Sukiyaki Western Django

“Imagine El Topo remade by Suzuki Seijun, and you might have something like this East-meets-West, pop art-meets-psych, guns-and-swords fusion that Miike makes weirder by having his Japanese cast speak in phonetically delivered English with subtitles! The icing on the cake? A Tarantino cameo”.

Ben X

“A galvanizing portrait of autism and its profound impact on both the autistic person and their families and community, Ben X boldly melds virtual reality with live-action vérité style and docudrama to create what may be a new film grammar”.

Married Life

“Ira Sachs’ slyly ironic film noir relocates British crime novelist John Bingham’s Five Roundabouts to Heaven to the Pacific Northwest in the late 40s”.

Be Kind Rewind

“When Jerry pops into the corner video store - yes, video; the new-fangled DVD is banned - run by his friend Mike (a delightfully doleful Mos Def), his magnetised brain erases their entire stock. In order to satisfy the store’s most loyal renter, the two friends set out to remake the lost films, starting, improbably, with Ghostbusters, and progressing to Rush Hour II, The Lion King, Driving Miss Daisy and any number of turkeys and classics.”

CJ7

“Ever a champion of the underdog and the handmade, Chow, whose own childhood poverty informs all his movies, conjures a savior out of a junkyard - a strange alien who looks like a newly-hatched chick with huge eyes, a flubbery green body, Charlie Chaplin moves and an unstable relationship to the martial arts.”

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

“In a rich array of archival footage, home movies and intimate recollections, director Alex Gibney (Enron, Taxi to the Dark Side) zeros in on the frantic 60s and 70s when Thompson rose to fame and then infamy with his own brand of maverick, subjective journalism”.

Mechanical Love

“Compelling, disquieting and droll, this gaze at relationships ahead vividly illustrates the age-old need to love”.

Want to know when we plan to see these, and where they’re showing? Well, I made a calendar.

I’ve been reading Carolyn Snyder’s “Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces“. It is a very thorough newcomer’s introduction to this simple yet effective user research technique.

Over the last year or so I’ve become quite interested in prototyping techniques in general - from flash and PowerPoint to even spaces like Second Life as prototyping environments - but I think paper prototyping stands out as something quite special.

Quoting from Snyder’s first chapter (p4), paper prototyping is-

“a variation of usability testing where representative users perform realistic tasks by interacting with a paper version of the interface that is manipulated by a person “playing computer,” who doesn’t explain how the interface is intended to work.”

Paper prototyping is particularly interesting because it allows designers to try out their ideas for an interface long before anything needs to be put together by programmers or engineers. The hand-drawn paper-y nature of the prototype also encourages users to give in depth feedback, and to express ideas and reactions to the interface that aren’t tied into its look and feel. It allows the whole process to really focus on user work-flow and interaction.

Because the research participant is interacting with a ‘human computer’ the process encourages conversation between the user and the design team, who ideally sit in on the process, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

Again, because the interface can be mocked up in 15minutes with a pen and paper, the development team is much more open at this stage to making dramatic changes to their design, listening enthusiastically, and acting on what the user says.

I think paper prototyping could be a really neat tool for libraries!

When we’re designing interfaces that our patrons will use (for example, our library web presence) we’re usually on a much slimmer budget than other organizations. We can’t really afford the money (or the time) involved in redoing a live website prototype over and over again. Most often our situation is enhanced by the fact that we have to hire outside help to actually build the bulk of these tools for us.

Paper prototyping could be a tool that we can use to cheaply test and refine our ideas before we start the building process:

• We could test our ideas in front of key representatives from our patron base,
• investigate the kinds of needs our users have; how they react to our assumptions,
• and have a clearer understanding of user preferences ready when we at last come to the table to discuss our new project with developers.

