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Designer/Artist + Co-Creation

With the advent of new technologies and the rapid dissemination and accessibility of information, artists and designers develop increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about the world in visual forms and of approaching open-ended questions or specific problems in new and exciting ways. It seems that design and art now represent blurred categorizations: artists and designers grow more apt at interchanging roles and are increasingly willing to collaborate and co-create.

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Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. – Steve Krug

Steve Krug explains how we can create better Websites if we just stop wasting time on useless debates within teams and engage in 'usability testing' early on in the development process. His book provides the antidote.

He distinguishes between designers and developers in what they consider to be a 'good' website design. Designers prefer pleasant layouts, whereas developers enjoy a good amount of features. This is also compared to the duality between commercial culture and craft culture. Which is a question of aesthetics versus usability. Ideally, we would want to have both.

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Sketching User Experiences (1)- Bill Buxton

In "Interacting with Paper," Bill Buxton proposes paper prototyping which he calls 'paper interfaces' as an alternative and a better solution to testing user experiences before starting the design process. The author suggests that paper holds powerful affordances that represent systems of control that users respond to and experience, both in terms of a sketch's control over users' actions (control commands) as well as its faculty to lead users to focus on the 'experience' and 'usability' of an interface rather than on its aesthetic feel or design.

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TSL230R Light to Frequency Converter

This is a first try at using TSL230R to measure HRV (Heart Rate Variability) levels. It will be used as part of a larger project to collect users' heart rates and translate this data onto a mobile (potentially wearable) screen as a non-verbal messaging system that reveals a somewhat hidden state of 'being'.

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