Brad Lauster .com

I just found lots of goodies at people.interaction-ivrea.it, including staff and students' websites, project websites and teaching materials. YUM!

Thanks to filter fine for this one:

The Future of Content Conference will take place at Stanford's GSB next Saturday 4/13. Michael Ramsey (CEO, TiVo), Jeffrey Berg (CEO, International Creative Management), and Steve Perlman (Founder, Moxi Digital and WebTV) will be speaking. Some interesting discussions on how the film, music, television and publishing industries plan on dealing with challenges to their current modes of operating should be in order.

This event is open to the public and is pretty resonably priced. Anyone care to join me?

I've been interested in and thinking about what I call "physical interaction design" for a while now. Physical interaction design being one of the points where interaction design and industrial design intersect.

Seems that others are thinking about it too...

Ira Laefsky, a researcher associated with Dave Farber's Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, contacted me today.

He's involved with the development of a physical workstation for remote telecollaboration while engaged in document-based work and is looking for resources concerning "the design and development of physical systems that have interactive controls and displays, as well as industrial design aspects and embedded software."

I wasn't much help to Ira, as he was already aware of Baumann and Thomas' "User Interface Design for Electronic Appliances," Bergman's "Information Appliances and Beyond" and Jenny Preece's recent "Interaction Design."

Ira correctly pointed out that all of these seem more oriented to screen design than the development of physical systems.

So, brad lauster (dot com) readers, do any of you have any pointers for us? Please leave a comment if you do!

Selena and I have been looking for a new vehicle for some time now. Since hybrid cars that suit our needs aren't yet available and fuel cell vehicles are but a pleasant dream, it seems we're stuck with at least a few more years of OPEC supporting' and environment destroyin'.

Our current pick of the litter is the Honda Element. Wheels24 also has an Element image gallery.

I think it's not quite as cool as the VW Microbus concept, but, unlike the VW, the Element, WILL be available in November.

...and dictionary.com proves my point, though this site has articles by a bunch of idiots who might argue otherwise.

Apparently, people in the online ad game (I chose "game" on purpose, since it's clear from the articles that they have no idea what they're doing) use "creative" to describe what they create. Also, the people who create "creative" are called "creatives." What a horrible, twisted use of language.

Oh yeah, there is actually an article on that site entitled, "Big Banner Ads Rule"...and the guy is serious!

Last week, Alan Cooper spoke at BayCHI. I put together some of my thoughts for an article that is now on Boxes and Arrows.

Step aside Mr. CEO, a new breed of Interaction Designers are movin' in! I hope you find it an enjoyable read.

Impressions after riding a Segway HT is a thorough review of the Segway HT. Unlike many other articles about the HT, Dan describes the experience of his two hours behind the, uh, handlebars.

Adaptive Path has published an interesting interview with Marc Rettig revolving around up-front project research and what to do with the results of it. There's also a bit about the Museum Innovation Project, which his students at the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Design are working on, at the end.

I'm leavin' (on a jet plane) tomorrow, for the SIGCHI | AIGA Experience Design Forum at CHI2002.

NOTE: I won't be around for the whole conference, just Saturday through Monday. Please post a comment if you'll be there - maybe we can hang out at the party on Sunday evening at Sursumcorda? See you there!

The SF Chronicle ran a front page story today, entitled, "Intel's quixotic quest for next billion users," on Intel's team of ethnographic researchers. While this is not news (similar articles have appeared in newspapers from all over the world), I think the fact that it made the front page is pretty significant.

What do you think?

Well, I never did get around to typing up my notes from the IA Summit, but here are links to most of the presentations, in case your're still interested:

Lou Rosenfeld's presentation on enterprise-wide information architecture [power point].
Dan Brown's poster and presentations.
Peter Morville's presentation on New Roles in IA and others.
Chiara Fox and Peter Merholz's PeopleSoft.com Case Study.
Peter Merholz's Company and Customer Insight for Information Architects.
Erin Malone's presentation on how site maps are used at AOL [power point].
Jesse James Garrett's A brief introduction to the visual vocabulary for beginners and The IA of Everyday Things [both power point].

...oh, I just found the list that ASIST put together also.

I've been thinking about design as business strategy a lot lately. A Google search today led to the Master in Strategic Design program from the Politecnico di Milano in, where else, Italy.

Does anyone have any suggestions for souces of information on strategic design?