The Surface Dial and the Physical/Digital Divide in Interactions

Microsoft announced their new Surface Studio this week. It acts as an all-in-one computer, but with a modular screen that can be re-positioned to act as a drawing tablet. The idea of a computer screen that works as a drawing tablet is nothing new. Wacom and other companies have been producing devices like this for years. What’s new about this is the fact that Microsoft has made the screen an integral part of the computing device, rather than a peripheral that can be added later if needed.

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The Surface Studio. (Image Credit: https://news.microsoft.com/surface-studio-2/)

By doing this, Microsoft is bringing a novel interactive technique to a wider audience. Starting at $3,000, a fairly wealthy audience, but still, comparable in price to a high-end Wacom tablets + a professional graphic artist computer.

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Khandu Cards: Design for Kids… and grown-ups!

I recently received a set of Khandu cards after backing a Kickstarter. These cards are designed by a company called Seven Thinkers, their aim is to get kids thinking like designers early in life. I was interested immediately on reading about them, since part of my research focus is on the idea of design decks. I’ll have a paper published at CHI ’16 on the topic, and I’m working on another paper that will hopefully be accepted soon.

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The fictional characters of Khandu

Design decks are decks of cards that help us work through a design process. These cards work well, because they mix up the lessons that a novice designer needs to learn in order to be a successful designer. In this post, I’ll discuss the format of the Khandu cards, and what I see as the value for novice designers.

The Khandu cards are based on a fictional world where the Khandus live. The Khandus are visible on cards, and some of their problems are described in the challenges. The cards are broken up into several decks. Each comes in a bag with names printed on them for storage. The decks are themed: challenges, people, tools, and actions. The Tool cards are further subdivided into 4 decks: prototyping – materials, prototyping, ideation, and inspiration.

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An Introduction From an Interaction Designer

Hello all, my name is Andrew J Hunsucker and I’m a PhD student at Indiana University, focusing on Human Computer Interaction in the Informatics department. You might remember me from my post on Virtual Reality a couple of months ago on this blog.

I’ll be blogging here on various topics, namely: virtual and augmented reality but also about design pedagogy. My main research interests for my PhD are how designers learn how to be designers. But I’m not just interested in what information they gather, I’m also interested in how they change as people over the course of this journey. I’ve been through a design Master’s program myself, and what I saw in myself and classmates was a complicated metamorphosis process by which they transformed into a designer. Continue reading