User intervention

A credit card swipe terminal with user modification. The clerk explained to me that people kept choosing the wrong screen button. Something about credit versus enter. The user fix covers up the confusing button.

A related story, at an iSchool discussion last year, a PhD student was complaining about how his users kept making the same mistakes with his interface. I sheepishly suggested that maybe the problem was with the design. He hadn't considered that...

Game Deaths

Stumbled upon this video compilation of death scenes in vintage video games starting with Pong and ending with F-15 Strike Eagle (?).



->r

University of Texas Second Life Presence

The UT Second Life presence named one of "The 2009 Ten Best Public Good Projects in the Metaverse". http://bit.ly/8MaWaT

I had the pleasure of being involved with one of the first projects (http://blogs.utexas.edu/triggsrg/ and http://slurl.com/secondlife/Educators%20Coop%206/33/254/1003) in SL at UT that was a precursor to the UT System's being the first state university to enter a persistent online environment as an entire system. 49 islands representing each of the 15 campuses across the state used for instruction, public outreach and experimentation.

The instigator of this grand project was a dear friend Dr Leslie Jarmon who passed away in November. Her tenacity and undying energy and generosity will always be an inspiration.



-rt

Local Vernacular

In this section I would like to talk a little about the role of the vernacular in local public spaces. In particular, I am interested in exploring the potential intersection between the sign as an informational display and its use of vernacular language (visual and/or text-based). For the purposes of illustration, I begin my journey with a walk through the area in which I reside. For me, the challenge is to find ways of looking and seeing things differently; to jar myself out of a position of routine where seeing the same thing everyday has actually become a position of non-seeing.

Michel de Certeau in his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) talks about how a walk through a city may be read as an 'urban text'. He proposes that the walker (or 'user of a city') constructs through a process of selection a 'rhetoric of walking' defined by 'turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures"'. The signs which I encounter in my journey through South London are at the same time informational and metaphorical.

I offer up two brief examples.  A few months ago, the local charity shops changed their display windows to reflect a more autumnal theme. Instead of the usual display of clothing on mannequins, their heads were repurposed with large papier-mâché squirrel's heads. Not only did this approach to visual merchandising get the passerby to look twice, but also immediately communicated the arrival of a new consignment. And, we could take this reading to it's logical end, you could equate the notion of thrifting with the squirrels' hoarding of their nuts.

The second example is a small blackboard turned into a sign which each day is propped up against the fence outside the local tea shop. The handwritten text and  illustrations of a teapot and cup are sweetly naive. This is reinforced by the use of words such as 'glorious' and 'love' with an authenticity evoked by the use of descriptors such as 'real' and 'home-made'.  The last sentence makes the point that 'Evreything (sic) is cooked with love' - with the word everything' misspelled.

Both these examples express an author's or maker's hand. These signs are visually constructed using recognizable forms and techniques forming a language which is read and understood by the way it is 'materially placed in the world'. In other words, it may be suggested quite simply that these signs become as Scollon and Scollon have argued, 'signs in place' (2003).

[caption id="attachment_110" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Charity Shop Window, South London, 2009"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_111" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Tea Shop Sign, South London, 2009"][/caption]

From Here to There

These are a few of those common, everyday signs which in a context familiar to you would not be anything but a sign. However, travel to somewhere else in the world and signs are at the same time familiar but not the same.

[caption id="attachment_96" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Phone Box in Durban, South Africa."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_97" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Hair Salon. Durban, South Africa"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_98" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Warning Sign. Game Reserve, South Africa"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_102" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Supermarket, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_104" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Supermarket, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia"][/caption]

These are a few of those common, everyday signs which in a context familiar to you would not be anything but a sign. However, travel to somewhere else in the world and signs are at the same time familiar but not the same.

[caption id="attachment_96" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Phone Box in Durban, South Africa."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_97" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Hair Salon. Durban, South Africa"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_99" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Supermarket, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_98" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Warning Sign. Game Reserve, South Africa"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_102" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Supermarket, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia"][/caption]

Signs from Here and There

These are a few of those common, everyday signs which in a context familiar to you would not be anything but a sign. However, travel to somewhere else in the world and signs are at the same time familiar but not the same.

[caption id="attachment_96" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Phone Box in Durban, South Africa."][/caption]