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Recent Entries

A conversation with Ed Niehaus, new CEO of Cooper
A few weeks ago, Cooper appointed Ed Niehaus as President & CEO. Ed is a Valley veteran, with a rich background is in public relations, branding and business-building. He met Alan when Visual Basic was merely a twinkle in Alan's eye, and since then, Ed has worked with a long... (Continue)
A “to do” list for integrating design into your organization
The good news: whether it’s thanks to the economy or to the iPhone, more senior executives understand that they need to get some design love. The bad news: Most expect that it will be easy. Most execs who want to integrate design into their organizations (or expand the role of... (Continue)
Each One, Teach One: Get Involved in Mentoring!
In my closing keynote at Interactions 09, I spoke about some of the challenges facing interaction design as a profession, perhaps the most important of which is a shortage of designers just when the world is starting to demand what we do. Increasing numbers of college and university programs will... (Continue)

Foldit: distributed gaming as research tool

by Daniel Kuo on June 30, 2008

Foldit Screen

Foldit, a game made by two medical researchers in collaboration with some computer scientists and with consultation from some game designers, taps into people's intuition where raw computer processing power isn't enough. Think distributed computing like the Stanford Chemistry Department's Folding@Home, but instead of donating idle CPU cycles to perform scientific research, you play a game that helps researchers understand human pattern recognition.

According to UW associate professor of computer science and engineering Zoran Popovic in Science Daily:

Some people are just able to look at the game and in less than two minutes, get to the top score. They can't even explain what they're doing, but somehow they're able to do it.

One of the most interesting parts is that they've incorporated competition into the game: between gamers playing for a high score, and actual research groups trying to solve problems. I think a lot about how graphic/visual/interaction design could similarly channel human energy in productive ways. There's got to be another example of this somewhere, right?

Filed under: Visual design


Daniel Kuo

Since joining Cooper in 2005, Daniel has lead visual interface design and branding efforts for products including medical devices, browser-based rich internet applications, enterprise software, and consumer products.


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