5 Things that is NOT Interaction Design

I think these two below are interesting artciles.

I have been in a similar position of trying to explain people what I do for a living and the moment I say Experience Design, it becomes more abstract. The moment I say Graphic Design, it becomes too narrow. People ask me to consult on Usability, but I think that a person trained in Usability should do it. But since I learnt it and done different kind of Usability Activities, I agree to it. Some people ask me to do a look and feel of their website. I think that this is a area of expertise for a person trained in Graphic Design working in Web Medium (often called User Interface Designer).

Below here is the link to an article that I recently read on Coroflot. Its thought provoking. In the end one is left with the question whethere the field really requires a formal definition of some kind, or should it be happy where it is and keep exploring newer ventures within the context of interaction design.

An extract from the piece… Like most of my friends and colleagues in the creative professions, I have trouble explaining to my mom what exactly I do for a living, so it’s not like confounded laymen are an indicator of intentional obscurity. But IxD seems to be in a different category entirely. Not only does it confuse outsiders, it confuses Interaction Designers too.

Read more here

You could also read up the discussions on this topic at the IxD discussion forums at this location.

While you may agree of disagree to the things that are said in the above two links, it gives a fair amount of understanding to the kind of confusion that exists within and outside the field.

. . . → Read More: 5 Things that is NOT Interaction Design

Comments are closed   articles, HCI, Interaction Design

On Content Management Systems

Of late I have been looking into the different ways of creating a website and also helped a few other people do the same. I think that the learning curve is extremely important for a designer and that is one thing I look into closely when I try out something new. With more and more build up of the online communities, one sees a lot of focus on Content Management Systems (CMS). This happens to be an easier way of doing things and thus not being dependent on the services of the developer to keep creating pages by hard-coding it on HTML / Dreamweaver. Perhaps this was the prime reason for me chosing to migrate my website to a CMS based system. I am thankful for that choice!

Wordpress – the backbone of this site.

I have used WordPress for this site (kshitizanand.com) and was totally blown away by the ease of use and the functionalities that it provided. I had been using it for the blogs, so I was familiar with the basic stuff on WordPress. After a while I then decided to try it out for a website. The wide number of themes and the every growing community makes WordPress an easy learning tool for designers. I am in love with WordPress and definitely recommend anyone who is interested in putting up an easy to maintain website

In a past project on creation of a Collaborative Tool designers and researchers, we had done an in depth study of the existing tools. The study was focused around community building, so Ning was the sole leader in seeking out to do multiple things.

Comparitive Study of different Collaborative Tools

However Drupal and Joomla were a close second and third respectively.

Joomla – supposedly popular with websites . . . → Read More: On Content Management Systems

Comments are closed   Interaction Design   ,  

NGO 2.0 at Srishti, Bangalore

NGO 2.0 Poster

I think this proposed symposium looks to address some really challenging questions that designers who are interested in Designing for Social Impact is concerned. For more discussions please join the googlegroup.

Comments are closed   events    

Introduction to Light Painting

This is a part of the workshop that I had conducted recently at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy as a part of their college festival Pragyan.

Introduction To Light Painting

View more presentations from Kshitiz Anand.

Comments are closed   photography, presentation    

On Publicy

Of late, I have been reading about the tremendous rise of the social networking sites. Facebooking is on an all time high and continues to grow further day by day. With more people giving their private data online, more companies asking for credit card details, friends keeping track via different channels, one is forced to think whether all this would be good in the long run.

I personally use two-three social networking sites and they have my information on it. When I started on these sites, I had all my information from my real birth date to my relationship status to my exact likes and dislikes on it. Over the years, I have removed some of the information. The irony of the situation is that even if you do that, all the people in the network get to know about it. So one would think that everything is lst in the name of networking and privacy is dead.

Recently I read about a term Publicy. Laurent Haug in his blog post titled ” Publicy the rebirth of privacy” talks about an interesting phenomenon that is happening everywhere. He mentions that “Privacy is not dead. It just went global and public, which doesn’t mean you can’t control what people know about you. Actually, it is now the other way around.”

Interesting article to read that one. And lots of food for thought.

Comments are closed   articles, experiencedesign, Interaction Design    

What makes a good photograph?

This is a part of the presentation that I gave at Pragyan 2009 at National Institute of Technology, Trichy.

It is based on a simple that I ask myself, everytime I think about taking a photograph. Here in the presentation are the list of factors that I think go into the making of a good photograph. If you notice, the camera is at the last slide. It is because of a fundamental belief that I have. Its not the camera that makes a good photograph. it’s the photographer and their vision.

What Is A Good Photograph

View more presentations from Kshitiz Anand. (tags: photography thoughts)

Comments are closed   photography, presentation