David Kelly on Human Centered Design

The future of Design is Human Centered Design...
A talk by David Kelly.. Truly inspiring.



http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/122

The habits of happiness

Sometimes called the "happiest man in the world," Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, author and photographer.
This is an interesting talk that I came across released by TED this November. Though a bit philosophical at times, it makes a lot of sense.

I seek Inspiration from these...

An ideal venture that I would like to have one day of my own would be comprised of these components.



Its never too late to do anything. If one has the determination, one is able to do what he/she wishes. One of the things that has had an inspiration on me is the Lines of Grey Project.
Initiated by Suchitra Vijayan, this is truly a kind of work that I would be wanting to do someday.

I volunteer for the Empowerment International Organization in Nicaragua as a Graphic Designer, and they deal with Poor Children education. Kathy Adams, the director got in touch with me over Flickr, for a video work, but due to some delay this happened. Their style of working is truly novel and a definite inspiration for me.

As I have blogged earlier as well, Children Education happens to be an area that I am deeply concerned about and I feel this is truly is a solution to the economic conditions of many countries.

I had come across this talk by Sir Ken Robinson, where he talks about "Do Schools today Kill creativity?", and how we in today's world are not giving the child the freedom to be creative. In the process how we are actually reducing the creative population.


Ideally I would like to open up something on the grounds of what Suchitra has done, on the lines of what Kathy is doing, and what Sir Ken is talking about!

Designing Games for Rural Population

One of my interest lately has been designing for the rural population.
By rural population I mean the rural population in third world countries like India, and Africa. I believe that there is a whole lot of challenges involved in this and many a times the tried and tested methods and design patterns do not work in these cases.
I came across this paper today that deals with designing games for the children in rural India.
The paper titled: "Mobile Gaming with Children in Rural India: Contextual Factors in the Use of Game Design Patterns."

This is really interesting as in the paper its discussed that the general design patterns, become not so useful, as the context varies from one culture to the other. Similarly the cognitive understanding of games are completely different for children across cultures.

Using of identified game design patterns for expert game designers, the novice designers and the developers who are not designers is important to know. Many a times the standard design patterns do not work and its nothing short of suicidal to blindly follow them.

One of the things that i seek to find out is the parameters on which the design for games, and entertainment for that matter , are dependent on. This could also mean a design pattern of the rural population. How children interpret symbols, graphics, based on myths, based on society's superstitions...


The whole thing is proposed to be a part of the framework that I call the Rural Interaction Design framework.

Mind Retention Software

Designing for emotions are difficult.
It really drains you out. It kind of makes you really emotionless at times.
One of the toughest things in a design is to have a proper concept , that is researched upon, and is supported by an argument when one is involving non-tangible things like motivation and feel good, and things like increasing the experience in a design.
Measuring these things are too subjective, I feel and a lot has to do with the users
personal views.

One of the things that we as designers tend to try doing these days is increase this emotional factor in our designs. There are numerous examples of technology trying to attain that. While I felt hat that there can be no substitute for a human-human interaction, I do hope that Human - Computer Interaction is able to do that to a large extent. This i feel is an attainable goal, owing to the fact the amount of association with technology that we have these days. Pervasive and Ubiquitous computing are these days more used and its hard to ignore technology as we look into replicating these emotions.

These days, there are numerous examples of a wide range of software applications that are being developed by people across and one thing I did come across was the Motivation tool Software.

I often wish that someone came up with a Mind Retention Software , that could track based on the brain waves, the feelings of a person and give proper signals to the person for which it is mapped, so that the person can control himself/herself better.

Memories

This pic was taken in 1994, almost 13 years ago from today.



Sitting L-R,
Amit J Kachap, ?? Bansal (dont know his first name), Avishmaran Basnet, Deependra Darnal, Pema Wangchuck Bhutia, Sarovar Ghising, Mr Timothy Lepcha (class teacher), Jalandip Lepcha, Manoj Kumar, Ankit Lamba, Anis Gurung, Aditya Gupta, Bineet Jain

Middle row Standing L-R,
Ankesh Anupam, Kunal Basak, Ashish Kujur, Manish Agarwal, Joseph Hsu, Amit Gupta, Vishal Gurung, Deepesh Kumar, Praveen Garg, Suman Ghosh, ??? , Saurab Dhakal, Kshitiz Anand,

Top row L-R
???, Prashant , Sanjay Kumar, , Pradeepto Chandra, Uttam Jhawar, Subhajit Bhattarcharya, Nazish Alam, Akhilesh Choudhary, Sushant

Trying to remember the names of all the folks in the class..

I am looking for the contact details of most of the people here. highlighted ones are with whom I am still in contact with either in person, through phone or over Orkut /other communities.

Please let me know if you know any of them! A North Pointer wishing to get in touch with fellow North Pointers.

Inspiration Africa

I am Speechless.