I’m going to try to post some more over the next few months, thinking about some of the ideas that are mentioned in Snyder’s book, and seeing what other people have written on the same topics. Some of the topics she covers include:

• an overview of the history and origins of Paper Prototyping,
• case study examples of how it might impact the design process and help a development team make important decisions,
• suggestions about the kinds of responses a good prototype (paper, or otherwise) should inspire, and the kinds of problems/confusions it should hopefully evade,
• guidelines for actually making and using a paper prototype - description of the actual materials used and providing ideas on how to clearly represent common interface features on paper,
• a walk-through of the process of actually performing a usability study: including how to pick a useful team - and useful users - and how to decide and design the tasks that user should be trying to perform,
• methods for capturing, understanding, and successfully reporting back on the study’s discoveries,
• discussion of common concerns raised about paper prototyping methods, and suggestions about when it’s most appropriate to use paper prototyping.

What do you think? Have you ever used paper prototyping, especially in the design of a library’s web interface? Do you have any further recommendations of good books / posts / articles to read about this technique?

Today I collaborated (virtually and in person) with three other Second Life educators to present a session on Libraries and Second Life at the TELSIG National Seminar which is being held in Palmerston North today and tomorrow.

I was incredibly nervous, and we were all crossing our fingers and toes that there wouldn’t be technology hitches - but all in all - even though there was the odd hiccup, I think it went pretty well! Everyone I spoke to afterwards had such nice things to say.

Clare Atkins from NMIT (Arwenna Stardust) was the MC - attending the conference in person along with me - introducing Second Life and describing its scope and features. We heard from jokay Wollongong (Joanna Kay) of ‘jokaydia‘, who took us on a tour of her Island, highlighting interesting learning and teaching spaces, including a “Virtual Classroom” project spearheaded by New Zealand educator Leroy Goalpost (Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytechnic).

Emerald Dumont (Kathryn Greenwood) joined us from Murdoch University in Perth. She talked about what libraries were doing in Second Life, gave us a guided tour of Murdoch’s Second Life space. Kathryn had set up a video feed from her office at Murdoch, so that we could see her as well as hear her speak. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get it to work on the spot! You can see a flickr video of what it would have looked like, though, if you’re interested. Kathryn had also suggested three great videos for us to watch, just in case Second Life failed us on the day! “Libraries in Second Life“, “Murdoch Uni Library gets a Second Life“, and “Murdoch Uni Island in Second Life“.

I gave a ‘mixed world‘ talk, with my slides and avatar in Second Life, but not managing to get out of standing up in front of 80 or so librarians! My talk was (of course) about my INFO580 research project “Second Life Libraries: Challenges and Strategies“. I had prepared lots more to say than I had the time to talk about, so I’m really glad I prepared a full transcript of my talk as a set on flickr for anyone interested in experiencing everything! (Of course, if you’re really keen you could read the whole report, or you could also check out my earlier presentation about Digital Libraries!)

It was so cool to do this, and excellent to get to work with clever people like Jo, Clare, Kathryn, Tim and Rob. Thanks everyone! ^_^

More great work from design students at Victoria, and this time it may be the single most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.

Stormtroopers visit the school of Architecture and Design, do a bit of recycling, check out some student work, and then attend a lecture. Are they on a recon mission to experience student life? They didn’t visit the library, of course, which is why the plans of the Empire always fail - you know, if they’d been reading more maybe they wouldn’t have missed that unfortunately designed exhaust port on the Death Star.

On Wednesday afternoon (along with staff and research students from Science, Engineering, and Architecture and Design) Elizabeth and I visited the Digital Media Design Lab to hear a selection of presenters showcasing their use of e-research technologies and demonstrating a number of cool projects they’d been involved with.

There were two visiting professors from other universities - Mark Gahegan (Auckland) and Neil Gemmell (Otago) - as well as six other academics from Victoria Uni. The general emphasis of the symposium was that e-research allows research to happen in new ways, using digital tools to enhance collaboration on a global scale. Research teams from around the world can benefit from each other’s work, share research data and even access (expensive) scientific equipment, across ultra-high speed digital network connections.

