Thanks Simon Pulman! for a really clear post on: Transmedia: The Scarcity-Lazy Paradox | & thanks Jawbone for the find!

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Excerpt:

"One of the principle questions that any multi-platform project must ask is how easily the audience should be able to access the entire story experience. It’s a pivotal issue, and one that must be contemplated and addressed by any aspiring Transmedia experience, such as:

Multi-Platform Marketing Campaigns
Feature Films and Television Series
Grassroots Transmedia Artists and Storytellers
Billion Dollar Entertainment Brands and Franchises
There are two schools of thought when it comes to designing a Transmedia experience. One proposes that audiences value story experiences more when they have to work for them – story threads should be hidden to allow enterprising consumers to discover them. The other suggests that, in a world with many distractions and alternate entertainment options, Transmedia elements should be as accessible as possible to allow audiences to jump between platforms without any effort. I should note at this juncture that I think most projects will probably try to find a middle ground between the two."

Points covered in the full post:

1. The Effort-Reward Philosophy

2. The Ease-of-Use Philosophy

The Middle Ground

Read full post on:

http://transmythology.com/2010/09/21/transmedia-the-scarcity-lazy-paradox/

New Zealand Army recruits through Youtube 1st person shooter game- fascinating: OfficialNZarmy's Channel

"Get what it takes - Medic: Fiapaipai Casserley finds how close training is to the real thing

From: OfficialNZarmy | September 03, 2010 | 6,106 views

When the bullets start flying how will you react? Fiapaipai was thrown into action and had to come to the aid of a fallen comrade and administer treatment in the field. See how she faced the challenge with the NZ Army."

Just found this blog & liking it: Oliver Reichenstein on 'Information Architects – Can Experience be Designed?'

Do experience designers shape how users feel or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? No? Then let me ask you this way: Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences?” The bullshit answer is “They design inhabitant experiences.” The pragmatic answer is: “They design houses.” The cautious answer is: Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not. But they do not design all possible experiences one can have in a house.

Can Experience be designed?

People’s perceptions of user interfaces are too different to be pre-cogitated by a single person. Yes, I designed this site. But no, I don’t know exactly how you experience it right now (but I do have sort of an idea).

Look at the Agenda

Con men: As in every other field there are con men that fool naive clients using experience design as a slogan. Some just make empty promises, some sell empty white papers, some use the slogan to pump up meaningless speeches, some just upsell naive clients with hot air.

Bullshitters: Bullshitting is not lying, it’s fooling people into assuming whatever suits your purpose. Bullshit in UX often comes in pretty funny colors: Unconventional meetings, esoteric brain storming and irrelevant chats at preposterous prices with arm thick bullshit documentations (documentation is important, but just because it’s printed and time consuming doesn’t mean that it’s worth thousands of dollars), some invite programmers and secretaries to design user interfaces, others push management executives to engage in childish games, and some make you do really really crazy stuff like eating soap in a handstand.

Wishy washy managers: Insecure managers like everything that can be tested because it allows them to avoid responsibility. The more insecure a manager is, the more he wants to ask other people. There is nothing wrong with serious user testing, but asking husband, wife, kids, secretary, cousin or yourself is not serious user testing testing. Usability tests and user research need to be done professionals. Not everybody can be as badass as Steve Jobs, but an exceptional product needs a clear vision, solid user research, an experienced designer and a management willing to take some risks.

The Rhetoric

Salesy Emptiness: User Experience Design as a tautology: The design of a product—voluntarily or involuntarily—defines the interaction between human and artefact. Interaction leads to experience. From this point of view, all design is experience design. Used like this, the term “user experience design” doesn’t mean anything.

Amateurish Exaggeration: User Experience Design as hyperbole: User experience design somehow suggests that a designer has direct control over how each and every user experiences his product. A massive exaggeration. The more experience you have in our field the more you are aware of how much the perception of a product varies from person to person. Design defines experience, it doesn’t control it. Used like this, “experience design” is a big promise that cannot be kept.

Technical language: User Experience Design as a synecdoche: The user experience of a product doesn’t start with the first hands on contact and it doesn’t end there either. It includes all contact points: business, technology and design. Skilled designers use the term user experience design instead of web design to express that the visual design is a representative part of a much more complex construct. Used like this, user experience design is a valid term.

The Substance

So yes, some, but not all that use the term “user experience design” are charlatans. So what do serious people try to say, when they use “user experience design” instead of just “web design”?

User Experience Design is not as easy as Dreamweaver: Everybody that publishes a website can call himself a web designer. Calling yourself a user experience designer suggests that you measure your designs with a substantial audience and deal with a wide scale of user opinions on a daily basis. If not, you are not a user experience designer.

