Me, talking to the chaps from Slub about livecoding and the like, for Wired. Turned out alright, I think. Shame there wasn't space for it in the print edition in the end, but online now.

"That is not to say that videogames need to be more sensationalist, more vulgar, or more crass, but that they need not fear being more transgressive, or more expressive, or more visceral. They need not to shy away from their darker depictions of our fantasies, or become embarrassed when people point out how they dwell on violence and excitement. This, the safe excursion to the gladiatorial arena, is what games do best." Rossignol on Ballard, and jolly good too.

Clive Thompson on how Mirror's Edge "hacks" your proprioception: "it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic."

"...Nintendo understands that while play does involve competition, territoriality and rehearsal for war, it also involves silliness, laughter and fun." Oh, god, can I just marry Stephen Fry now? Oh, there's a queue. Never mind.

"There's only one problem with this theory of depression: it's almost certainly wrong, or at the very least woefully incomplete."

"These rules were obtained from the text Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman. [they] are derived heuristically from experience and applicable in most interactive systems after being properly refined, extended, and interpreted."

"...visiting [Lego's] secret vault guarding almost every Lego set ever manufactured—touched me in a way I didn't expect. This wasn't amazement or simple awe... these were tickets to ride a time portal to emotions and simpler days long forgotten."

"This is an important game - ... important because it is so ambitious, so detailed, so confident in its originality and inventiveness. It would sort of be an act of cultural irresponsibility not to play it."

Not quite sure what point Poynor's trying to make; in many ways, his list of examples at the end really is a list of design thinking examples - architecture, engineering, etc, seen with a design hat on. Lots of statements I'm uncomfortable with in this.

"a superhero’s costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist’s sleight of hand." Michael Chabon on the escapism of costume.

"...a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths."

"The main thing you don’t learn with a CS degree is how to develop software, although you will probably build up certain muscles in your brain that may help you later if you decide that developing software is what you want to do."

"Software is everything. It also sucks." Fascinating article on remedying that idea, about the team that writes software for the Space Shuttle. It's practically the polar opposite of web development. Some bits of that are probably good; some are perhaps n

Remarkable piece from Adam Greenfield on experience design. The second time I've seen the Saarinen quotation pop-up, too. A must-read.

List of corporations, and their "official" typeface (usually for their logotype, but also for other things).

Jesper Juul on "goal-less" games, sandbox or otherwise.

"Sure you can still make out the words, but you’ve eliminated all the subtleties of hundreds of years of typographic design elements that were put there to make things easier to read." Lots of good articles about web typography right now.

(by Jared Spool)

In the paper we present two taxonomies of tagging, the first dedicated to design decisions in tagging systems, and the second to the incentives that drive people to tag therein.

Lots of lovely free IxD pdfs. Better read them, then.

Featuring, of course, Remind.

Comprehensive article on Remind

Lego 'hired' Mindstorms geeks to help them develop a next generation of Mindstorms system. This Wired article explains what happens. Fun.