New Zealand’s “Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network” (KAREN) runs the length of the country, connecting most universities, and ties us into these international e-research networks.

For New Zealand, in the ‘corner’ of the world, the ability to borrow ‘number-crunching computing power’ or ‘telescope star-gazing time’ from other institutions with bigger budgets and more varied research environments is really exciting. Also, our own resources and data are just likely to be in great demand, due to their uniqueness and relative inaccessibility. By contributing our local research outputs to this global network we open up Kiwi ingenuity to the rest of the world.

Nationally, the “BestGRID” project has been run over the last 3 years to assess methods, applications, and infrastructure that could support a “fully-functional e-research ecosystem for New Zealand”. At Victoria, Sam Searle and John Hine from the school of Maths, Statistics and Computer Science are organizing equipment, facilities, friendships, and even programming know-how to help academics and post-graduate researchers make the most of this network of data and resources.

My favorite speaker was definitely Mark Gahegan, who spoke about his experience working in the US contributing to GEON, the Geosciences Network, and also about his more recent work developing visualization tools for geoscience resources. Gahegan is Director of e-Research and Professor in the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, at the University of Auckland (and an excellent speaker).

Gahegan described how, in the sciences and social sciences, a lot of time is often lost trying to interpret or re-interpret data previously acquired by other academics. How we understand come to understand the work we have created is tied up in the final research product itself, with few ways for us to convey quickly to the next person who comes along information such as:

• The process by which the research product was created,
• What other work the researcher was influenced by,
• Which scientific community ended up using the work,
• How that community used the work, etc.

Gahegan wants to capture and visualize geoscience research data in such a way that it is “semantically interoperable between people with different points of view, differences of opinions”.

More elaborate visualisation tools, like ConceptVista, an open source project that Gahegan has been developing, will enable researchers to view research data situated within the context of its creation and use. As a researcher works on her own project, she could be notified by the interface of previous outputs which match her method of data collection, or have been been used extensively by her target community in the past - and this could help her make better decisions about which resources in this vast global co-laboratory to make use of.

Slides from the speakers at the symposium should be available on the EResearch webpages shortly. Photos of the event should appear on the DMDN News blog soon as well.

Work from Victoria’s first year design students is now starting to appear on Vimeo.com (that’s the pretty youtube). It just blows me away that this is the work of students who just started at uni in February this year. They’re already creating work to the standard of professional advertising. Check more videos out on Vimeo!

In celebration of my new website design, I present some Star Wars Snowboarding. Familiar it is, somewhat, yet different.

Although I actually finished my INFO580 research project some time ago - in October of last year - I’ve been slow in making it available here on the blog. A combination of work, Christmas, and taking an interesting paper on Web and Intranet Content Management over trimester three has really meant that I’ve barely thought about my research, and Second Life in general, since finishing the project.

Though I’ve been a bit busy lately, my paper (read the full thing as pdf) reflects my ongoing interest in the way that interfaces for engaging with information (particularly library interfaces) might be better designed to facilitate interaction, ease of use, and community. I’ll certainly be continuing to think about these issues in the coming months, particularly as I have been asked to contribute to the upcoming TELSIG National Seminar and talk about my research project and about Second Life Libraries, with the help of some rather brilliant Second Life educators - in June of this year.

Finishing this project marks the end of my Masters in Library and Information Studies. With the completion of this professional qualification, as well as the more recent “certificate of proficiency” I’ve obtained in Web and Intranet Content Managment, I’m now interested in continuing to explore Information Architecture and Interaction Design.

This week is orientation week at Victoria University, and yesterday I gave my first orientation session to the students. This presentation was a pretty simple introduction to all things library, with a friendly and welcoming tone, for first years up at the central Kelburn library. I’ll be taking some more complex ones soon enough, for Second Year Design, and hopefully Architecture, too.

