voice. A central ring of LEDs provide the user with live feedback for current "playhead" position, and bright LEDs pulse when a note is played due to a detected bearing. The three tracks allow the playback of three different percussion sounds: snare, hi-hat, and bass drum."

I'm really pleased that one of my projects has inspired another musical instrument to be designed and built. If anyone else is doing anything similar, then please get in touch!

Emotoscope

This is the Emotoscope, made by Kenichi Okada. In his own words:

Emotoscope is a device that gives you an experience of missing time.

Recent digital recording devices such as digital cameras or video cameras make it possible for us to take thousands of pictures or videos with high quality image, but as much as it becomes convenient, we are losing the opportunity of looking at things more carefully.

For this reason, I sometimes use an analog film camera to shoot my everyday life and play the films with a projector. Every time I watch film, it gives me nostalgic and emotional feelings. Then I start to miss the moment that I was there. The experiences become very precious to me. Why couldn’t I see that the moment was precious to me? If I can see present time as if seeing past experience, how would I feel by that?

It is this engagement on the emotional level that I would like to explore further in my own designs of new musical instruments. Perhaps one way would be to superimpose record crackle and hum on top of day to day sounds?

BoxBeat

Just spotted the BoxBeat project on the MAKEzine blog. It's a simple instrument that superimposes a percussion sound on your finger-tapping. I like the idea of creating instruments that you interact with indirectly (in this case through the table).

Multi-touch Second Life Installation

This video shows the prototype of Christopher Chong's installation "The Sonic Window" in which a multi-touch screen is used to navigate around a soundscape generated from Second Life.

Prepared Radio

Here are two videos of Robin Price's audio-visual radio installation. The top video shows just the visualisation and the lower video shows the whole installation being used. Robin is a colleague in SARC and is working on database-driven musical interfaces/instruments. The radio installation shown here builds a database in real-time of sounds from the radio, which are then placed back in the radio-stream as the user plays with the radio.

"Ground Me" Sonic Art MA installation

Just attended the first of the MA students installations. Javier Jaimovich's "Ground Me" takes place in the Sonic Lab. As you enter you are confronted with a series of metal pipes and chairs hanging from the ceiling. When you touch one of the pipes at the same time as either the labs metal grid floor, or one of the hanging chairs, you effectively 'ground' the signal, and a loud electric shock sound is played. This proves to be remarkably effective, and the first few times you make contact, it feels like you're actually receiving a small electric shock, even though the voltage used is so low there's no chance of being able to feel this (except perhaps by grounding with your tongue, which was observed a few times). Other interesting ways of playing the installation involved holding hands between people to provide a longer chain to reach the tubes suspended higher up.

BeatBearing has one million hits

Wow. The BeatBearing video has been chosen as a featured video on YouTube for most of last week, at one point actually ranking as the number one featured video. This has managed to push hits on the video to over one million. Thanks to everyone who's shown interest in the project! As a lot of the same questions keep being asked I've decided to compile a FAQ list:

FAQ's

• Can I buy the BeatBearing? - Sorry, but there's only a single prototype at the moment. So not yet.
  
• Can you tell me how to make my own? - I'm planning to write a 'how-to' article soon. Keep an eye on this blog for further news.
  
• Is it fake? - No. It works exactly as it does in the video, albeit with occasionally some bad connections, an example being the cowbell not playing about 50 seconds into the video.
• Why only 8 beats long? - this is only a prototype to test if the idea works. A fully working version will need at least 16 beats.
• Can you shoot some more videos? - I'm planning to, but only when I'm less busy with the PhD!
  

Damo Suzuki at the Black Box

Saw Damo Suzuki (ex-Can vocalist) play at the Black Box last night. Damo's band consisted of local musicians - 3 drummers, 3 basses, and 2 guitars. The show started with about an hour and a half long set of krautrock-esque improvisation, and after a short break finished with about another hours worth of improv. Although at times mesmerising, unfortunately the black box wasn't the ideal venue for this kind of long free-form workout, and could have benefited immensely from being held at an outside festival where the music could be dipped in and out of. Definitely worth seeing though, and even signing up for a chance to play in one of his gigs. Check out the Damo Suzuki Network for more info.