User Experience Design proficiency makes you feel small, not big: Traditionally, design is a hierarchical notion where the designer is King and the consumer pays designer taxes to get a spark of his genius. In the field of user experience design, that notion of a glorified omniscient designer has been turned upside down. The experience designer tries to get in touch with as many different users as possible.

User Experience Design doesn’t win ADC prices, it wins percentages: User experience design is the part of a design that can be measured in clicks, time on site, return on investment, return visits and in verbal feedback. User experience design is design where every opinion counts. User experience design is engineering, it doesn’t try to find the perfect solution but the best compromise.

Everybody is a user, so is everybody a user experience designer?

Since everybody is a user, everybody has an opinion on how his experience should be. And many are very eager to utter their opinions really strongly. But that doesn’t mean that every user is a designer. Asking for salt doesn’t make you a cook. The user has his own opinion, the user experience designer deals with different opinions and tries to find the best compromise. Good compromises are not in the middle, they are higher than the initial options: good compromises are synthetic (If your options are cowardly or foolhardy, the synthesis is courageous).

You don’t need to be an engineer to find out that your car doesn’t start. But you need to be an engineer to fix it. As a user experience designer you need to know how things work. When it comes to use, all opinions are equal, but when it comes to engineering, they are not. The engineer collects the feedback and finds ways to deal with it. His opinions are not just based on personal experience. Like a scientist, he tests and validate his assumptions, he develops both theory and practice—not merely relying on his own perception, but by actually testing his products with his audience. And yes, designing interactive products for over ten years makes you more experienced about what works and what doesn’t. But it should never stop you from testing it in the field. By dealing with feedback you get proficient in “experience design.”

The more response you get the more you learn and the better you can do your job in the future. It is not so hard to find feedback. What’s hard is how you deal with it: Feedback always makes complicated things more complicated. And beware! If you do everything the user wants you end up with a mad carrousel.

Theory and Practice

You cannot claim to be an expert in interaction design without practical experience. Building things and dealing with user opinions is what makes a user experience designer. Being an active facebook or Twitter user, a talented speaker, a winning sales man or a collector of UXD articles doesn’t make you an expert on user experience design. What makes you an expert in designing interfaces is building interfaces and dealing with the (often very angry) feedback. Full blooded user experience designers find pleasure in weird things like:

  • Studying user behavior on a daily basis just for fun (Analytics, SE-logs)
  • Usability tests and interviews
  • Prototype testing and optimization
  • Fixing mistakes after the launch by closely watching and evaluating angry user reactions
  • Learning about new business processes
  • Studying new technology on a daily basis

The bigger the audience the more Stoicism is needed. Relaunching T-Online ten years ago, was a baptism of fire, the new design was ripped apart by the whole German tech community. Over time you get used to relaunch protest. Looking at the numbers, iA’s designs seem to improve (and for some reason the reactions are not all that angry anymore). But in every project, there are a lot of surprising feedback to digest and learn from.

Conclusion

Yes, a lot of agencies will abuse technical language to upsell, some more bluntly, some in a more entertaining way. But you can’t slam the bullshit hammer on an entire industry that employs some of the smartest and honest men and women in tech without looking like an amateur.

Amateurs don’t want to talk to and understand clients, they don’t want to discuss things with stupid users, they want to go right in and do it live, change it and improve it in the way they deem necessary. Their strategy is: “Let’s work until it works.” Amateurs are cheap at first but they often fail to complete the job. Because, simply put: without proper preparation and user research and user opinion you can’t make things work—for the user.

  1. User experience design is not a magic method that allows you to foresee how people will feel about your design, but a design approach that is based on user feedback in different phases of the project.
  2. The more experience you have with user testing, the better you know how to deal with the usually hard to handle feedback (feedback alone won’t make a good design), and only few are born Stoics.
  3. The more experience you have handling user feedback, the more likely it is that you are going to find a higher synthetic (and not a foul) compromise in your design development.

Okay, but… how can I discern the bullshitter from the user experience designer? Look at what they say and look at what they did. Then compare. Well that’s just… like… your opinion man… Sure. Tell us what you think on twitter.com/iA

In case you haven’t heard: iA’s Writer for iPad just came out.

Source:

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/can-experience-be-designed-2/

A September 17, 2010 post.

'PlayStation Move videogames will know how to fake players out'| GameLife | Wired.com

PlayStation Move videogames will know how to fake players out

Source: Wired.com

"TOKYO — The best PlayStation Move videogames will know how to fake players out, says Sony’s top game man.

The firm’s new Move motion controller pairs a handheld wand with a camera for unparalleled accuracy, but a hyperaccurate game isn’t really what players want, says Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios.

“You have to be very good at pingpong in real life if we make a simulator,” said Yoshida, who oversees all game development that happens under Sony’s wide umbrella. “Our teams have devised a way to make you feel that everything you do is accurately tracked. However, the game does a lot of assisting so that you won’t miserably fail.”

