Ha Dong Nguyen is a 35-year-old video game artist and game developer from Vietnam. He graduated as an engineer in Information Technology. Hanoi University of Technology is a prestigious school that taught many Vietnamese talented engineers. However, Nguyen never had a vision as a world-famous game programmer when he grew up in Van Phuc, a…
Hologram Augmented Reality
With the recent development of Augmented Reality, I believe the technology that can display interactive digital objects and characters as holograms within the real environment will soon be popular. Maybe it will need to have holographic projectors, combining with hand gesture technologies, shape, and face recognition. The possibilities are endless. We might don’t need that…
Virtual Reality=Alternative Reality?
Death is inevitable, but how to deal with it is varies from person to person. The coronavirus pandemic, for instance, has recently led to a spike in zoom funeral since people need the virtual space for interactions. This change raises some questions: What if you could reunite with your loved ones in virtual reality? This…
Redesign the smartphone case and text app
The mobile is an integral part of our everyday life and work. However, the flat screen of a smartphone is difficult for the blind and visually impaired to operate. Because of these kinds of inconveniences, millions of people around the globe feel excluded. I hope to improve this problem with a phone case and a…
Information Architecture for IXD project
One of my first encounters with Information Architecture, to be more exact is the first encounter I actually recognized that is my first official UX project from Kate Rutter’s UX Foundation class. The brief for this project is to create a tool on Amazon that enables faculties to efficiently collate items into kits and students…
Women in Programming: Corrinne Yu
Until beginning her career as a technical programmer, Corrinne Yu attended California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, to study electrical engineering. Corrinne Yu is an awesome individual. People have most known her as the principal programmer for the Halo team at Microsoft. Unlike what people expected from a petite Asian woman, she dresses like a rock…
Solitaire paved the way!
Based on a century years old card game, Microsoft Solitaire was first introduced more than 30 years ago and ended up becoming one of the most played video games in history. This game has been entertaining and introduced computer games to more than 500 million players all around the world. Microsoft’s Paul Jensen, studio manager…
Mariam Braimah-a bridge between Nigeria and Silicon Valley
Mariam Braimah is the Lead Product Designer at Netflix and founder of the Kimoyo Fellowship, a design program that connects designers to leading tech industry professionals across the African diaspora. Braimah was born and raised in New York and moved to San Francisco after college when she decided to be a UI/UX designer. When she…
Social media community
Social connections are building blocks of our society. Just like how telephone or television was celebrated as the most innovative communication, I believe social media did not reduce social connectivity. If anything, social media likely increased connectivity or reduced the cost of communicating with others. However, it was criticized for its large connectivity as superficial…
GUI: don’t change what isn’t broken
In 1981, Xerox introduced the 8010 “Star” Information System. Star’s introduction was an important event in the history of personal computing because it changed how interactive systems should be designed from now on. Today, windows, mice, and icons are the norm, but Star’s bitmapped screen, mouse-driven interface, and icons were unique at that time. The…
Life is tough but so are you!
Oregon Trail is a very educational game. It takes you on a Westward journey, follows the footsteps of many Americans in the 1840s. Life was tough back then and so does this game. The user interface is really simple but the game demands a great amount of attention and skills. The characters keep hurting themselves,…
From 2D to 3D
Muriel Cooper and her team built the Visual Language Workshop as a typographic landscape that gathered information to get organized in a virtual reality map. In the “identifiable neighborhood” pattern, Alexander suggested that “people need an identifiable spatial unit to belong to.” I think it’s also true in keeping the same identifiable qualities of 2D…
Judith Donath and Deceptive Technologies
Judith Donath is a designer, computer science researcher, artist, and writer whose works ask fundamental questions about our interaction with new technologies and addresses the need for critical thinking and discernment. In 2014, she published The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Donath has been always passionate about how communication technologies change society. Judith Donath…
Forget the cubicles!
Whenever the word “workplace” pops up, the first image that comes to your mind might be a company with many square identical cubicles. But the modern workplace can be totally different as many organizations turn to mainly run on digital platforms. Stack is an instant messaging platform that combines chat and emails. According to Christopher…
Man+Computer=?
Right from the title “Man-computer symbiosis” suggested a complementary relationship between humans and computers. As Licklider imagined a better world with computers, actual users began to communicate with computers. From chats in time-sharing systems to more elaborate real-time interactions in computer defense systems, these early computer infrastructures foreshadowed the many networks operating online today and…
From a demo to a dystopia?
More than fifty years ago, Doug Engelbart showed a preview of the future. Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs: communication and collaboration. Instead of punch cards and taking a while to process, computers should have keyboards and screens that are responsive. So, he with his time built…
Catt Small and Problems of portraying Blackness in Video Games
Catt Small is a product designer, game maker, and developer. In an interview with “Gaming on Tumblr”, she considered herself “a creative technologist”. She is “an artist who loves to learn and explore through the lens of code and other technology-centric resources.” She started coding around the age of 10 and designing at the age…
The more the merrier!
A multidisciplinary design approach seeks to integrate the different skillsets into the design process. While it’s important to specialize in one area, a designer who has more to offer brings extra benefits. In the process of working with many different areas, the mid-century designers discovered new approaches to the same old problem. And by shifting…
The mid-century foundation
The mid-century is the age of interdisciplinary. Instead of focusing on one single aspect, designers from the mid-century experienced in different areas, and their works built the foundations for interaction design. And in this post, I want to write about the influences from multi-disciplined designers Charles and Ray Eams, Ladislav Sutnar, Karl Gerstner, and Henry…