विवेक लोक

Human-centred invention

Why augmented reality is garbage, and how to make it transcendent and good and funny, OR a lesson in wielding the magic of socio-technical ergonomics.

It’s Time to Make Every Weekend a Long Weekend

In December 1999 I walked in to the office of my boss, Tom Kennedy – CEO of Brainwaave, a pioneering multimedia agency. My partner and I had our first child on the way, and home life was suddenly feeling very important. So I asked for a four-day week at full pay.

art

Forty years of making pictures with computers

I started young, a nine-year-old kid teaching myself 6502 assembly language so that I could make the lights move on the KIM-1 microcomputer that my Dad brought home, a gift from a friend of his who worked at the CSIRO*... [read more]

research

A hallway conversation with Hiroshi Ishii and Lian Loke

When you have a moment to be advised by someone who leads the world in a field of enquiry, it's good to listen closely.

Strategy

A fireside chat

At this year's REMIX festival I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my dear friend Mark Pesce (alongside the marvellous Simone Chua from the light sculpture and immersive design studio Amigo and Amigo) on creative entrepreneurship – here is what I wish I'd known when I started out, and what

design

Personal, tangible, emotional

A Design Fiction: ABC Ticker is a news feed delivered with your morning coffee, personalised just for you and printed on your receipt. Made with wizard-of-oz prototyping and real test users.

collaboration

Space, Place and 場

Let’s start with 場. In architectural theory we say that a place is a space with a history. But what about the present? What do we call a place where history is being created? A rich place full of interaction and possibility, a place for emerging relationships?

innovation

Innovation and Creative Intelligence

After three years at the ABC, first as a UX and Innovation Strategy consultant and then as creative director of R&D, I’m moving on – taking on consulting work and writing up my PhD. And it’s wonderful to see how many amazing things are going on in the world.

research

Experience Art

Back in 2008 I presented a paper at OZCHI in Cairns, and met a few of my research heroes. I documented the experience on Twitter, but despite my optimism at the time there is no longer any trace of those tweets. So this year...

creativity

How Creativity Works, and How the Patent System Thinks it Works

Last week our national broadcaster hosted Edward Jung of Intellectual Ventures , a company that "has earned a special brand of hatred in the business world as the ultimate patent troll". This week they kindly allowed me to present a brief counterpoint:

research

Creativity and Cognition 2011

Just back from Creativity and Cognition 2011, which was truly ace. I gave the paper I wrote with my co-supervisor, Prof. Ernest Edmonds, which people seemed to like. Saw some thought-provoking presentations and met a number of inspiring and wonderful people. Here are some highlights:

collaboration

Notes from a SIGGRAPH Panel on Successful Creative Collaboration Across Time & Space

What makes collaboration work? Let's hear from Tim McLaughlin (Texas A&M University), Tommy Burnette (Lucasfilm Singapore), Tim Fields (Certain Affinity), Jonathan Gibbs (DreamWorks Animation) and David Parrish (Reel FX Creative Studios).

prototypes

Imaginary tablets

For those of us interested in how humans interact with our machines, how socio-technical systems are made and how they make us, this is a precious moment. Tomorrow the probability waveforms collapse...

design

Reclaiming Affordances

The next time you're about to use the word “affordance”, please stop and check if the word “cue” would work instead. Because if it would, then you're doing it wrong. And here's why that matters.

research

Creativity and Cognition 2009

In a few hours I’m off to Berkeley for Creativity and Cognition 2009 to participate in the Graduate Symposium. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ben Shneiderman, Jane Prophet and my advisor Ernest Edmonds...

Strategy

Prior Art

It was an intoxicating time before the first .com crash and we filled our days with experiments in virtual worlds, multiplayer gaming, videoconferencing and other exotic attempts to figure out what to do with the new 10Mb/sec (symmetrical!) connections. And of course, internet video.

design

Form factors

[From September 2009, four months before the iPad launch] – I’ve been obsessed lately with form factors for interactive devices. To the extent that I’ve been carrying around models of tablet computers made of foam core and acetate, just to get the feel...

VR

The longer it takes you to catch on, the more visionary I get

Take a look at the wonderful, terrible Immersive Workspaces from Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red.

collaboration

Tap tap tap – a case study for distributed collaborative creativity.

Taptaptap make iPhone apps, but they’re not an old-fashioned development shop. Times have changed.

What is it that we are trying to create, when we say that we are building worlds?

[Originally published 1997] First let us see who we are. The community of worldbuilders can be found at sci.virtual-worlds, but you'll find more conversation in comp.lang.vrml. It is currently quite a difficult and technical pursuit, to build a world online. There are few good tools available.