Addicting flash games are an under-appreciated artfor

Now that I'm learning a little about flash programming, I am blown away by the design complexity and technical skill involved in the creation of simple games. One of the coolest collections (and most mind-blowing in terms of its creation) has to be Ferry Halim's Orsinal games. They're so simple and pretty, but their design and implementation must have been quite the undertaking.

Even more basic games such as Filler must have taken forever to create. How does a professional flash game designer make a living? Or is it truly an activity for amateurs with lots of spare time?

By the way, sorry if I just wasted an hour of your day by posting those links.

Pride in your work

I am often depressed by the throw-away nature of most design work today.  Of course, almost everything is driven by economics, and the quality of the thought that went into the design of a product is usually lost in its marketing.  So frequently the product itself is secondary to its context; the design driven by avoiding the competition's patents, its features chosen by a committee of suits, its useful lifecycle (never more than a year or so at maximum) decreed by the inexorable encroachment of knock-offs and the waning patience of retailers.

So today when I was waiting for the train at the Quincy stop in the loop, I was pleasantly surprised to see this old promotion:

What pride in your design!  The Daisy Oil Can, its patent date proudly displayed on the top rim of the product (not just the number, and not hidden like on most products today), is hailed as a miracle of innovation.  Miniature people surround it, gazing longingly at its laughably oversized brilliance.  As far as I can tell, it is a glass-lined tin can which presumably does not leak as much as conventional all-tin cans.  But the damn thing looks like it's here to stay; the inventors have no shame in their sliced-bread mentality.  It's too bad that small victories are no longer deemed worthy of such celebration.

To see how far we've fallen from those glory days of wondrous invention, check out this depressingly right-on spoof from The Onion (foul language is potentially NSFW).

An idea

When Bruce Mao spoke at Northwestern recently, he discussed his frustration quantum leap between hiring somebody and not hiring somebody to your firm.  This resonated with me for two reasons.  First, for a company to take somebody on, they must be reasonably confident that it is a good long-term investment.  Companies usually cannot hire somebody for one specific project without a plan for the future; investment in training and an ongoing commitment to salary and benefits prohibits this.  Consultants and freelancers are available for particular jobs, but they are expensive and the pool of available consultants is necessarily smaller than the pool of qualified people who would like to (and are able to) contribute to a particular endeavor.  Second, as an unemployed person, I am finding it difficult to connect with a company that both suits my needs and is willing to accept my limited proven experience in the workforce.  If I did find such a company, in this economic situation I cannot even be sure that such a situation would be lasting.

So what to do about this?  There are plenty of people out there with ideas, and there are plenty of people out there with the ability to execute those ideas.  What if there was a service which would match up people with complimentary interests and abilities in order to do certain things?  A guitarist and a singer, an entrepreneur and a programmer, an engineer and a machinist, a designer and a marketer--all could meet and collaborate in a mutually beneficial way, contributing their work to society without the burden of a long-term economic commitment.

The idea is for a service in which people could post their own listing of ideas and the ephemeral gigs that could contribute to the execution.  Listings would consist of a short description of the idea--with an arbitrarily high level of disclosure--and a brief listing of what work the poster is looking for help on.  Along with this, he or she might provide a starting point for negotiations on the ownership for the concept--likely as a portion of the project's equity.  Then, anybody with the talent and desire could get in touch with person and hopefully begin a collaboration.  

One problem that I foresee with this model is people stealing others' ideas.  There are two ways to prevent this: only disclose publicly as much as you feel comfortable with, and fully document and archive all correspondence.  If somebody were to steal and attempt to patent a concept from the program, it would be well documented (through the initial posting and ensuing correspondence) where the idea actually came from and who came up with it.  In essence, I envision the exchange of ideas provided by this system to work more like the science world than the business world--where progress and knowledge well documented and credit for innovation is systematically distributed according to prearranged metrics and relationships.

An existing example of this crowdsourcing business model is the site namethis, where everybody is encouraged to contribute ideas for the name of something and the winning entry (as decided by the poster) gets compensated.  Why couldn't this model work for more expansive projects?

