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Last semester I joined the Journal Club lecture at our University. I continued my research in gesture based interaction for screen-based environments. This little paper research was based on the question how the screen size influences the gesture design. In the end I created a short presentation about important conferences for gesture design, and summarized the results of 4 papers. Thanks to Martin Kaltenbrunner for his useful advices!

Furthermore, I found a bunch of very interesting papers for designing gestures in screen-based environments. I want to share these papers with you. You are welcome to add comments about the papers or recommend other nice projects! (use the tooltip for only reading the titles of the papers)
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For several months I worked on technical paper about designing gestures for screen-based environments. Finally, it is finished and you can read it. Here is the abstract:

This paper analyses gesture design for pointing devices in screen-based environments. By exploring design patterns the analysis investigated the gesture design of five different end-user products: Desktop operating systems, mobile operating systems, 3rd Party software, small software products, and common hardware products. The beginning of the paper defines what a gesture is, and the various kinds of gestures. Afterwards the analysis merges the gesture design results with the basic commands for pointing devices. This approach points out which gestures are often used, and in which context they are used. The results give interaction designers and software engineers a guide for implementing gestures in their own products. Furthermore, the paper proposes solutions for gesture documentation, and a conceptual framework for complicated gestures. The last section takes an industrial design perspective on pointing devices as an input channel. It discusses the evolution of interface design from a hardware driven to a software driven approach.

Please note:

Unfortunately, I got sick on a long-term disease. Therefore it took me so long for writing this paper and that is also the reason why the data of the analysis is from January of 2010. However, in my opinion the results of my analysis are still valid. For more up-to-date data, please check the Touch Gesture Reference from LukeW.

Acknowledgement:

I am very happy about the support from my teachers, friends, and fellow students. Big thanks to Mahir M. Yavuz and Mathias Stäbler for the content feedback. Vesela Mihaylova for a great Adobe Illustrator and graphic design support. Tim Devine for transforming over 30 pages of my bad english in a readable form, and marking some unclear points of my paper. Dudes, thank you so much!

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The book Designing Interaction from Bill Moggridge was already published in 2006. Even it is quite old for a technology book the content is still valid. The first six chapters give a perfect history background of human-computer interaction. The evolution of input devices and the computer itself is very good explained. Also the original comments from the designers and engineers are very interesting to read.  In the end the reader gets a very good introduction how and why the computer evolved as it is today. Even the described history is a strongly based on the authors view.  The chapters Adopting Technology and Multisensory and Multimedia gives a nice introduction into tangible interaction. It also helps beginners to understand how to leave the desktop metaphor. The whole book describes very easily how product designer, industrial designer, psychologist and engineers working together for developing the new devices. The texts about their development and thinking processes gives a very good insight. The last chapters about The Internet, Futures and Alternatives Nows, and People and Prototypes are nice to read, but with some comments I can't agree. For this reason, the aspects of Emotional Design and Prototyping are little bit weak in my opinion. However, reading the first six chapters is very useful for human-computer interaction beginners. It makes their knowledge around the history of Interaction Design more stable. The last chapters are nice to read, but not very obligatory. Unfortunately, the multimedia CD of the book I never really checked.  So I can't say if it is good or not. For professional interaction designer is almost nothing new in this book, so I can't recommend it for them.

A small summary of my Twitter messages from July - October 2010:

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from March - June 2010:

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Now I am almost studying Interactive Art for one year. Me, as a Flash and Flex Developer, like coding with audio-visual and interaction-based content. But if I am honest, in the last time I did not use Flash in my projects at all. I had to deal with some other powerful creative coding tools. Some of these tools provide me, as an artist, much more freedom than the Flash plattform can ever provide. For example, creating a visual output for multi-displays applications, programming on hardware (arduino), some real-time video tracking (face detection) experiments, using special Open-GL Renderer for 3D graphics and so on. But I also ran into problems, which I would never have with using Flash. Especially, when I worked together with unexperienced programmer. For this reason, I will describe some of these creative coding tools with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. After this article you should have a good overview about the available tools in creative coding.

Creative Coding Tools Overview

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from Januar - February 2010:

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from November - December 2009:

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During the first semester of my study Interface Culture at the University of Art in Linz I had to write some papers about interactive art. My first papers dealt with the history of interactive art and continued with some different art movements in this domain. In some cases I am more or less satisfied with my papers. Anyway, I think every 2page long paper contains some interesting points for Interaction Designer, Web Designer, Web Developer, Web Artists, Computer Scientists etc.. That is the reason why I want to share my written work with you.

Please consider that all my papers here were an assignment for the master classes of Interactive Art by Christa Sommerer. My papers don't meet the requirements of a scientific work despite the fact that the format seems to be scientific. All my texts represent partly more my own thoughts on the different art topics, so please interpret my papers as a short essay or summary. My thoughts are mainly based on the first and second references, which are mentioned at the end of each paper. I highly recommend to read these references, because they are a very good collection for delivering an introduction in the domain of interactive art. Thanks Christa for this great collection of references and the introduction!

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from September - October 2009:

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