Professor Kimiko Ryokai has a joint appointment between the School of Information and the Center for New Media at UC-Berkeley. She started teaching Tangible User Interfaces at the I-School last year, in the Fall of 2007. Unfortunately for me, I graduated in the Spring of 2007 and missed her class by a year.The class hosted an open-house last week, which, of course, I could not make it because I have a 9-5 job and the open house was in the afternoon. Read the article on the showcase from this year here.

Looking through the project ideas on the course website shows a couple really unique ideas, including the Peter and the Wolf Storytelling Mixer which reminds me of some work I came across at Georgia Tech over 4 years ago.  The crux of this mixer is bringing music to children, and this is part of  what Gil Weinberg has been doing at Georgia Tech. He builds on the idea that music is good for children and their development, but that instruments are too complex for infants and children younger than 8 or so to play. Young children can benefit from creating and playing with music using simpler toys or instruments. Here’s a video about his Shapers:

This is where I have to admit that when I was applying to graduate school back in 2004, the idea of going to Georgia Tech’s HCI program and working with Professor Weinberg really excited me. I went to visit him during the summer of 2004, on my way back from Texas A&M, because I really admired his work. He was gracious enough to meet with me, but I did not end up going to Atlanta, instead heading to Berkeley in the Fall of 2005.

You can also watch a video about the Bubblegum Sequencer, a project from last year’s TUI class that got a fair amount of publicity:

Find an article about this class at SFGATE.com

It’s a Virginia morning in my inbox. Here’s another post about The University:

I just received an email from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Virginia asking for a donation.  Now, I know that the SEAS has been strapped for cash lately since I had to pay for my own travel costs to guest lecture in a 2nd year class there this fall.  Since there were no speaking fees, I decided that was my contribution for the year and I would reconsider making a donation in the year to come.  The email I received this morning was the following:

Please let me know if you agree: This is NOT viral marketing. Correct? The reason this is not viral marketing is because viral marketing means that the message or content travels through a series of channels that are not always initiated by the original sender. So sending an email to your alumni base, is not considered Viral Marketing, it’s considered Mass Marketing, Mail Marketing, or in this case, Fundraising. In addition, a quick search of viral marketing on google shows the first result:

“Viral marketing is a marketing strategy that encourages email recipients to pass along messages to others in order to generate added exposure.” source

Right, and I do not see the email asking me to forward it on to anyone. Furthermore, if they paid a consulting agency to tell them that “viral” marketing was the next big thing, and all they come up with was this email, I’m certainly not going to give them any money. They just wasted the money they had!

Finally, I get that they are trying to make some joke that Viral Marketing isn’t Science, and they’ll stick to what they are good at: Science. But really that dismisses all the research that has gone into why viral marketing is so effective; this includes very scientific research coming from our nation’s Sociology departments.