In the spirit of the idea, I would like the development of this service to be a sort of proof of concept for the service itself.  If anybody believes they could contribute, I would love to hear from you.  I am in the greatest need of somebody with web programming abilities and somebody with marketing abilities, but I would love to hear from anybody with suggestions or opinions about any part of this.

Flash prototyping for interaction design

For all you EDIers out there, I found a pretty useful tutorial for learning Flash for interaction design prototyping.  I went through it last night, and it does a good job of explaining not only some simple ActionScript commands, but also some of the logic behind what you're doing. 

Hope this helps!

Misdirected Text Messages: Volume 1

[Ed. Note: Post originally written over the summer; content still holds true; will follow up soon.

For years now I've been the recipient of SMS messages intended for other people on a multi-daily basis. The messages represent a seemingly random cross section of all the correspondence that passes through Verizon's system; there is no pattern in the senders or the messages themselves. Not once have I received a solicitation of any kind, so it seems unlikely that this is "spam" in its normal form. The senders are always different-- sometimes from phone numbers and sometimes through Verizon's VTEXT.COM address-- and the messages are as varied as they possibly could be. On occasion, I've tried responding to a text, but I've never gotten a clear answer. It's quite annoying.

Anyways, I can't decide what else to do with these messages, so I'm going to post some of the more interesting ones here on an ongoing basis. There's no real point to this, but I hope that somebody finds it amusing.

---

Mon, Jul 14, 2: 37 pm

From: ONEMARTIALARTIST@VTEXT.COM

He says yes to that if Any swelling or pain exists 24 hrs after metoral dose pack is over.That treatment is ordered on Standby anytim

Troy

Fri, Jul 11, 9:48 pm

From: 415-302-3587

Hi - been running around lk a banshee oday. Wish u wr only 3 hrs diff- need a shouldr- bn a tf day n wshd i was outta here already. L try 2 call u tmro

Thu, Jul 10, 2:06 pm

From: 404-227-4548

with a woman in this culture is not possibility for me because of cultural differ's. i been with o

Wed, Jul 9. 12:01 pm

From: 503-930-5457

throwing up earlier trying to get ready now

Tue, Jul 8, 9:40 pm

From: 425-698-3498

yes is ok i want to shop here a little to try and find size 11 shoes...did you get my money message...how much was the flight

Sat, Jul 5, 9:17 pm

From: 4147597970@VTEXT.COM

Thats cool though. You can get a hook hand and join your mom as a pirate. Hopefully a bottle rocket will take out your eye tonight.

A Revolution in Design Research

Last Thursday, I attended a lecture by Jodi Forlizzi about her research at CMU on human-computer interaction and her thoughts on the ongoing "revolution in design research." The revolution, as I understand it, has to do with design research becoming a better respected and defined method of developing products and aiding in the scientific process. The crux of her definition of design research is that it is a seach for the "real," whereas conventional scientific research is the search for the "truth."

Dr. Forlizzi focused the second half of her talk on a project called the "SnackBot" which, as you could probably guess, is designed to bring snacks around to people at CMU. There seems like a lot that you can do with a SnackBot, and parts of the design seemed well grounded in the ethnographic study of people's snacking habits. Of course, as she was describing her research insights and challenges, and how they led to a humanoid form of certain proportions and abilities, I couldn't help but think of this:


Rosie Jetson is the ultimate snackbot. While I don't mean to dimish the work of Dr. Forlizzi or others working in the robotics field, who would have guessed that given the technological revolution of the past few decades, we are not even close to making something with the abilities of this 1962 Hanna-Barbera conception. Not to say that having a fleet of maid-robots wheeling around our houses would be a good thing, but I feel like we've been promised these household humanoid robots for decades, and it seems like it's never going to happen. When will I have a comprehending metal assistant to perform all of my menial tasks for me? Is this the ultimate goal that is driving robotics specialists to create such things as SnackBot?