During the Tokyo Game Show last week, Yoshida answered questions about creating games for PlayStation Move. Another notion Yoshida floated: Because Move games can be built purely around unique 3-D gameplay experiences instead of characters and storylines, they might more easily overcome the cultural barriers that have long existed between Japan’s game industry and the West."

Read More http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/09/shuhei-yoshida/#ixzz10Uz28hrG

Read More http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/09/shuhei-yoshida/#ixzz10UylltiM

My daughter says 'Cooool.' I agree: Google’s Vision of the Future? Bicycle Meets Monorail | Epicenter 

Pity the future.

Two years ago Google launched the 10^100 project to give millions to fund ideas that will change the world. After being overwhelmed by 150,000 ideas, Google finally announced five winners on Friday.

One of the top five is a company appropriately called Shweeb that proposes building a monorail made of little clear capsules powered by people pedaling recumbent bicycles. Google is giving the company $1 million to fund R&D to “test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting.”

Quite simply, Google must have gotten 149,996 stupid suggestions for this to have gotten funding. Monorails are kind-of cool in that Disney-theme-park way, and recumbents are efficient bicycles — if entirely unsuitable for daily, urban cycling. But combining the two is something not even the worst sci-fi writer would conjure up.

Can you imagine how sweaty and stinky these things would become? If I’m going to pedal something to get somewhere, it’s going to be using a bike that can actually turn and take me to my destination. Moreover, these things are bound to be slow, and will probably need a large staff of attendants, like a theme-park ride, to ensure that people get on and off safely.

That’s about the best one could hope for.

Shweeb is about to announce where its first public-transit system will be installed. We’re thinking it might work well in Miami Beach, where the well-tanned can shuttle from hotel to beach in a bathing suit, showing off their liposuctioned and collagen-injected derrieres through the plexiglass capsule to onlookers below.

It might also work well in Portland, Oregon, where it could convey bearded computer programmers (the core market for recumbent bikes) from one brewpub to another.

Or maybe it will eventually replace the miniature and embarrassing multicolored bikes that Google engineers ride around the Mountain View campus.

The other recipients sound much more deserving.

The net’s best fighter for government transparency and openness, Carl Malamud, landed $2 million for his Law.Gov project to make the nation’s legal materials online and free for anyone who wants to see them.

The Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational organization that “provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos” is getting $2 million. That will help he organization make more courses and translate them into multiple languages.

FIRST, a nonprofit that runs team competitions to promote science and math, is getting $3 million to promote student-driven robotics teams.

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) runs a one-year program to help recent university graduates prepare for Ph.D. and master’s programs. Google is giving it $2 million to promote math and science graduate study in Africa.

Those all sound like great initiatives.

But the Schweeb plan? That’s just an embarrassing choice. And that’s coming from someone who lives in a city, rides a bike as his main form of transportation, takes public transit, and doesn’t own a car.

Maybe Google was just wanting to show off that it’s quirky, but man, oh, man, if that’s the future, I want out of this theme park now.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

CSI Creator Anthony Zuiker to intro Dark Prophecy Psychopath on CSI Premiere (Was that Justine Bateman?)

Source: Underwire UK

"CSI creator Anthony Zuiker is playing the synergy card big time with his latest effort.

Dark Prophecy, second in a series of “digi-novels,” goes on sale in traditional book form Oct. 14. To plug the Level 26 product, CBS’s long-running CSI: Crime Scene Investigation series will introduce TV audiences to Dark Prophecy’s resident psychotic, Sqweegel, in its Oct. 14 episode.

For a sneak peek at the twisted killer, check the video, embedded above.

Dark Prophecy retails for $27 in hardback. The iTunes version, which supplements text with video “cyber-bridges,” will follow at a later date to be announced."

Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/dark-prophecy/#ixzz10UxBa4Hl

OMG. NO. NO: 'I, Robot Director Alex Proyas Signs On To Helm 3D Action Film Paradise Lost'

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Alex Proyas, the director responsible for I, Robot, Dark City and Knowing, has been chosen as the right man for the job of adapting John Milton's classic poem Paradise Lost into an epic 3D action movie.

For those who weren't paying attention in English class or, y'know, have just forgotten, Milton's extended poem deals with several religious stories, the most famous of which is the telling of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The film however is going to deal with a different story, that of "the epic war in heaven between archangels Michael and Lucifer, and will be crafted as an action vehicle that will include aerial warfare, possibly shot in 3D," says Variety, who broke the story.

The screenplay has been written by Stuart Hazeldine (Exam), based on an original draft by Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi, with touches added by Lawrence Kasdan and Ryan Condal.