Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Experience Is Not Something We Feel But Something We Do
A Principled Way of Explaining Sensory Phenomenology, With Change Blindness and Other Empirical Consequences

“Any theory of experience which postulates that brain mechanisms generate “raw feel” encounters the impassable “explanatory gap” separating physics from phenomenology.

A way round the problem is to postulate that experience is not something we feel, but something we do: a kind of give-and-take with the environment, analogous to the “feel” of driving a car. One consequence of such a “sensorimotor” theory of experience is that it provides a way of explaining the differences between seeing, hearing, touch, etc., which is more principled and has more explanatory power than M�ller’s notion of “specific nerve energy” or its modern counterpart, the notion of sensory pathways or cortical areas. The feasibility of sensory substitution is an empirically verifiable implication of this approach.

As applied to visual perception, a consequence of the sensorimotor approach is the idea that seeing does not consist in the creation of a “re-”presentation of the world inside the brain, but rather in knowledge that the outside world is immediately accessible through a flick of the eye or of attention, like an “outside memory”. The world-as-an-outside-memory idea has empirically verifiable consequences in the phenomenon of Change Blindness, among others.” Read the paper here.

San Jose Bluetooth Developers Conference
“It’s still early enough in the development of Bluetooth that its Developers Conference (held last week in San Jose) is still full of real developers, people with their hands actually on the technology. In the exhibit hall you were likely to see a crowd of hackers looking over the shoulder of a nervous but excited engineer who was trying to get his invention to work (often, it didn’t). Very little PowerPoint; lots of exposed circuitry.” Read more.

A Primer in Diffusion of Innovations Theory
“Some inventions ‘take the world by storm’ (archetype: the Sony Walkman). Others seem to fail, lie dormant for decades, but when ‘their time has come’, their use grows quickly, even explosively (archetype: the fax machine). Most achieve slow penetration at first, then their adoption grows more quickly, but later slows down again. A broad social psychological / sociological theory called Diffusion of Innovations (DoI) Theory purports to describe the patterns of adoption, explain the mechanism, and assist in predicting whether and how a new invention will be successful. It is expressed in Rogers E.M. ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ The Free Press, New York, originally published in 1962, 3rd Edition 1983. The theory has potential application to information technology ideas, artefacts and techniques, and has been used as the theoretical basis for a number of IS research projects.” Read the paper here.

IBM’s Paul Smith Debunks a Few Myths About UI Design
Oh boy, there’s a lot of good stuff in this article. I won’t even try to recap. Read it all yourself.

Intel CEO Barrett Describes Keys to Growth of Wireless Internet at CTIA
Future wireless growth will be driven by scalable applications and services that work together across multiple devices according to Barrett. “The challenge in enabling the wireless Internet is to be able to deliver services to the customer across multiple devices,” said Barrett. “The only feasible way to provide the same content in a variety of form factors is by relying on standard platforms and architectures.” Read more here.

St. McLuhan
Sometimes it seems pretentious or obvious to bring up Marshall McLuhan, but one of us is reading him again, and wants to make the recommendation without apology. Anyone designing for interactive media is likely to find him entertaining and thought-provoking. He’ll give you new ways of seeing and thinking, which is a good thing. At Amazon: Understanding Media, The Medium is the Massage, and a collection of quotes and commentaries, Forward Through the Rearview Mirror

Two Lessons for Businesses from Maxis
This article gets better as it goes along, and the last few paragraphs are what prompted us to post it here. One interesting part is how Maxis plans to create a marketplace within The Sims Online. But we also like the lessons of the last two paragraphs: “interaction design trumps graphics” (The Sims is graphically less high-tech than many other games on the market, yet it camps out in the top ten list), and “online businesses exists, like cities, in human context over time.” Read the article
(Tip o’ the hat to EricBlog)

Ready to Use Wireless Communication from the Corner Store
Telespree just announced its wireless over the counter communications solution. This device (its a phone with a single button interface) will allow users to place calls and even access calendars and to do lists all using voice activated controls. The Telespree phone is a handset paired with a detachable AirClip�, a prepaid airtime and power supply cartridge with promotional ad space. The phone is pre-activated, charged, and ready to use. Replenishing airtime is easy; just purchase additional AirClips� where you bought the phone. Doesn’t look as though an incoming call option would be feasable, but a portal with a Web-based control referencing the phone’s unique id number might allow for communication using a buddie list. Lots of interesting possibilities here. Learn more about Telespree.