Das Forum für Entwerfen e.V. veranstaltet am Freitag den7. und Samstag den 8. Mai ihr 18. Forumgespräch in den Räumen der HFG Ulm. Thema ist "Der kurze Weg zum Glück. Gebrauchstauglichkeit als Versprechen und Chance in der Gestaltung". Wer mag, trifft mich dort am Freitag! 16:30 Uhr: Experience Design: Von der bloßen Gebrauchstauglichkeit zum freudvollen Erleben (Prof. Dr. Marc Hassenzahl, Folkwang Universität, Essen)
Read MoreUser Experience is about happiness and well-being. As I wrote elsewhere: "Usability wants us to die rich, UX wants us to die happy." In that sense, Experience Design is about designing interventions, which make people feel better - or happier? - or make their lives more meaningful? - or less miserable? You get it ... this is where the trouble starts.
Read MoreJan Brechmann and Arne Loermann explored the idea of a cute, autonomous pet-like creature, which calls energy consumption to the attention of its owner and "rats on" the most notorious devices in the household – Meet Greenbro.
Read MoreIt took a while to post it, but here it is ... Already last year, Mark Blythe, Effie Law and I edited a special issue on Experience Design in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. It features a more designerly perspective on and some reflections about Experience Design itself and its relation to common approaches and views in Human-Computer Interaction and Design.
Read MoreBeauty matters. Certainly, most people would agree. Beauty is an important ingredient of our daily lives. We admire and praise the beauty of nature, architecture, music, other people – an ugly color or an awkward form easily repels us. Given its pervasiveness, the lack of research addressing beauty (or aesthetics) in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is striking (see Tractinsky, 2005).
Read MoreThe empirical study of aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is concerned with – among other topics – the relationship between beauty and usability and the general impact of beauty on product choice and use. Specifically, the present paper explores the notion of a "beauty dilemma" – the idea that people discount beauty in a choice situation, although they value it in general (i.e., they are not choosing what makes them happy). We explored this idea in three studies with a total of over 600 participants.
Read MoreEverybody knows it is important - but nobody is actually doing it. Or did you back-up your personal data, your pictures, music, and movies lately? Johannes Neusel created a concept for a slate PC, M!nd, which makes back-up fun and a littlemore likely by explicitly integrating external data back-up into the docking station.
Read More... but beware the deadline: 1. May 2010. This year, I am -- together with Mark Blythe -- short-paper chair for Designing Interactive Systems 2010 (DIS). It isa wonderful bi-annual conference, which "brings together professional designers, ethnographers, systems engineers, usability engineers, psychologists, design managers, product managers, academics and anyone involved in the design of interactive systems." This year it will take place in Arhus, Denmark, from the 16. to the 20. of August, 2010.
Read MoreA three year old - especially if she is your own daughter - is definitely sweet. What else could a parent say? However, if it comes to particular activities, the explosive mixture of will, stubbornness and underdeveloped motor skills can be a true nightmare. Take baking, and especially cracking the eggs, as an example. Every kid wants to do it, none is good at it, and you end up with a lot of eggshell in the batter. What is needed is a way for three year olds to crack eggs in an experiential way. In a student project on experience design, Luisa Dursun and Annabell Meierkordt, devised a tool – Eggsplat – which is supposed to make cracking eggs fun.
Read MoreOver the last decade, ‘user experience’ (UX) became a buzzword in the field of human – computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design. As technology matured, interactive products became not only more useful and usable, but also fashionable, fascinating things to desire.Driven by the impression that a narrow focus on interactive products as tools does not capture the variety and emerging aspects of technology use, practitioners and researchers alike, seem to readily embrace the notion of UX as a viable alternative to traditional HCI.
Read MoreThe intellectual roots of HCI are work science, work psychology, and ergonomics. All those disciplines were basically triggered by a more or less economically-driven demand for an improved workplace (Karwowski,W., 2006). One strategy was to select and train people to increase work performance, the other to adapt workplace design, machines and so forth to the skills and capabilities of workers. In this context, efficiency and effectiveness was clearly an institutional and not a personal goal. Better performance equaled more money. The human was viewed as a necessary, but yet improvable part of the system.
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