For this talk, which I’ll be repeating on Thursday (tomorrow!), my main goal was just to encourage the students to talk to their reference librarians when it comes time to start thinking about their assignments.

All in all, I think my first run through went pretty well, though I was about five minutes under time, which means I can possibly embellish a bit more. I’m particularly pleased as it was an excellent opportunity to try out two neat resources: Creative Commons image search and Powerpoint with Google Documents.

So, take a look at my presentation - and then read on for more about the two best parts of the process of putting it together. You can have a look at the full screen version, if you prefer.

There’s nothing like having wonderful images to accompany your slides, and the creative commons search page is an excellent place to start. You can search Google, Yahoo, and Flickr - as well as lesser-known Blip TV (for video), OWL (for music), and SpinXpress (a range of media formats) - with automatic creative-commons filtering, directly from the search page. You can’t meta-search across all three at options at once, unfortunately - but clicking a different tab will replicate your search in that sources.

Flickr is definitely the best choice for great images for presentations. The Flickr community is generally made up of above-average photographers, and significant number of people (myself included) tag their photos as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This means that you can freely use their work, but must credit them, you’re not allowed to sell what you make, and if you modify what they’ve made you must share the new work you’ve made under the same license.

Having snagged my photos from Flickr, I put my presentation together completely using Google Documents’ new presentation tool. I’m impressed with how well it works. Sure, you can’t use MS PowerPoint features like slide transitions, but those just seem unnecessarily flashy anyway. I particularly like the online presentation mode, complete with chat menu down the right hand side. I can see this working really well for a low-budget distance class somewhere out there. The group could sign on to a group audio/videoconferencing chat client (such as Skype), and then listen to the instructor speak, watch the slides via Google Documents, and type in their comments and responses.

I particularly like that idea because it is further hammering in the same concept we’re using when arguing for Instant Messaging reference services over traditional Virtual Reference clients - that an collection of different software working together (e.g. IM + IM agreggator client + wiki), is far more powerful a tool than the “all-in-one” proprietary system. It’s another way we can surround ourselves with a flexible network of tools.

Coreopsis Major left clues in the form of call numbers at her library, at first on tables, then leading to books at various locations around the library, to take the finder of these clues on a treasure hunt around the library. Eventually, there’s treasure at the end.

(I borrowed these pictures from Coreopsis Major’s page on SFZero, go check out her project!)

Coreopsis was playing SFZero, a kind of Alternate Reality Game. In this game, players create “Characters” who perform all kinds of “tasks” out in the real world in order to obtain completion “scores” when they report back their progress on the website. In many cases, the tasks, submitted by other players to the game, are simple, yet ambiguous, designed to allow players to exercise huge amounts of creativity.

Coreopsis’ task - that spurred her to create her game - was simply “Leave Clues“. Other tasks are as simple and quirky as “Make it Work” (which players have generally interpreted to mean “fix something”) and “Irregular Animal Documentation” (”document an animal you rarely see”).

Tasks, and Characters (based on what tasks they perform most), are divided into “institutional bureaucracies” which embody particular themes of thought-provoking play. “The EquivalenZ project seeks to fulfill the originating fantasies of Virtual Reality”, “The city suffers from a Humanitarian Crisis and appeals for unilateral humanitarian aid, and basic human rights”, ” The Biome Group concerns itself with an exploration of the living structure of the City”, and so on.

I think SFZero as a project is especially cool because it is encouraging players to think about the world around them in new ways, adding playfulness to otherwise ordinary spaces and activities. In the process of re-thinking their everyday lives, SFZero players also impact others around them. Coreopsis Major’s simple treasure hunt creates a sense of mystery, adventure and exploration in the otherwise ordinary library activity of looking up and locating call numbers. I wonder what other ideas we could come up with to create excitement about common library activities, in ways that teach students basic skills at the same time.Coreopsis Major’s simple treasure hunt creates a sense of mystery, adventure and exploration in the otherwise ordinary library activity of locating call numbers.