Dan Howard: The Visionary

For this week’s blog post my task was to interview Dan Howard. Dan is an incredibly interesting character who has a wide range of interests and experiences spanning from being the lead singer in his band (Wintermute), the arts and games design (software and board games). With regards to research, Dan enjoys the more philosophical and abstract topics within HCI such as when we looked into Ambiguity within the first week. Another topic much enjoyed by Dan was UbiComp; the excitement of imagining how technology will shape our future lives (or indeed how the future will dictate the direction of technology?).

Dan did not come across many challenges within HCI; he was always quite comfortable with the tasks at hand however, through time, he realised that there was a lack of technological context to his research. He felt he was not completely aware of what technology was available to us at this present time which made it difficult to think about what was feasibly possible with regards to his own ideas. Similarly to myself, Dan found the area of Tangibles a little bit unclear with how it could be interpreted. He did not see the need for deliberation when trying to distinguish one area of HCI from another and wanted to know why such areas had been ‘labelled’ so categorically. I’m sure Dan had his own thoughts when witnessing Aare defend his tangible Hololens last week.

Moving onto his MRes project, Dan’s extensive experience within galleries has given him a solid foundation for which to build upon. His project ideas currently revolve around creating a digital solution for commissioning events. Another project area Dan expressed a great deal of interest in was board game design and in particular, educational games (PC based) for young people.

Within future HCI sessions, Dan would like to investigate more into what has already been achieved within HCI. There should be more context, being able to look at HCI from a timeline perspective which gives indication to what the major achievements were as well as the possible failings. We have covered this to a certain extent with the HCI waves however only one group was given the opportunity to explore this in any great amount of detail. At this point, knowing a little bit more than what we did at the start of the course; it might be worth looking back to reflect on what has been covered and try to establish what has already been researched or attempted.

I found some interesting links and papers for Dan.

This source is not the most appealing to read (aesthetically not laid out very well at all) however, at a glance it indicates some of the major developments in HCI prior to the year 2000. It may give Dan a bit more context. See here.

One paper which I have previously read, explores the effectiveness of introductory programming courses for students. It gives an insight into what aspects of coding are perceived harder to grasp as well as exploring the possible reasons for why certain people excel at programming whereas some are a little slower to catch on.  See here.

Stemming from another conversation we had, Dan identified his interest in getting people interested in coding (from all walks of life). He envisioned the use of objects ubiquitously placed within society where people are allowed to ‘hack’ them for small rewards to promote coding. One such paper that explores the idea of ‘curiosity objects’ to attract people’s attention is Houben who used them as a way of enticing people into interacting with public displays. The underlying idea of a ‘curiosity object’ might be something in which Dan could use to bolster his idea. Paper available here.