In this talk, David Merrill gives us an overview of his research on a number of novel platforms for accessing and manipulating digital content. These systems use expressive gesture and visual attention as inputs, explore multi-user interaction, and leverage our understanding of physical materials. I will focus on my most ambitious project and Ph.D. topic, Siftables, a tangible interaction platform that gives physical embodiment to information and digital media items. The system utilizes sensing, graphical display, embedded computation and wireless communication to free interactions with digital content from the desktop environment. Siftables points the way toward a new generation of interactive tools that bend to our needs, rather than bending us to meet their limitations.

While interaction designers have strong evaluation skills through quantitative research such as usability, IxD lacks the same types of aesthetic-based design criticism that graphic design, architecture and industrial design have. This 25-minutes presentation is meant to offer the beginnings of a discussion around what could are the foundations of interaction design, how do they impact aesthetics of interaction and how can they be used for design critique within an interaction design practice [...]

China, the world’s largest cell phone exporter, is expected to maintain momentum in both production and marketing of mobile phones in the remaining of this year, CCID Consulting said recently. The company predicted that China would produce 605 million cell phones for the whole of 2008, a growth of 16.9 percent over last year, and sell 205 million at home, up 17.55 percent. The foreign sales would amount to 400 million units, up 16.79 percent…

CCID Consulting, China’s leading research, consulting and IT outsourcing service provider, recently released its article on mobile phone market increasing in large scale. From data by CCID Consulting, the sales volume in China’s mobile market is 150 million units in 2007, which is 24.1% more than that of 2006. If black-market mobiles from smuggling, unregistered brands and other illegal products are counted, the number exceeded 200 million in 2007. The China mobile market has started development on a large scale driven by market demand and technology renovation…

China’s mobile phone sales will be lower than expected after the May earthquake and a lack of state of the art applications depressed sales in the second quarter, a Beijing-based research firm said recently. CCID Consulting, a research group with the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry, cut its 2008 domestic handset sales forecast to 165 million units from 185 million units. ‘The handset market lacks innovations and the 3G market has only just started so many consumers have adopted a wait-and-see attitude,’ said Li Xuefang, a CCID analyst…