Last year at IxDA’s Interaction 09, Johnny Holland interviewed Mark Baskinger, associate professor at the School of Design of the Carnegie Mellon University.Mark talks about drawing ideas and shares his thoughts about the differences between industrial designers and interaction designers and how interaction designers can use sketching to communicate their designs better [...]

Want to do design research cheaply and efficiently with participants anywhere in the world? (Of course.) Want to observe real users in their native technology environments, from the comfort of your own desk? (Who doesn’t?) But what software and hardware do you need, and will it actually work?Bolt|Peters’ Cyd Harrell covers the most powerful tools for un-moderated conceptual research, remote screen observation, participant communication, observer involvement, session recording, time-aware tasks, and real-time recruiting. Get the lowdown on UserVue, Acrobat Connect, GoTo Meeting, Loop11, OpenHallway, UserZoom, Optimal Sort, Ethnio, and more [...]

Researchers have been busy calculating what China’s carbon emissions target announced last year will mean for the average family [...]

In a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek analysis, Sebastian Wernicke turns the tools of statistical analysis on TEDTalks, to come up with a metric for creating “the optimum TEDTalk” based on user ratings. How do you rate it? “Jaw-dropping”? “Unconvincing”? Or just plain “Funny”?

Many university students under pressure are turning to the Internet for help – not for research, but to find someone to write their reports for them [...]

China’s announced target to cut carbon intensity would cost the country 30 billion U.S. dollars each year during the next decade, a report carried by China Daily said [...]

In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft [...]

Stimulus policies spurring Chinese domestic consumption will be maintained in 2010, while high sales growth of home appliances and automobiles due to the stimulus packages will not affect consumption, analysts predict [...]

Metaphor brainstorming is most useful during the early stages of design for developing conceptual models, generating requirements, and early user interface design where you are specifying the relationship between features and specific user interface metaphors. In this workshop, Chauncey Wilson will:

1. Describe the metaphor brainstorming process;
2. Explain how take the output and convert that into requirements and design concepts;

We’ve already seen MIT researcher Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense projector-based augmented-reality system in some cool demos, but he just gave a TED talk and his latest ideas are the wildest yet. At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.