On Friday night I went to the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A museum.  Decode bills itself as showcasing “the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations.” and on the whole it lives up to this.

The exhibition begins with an interactive light and sound installation – lights shaped like reeds that react as you walk through them. It was fun, and interactive, and a great introduction to the exhibit. The next part was devoted to artworks rendered by code, graphical representations of mathematical algorythms and live infographics. All quite pretty, but a number of them were on small 19 inch screens set into walls that required visitors to be up close and personal, and viewable by only 1 or 2 people at a time. These pieces would have been much more impressive if displayed at a larger scale, or projected onto larger spaces.

The rest of the exhibit was dedicated to interactive pieces. My favourite exhibit was called Oasis – a lightbox covered in sand that acted like a pond. Shifting the sand around caused AI fish and amoebas to appear that grew and swam around. Fun, cute and a great way to get people interacting. I did however think it needed to have a bit more colour – black fish/amoebas on a white background covered in black sand meant that sometimes the little fish/amoebas got missed. Colour would help them standout and perhaps create more visual feedback, for example changing colours the longer the fish has been in existance.

It was also a shame that some of the bigger interactive pieces were either away being repaired, or not functioning correctly on the night.  One of the perils on these types of works is that technology tends to be fragile. Things break, programs crash or freeze or sometimes they stop working for no reason.

Despite that it was still a good exhibit overall. I would have liked it to be bigger, to have more works but for £5 I’m not going to complain. I’d definitely recommend it as worthwhile, especially for the varying styles of interaction on show and also for the sheer novelty factor of being in a venue like the V&A for such a nerdy show!

Edited 11/02

It has been brought to my attention that the Decode exhibition was actually done as a joint collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a digital arts organisation. onedotzero look like they’re doing some interesting stuff, so go check them out.

Via The Librarian in Black I’ve discovered tht the Library Journal now has a new column on User Experience. As a librarian who has moved into user experience work this makes me rather pleased.

User experience is incredibly important and I think even more so in libraries. Especially when you think about the standard OPAC available at many libraries. So many of them are awful to use, clunky and badly designed and really need a good looking at.  And often this carries across to the physical space itself. As the author, Aaron Schmidt, points out in the first post, even something as simple as moving the location of a stapler to make it more accessible to patrons can result in a huge improvement to the users experience of a space.

I’m of the opinion that more librarians need to have a basic awareness of user experience principles, so I’m pleased that someone is tackling this. I hope it gets widely read and leads to an increase in fantastic experiences at libraries everywhere.

The Information Architecture Institute is currently running a competition to Explain IA. There’s a $1000 prize involved too!

In this contest, you are invited to explain information architecture. What is it? Why is it important? What does it mean to you? Some folks may offer a definition in 140 characters or less, while others will use this opportunity to tell a story (using text, pictures, audio, and/or video) about their relationship to IA. Anyone can enter, but only IA Institute members can vote for the winners.

Entries are added to the Explain IA Flickr pool and I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with. I’ll also be putting my thinking cap on to see if I can come up with something to submit.

Finally, Chrome has enabled extensions! I’ve pretty much exclusively been using chrome at home for about the past 6 months, but have been really noticing the lack of extensions. Especially the adblocker! I had gotten so used to using all the added features of Firefox that using chrome at first felt like taking giant steps backwards.

I will be watching with interest how the extensions progress and also keeping an eye out on how they affect the performance of Chrome. I am the kind of user who has a minimum of 20 tabs open at a time, so I’m very interested in seeing any performance issues.

As such, I’ve only put a few extensions on – the essentials as it were. Adblock, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter. Are there any extensions that are simply must haves that I’ve forgotten?

The Journal of Information Architecture’s second issue is now available.

I haven’t read it all yet, but I’m part way through the article on Card Sorting, Category Validity, and Contextual Navigation by Stefano Bussolon which is long but incredibly interesting.