As usual, the September/October issue of Interactions contains many interesting articles and commentary, but there are two items of particular note to product design researchers (subscription required to access full articles):
- Gretchen Anderson of LUNAR discusses the the convergence of interaction design and industrial design in Let's Get Physical. She includes a set of constraints to consider when pairing a UI with hardware such as size & placement, differentiation and iconic appearance, "controls will be like facial features that make the product instantly recognizable."
- I (Rob Tannen) have an article that covers some of the latest technologies that can be applied to field research in The Researcher-Tool Mismatch: Improving the fit between user researchers and technology. The article takes a look at several tools, including video (high definition, high speed video) and audio technologies like the LiveScribe Pulse Pen, "For ethnographic observations, both conversations and environmental sounds can be unobtrusively recorded (in stereo) while taking notes. While the device does not provide the highest-resolution audio quality, it increases the working bandwidthand accuracy of the design researcher."