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Argentine tango blog
/ with Interaction Design interludes / by Oleh Kovalchuke |
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September 2006
September 30, 2006 - Video from milongas in Colorado
I have shot videos at 'Red Martini' milonga in Colorado Springs, Turnverine practica and Mercury Cafe ("Merc") milonga in Denver, edited the footage in my studio in Manitou Springs and uploaded videos to YouTube, somewhere in the digital ether. All this fun and games gave me an inspiration of make a ten minute short about tango. Coming soon...
Meanwhile, Wednesday milonga in Colorado Springs:
And Friday milonga at The Mercury Cafe in Denver:
September 30, 2006 - More on personality profiles
Suddern burst of discussion about personality traits of interaction designers on IxD list. Cheryl Kimble wrote:
does anybody have this issue?
my old boss was an intj and i an infj. we absolutely couldn't work together. the f was so abstract (idealists) and the t was so concrete (rationals) that we never seemed to understand where the other was coming from. also, f's like to work in teams and t's like to work alone.
This is why I got interested in personality profiles - to understand where the other people are coming from and where to forward them in their further journey.
By the way, rumor is that women come from Venus... Could be true according to one of the articles The Scientific American Book of the Brain. Another article in the same volume dicusses IQ and is relevant to the recent thread on social classes and interaction design. Good book for casual, spare time reading.I have written about personality profiles before, when I was reading about them extensively [1], [2]. Incidentally, I am INTP, and Prime Minister. Just took the test again and got INTJ instead of INTP.
September 22, 2006 - Why dance tango?
From Kace in Singapore:
1. Authenticity -- tango is not a "made-up" dance, springing from the mind of one dance "authority". Many years ago, after passing my ballroom samba Gold Medal test, I naively thought I have "mastered" the samba. Imagine how flabbergasted I was when I saw an authentic Brazilian samba dancers for the first time. Tango has an authenticity that allows anyone from anywhere to learn the same dance as in Buenos Aires.
2. Honesty -- tango needs much less "role-playing" and "pretending to be someone-else". All dances have a cultural context which needs to be embraced, but many will consume the dancers e.g. role of ghetto gangsta for hip hop dancers, role of hepcat for the lindy dancers, role of gypsy for flamenco dancer. You can be more yourself in tango.
3. Freedom -- from early on you learn to adapt tango to yourself and not the other way round. How you embrace, walk, turn are all influenced by how it feel inside more than how it look outside. As long as we stay within certain tango paradigms (not losing the embrace, not doing solo shines, etc) the dancer has the freedom to create steps.
4. Emotion -- tango is the only dance I know that projects a healthy range of moods within an evening of dancing. Most other dances are set to one fixed temperature -- cha cha (cheeky), paso doble (proud), salsa (carnival). I can do a few songs of each, but I cannot sustain an entire evening of such extremes.
5. Nostalgia -- tango is a mirror to an earlier, more romantic era. In the "good old days" gender roles were clearly defined, people went out to ballroom to socialise instead of watching the television, and musicians connected at close distance to their audiences. Tango lets us break out of our political correctness and return temporarily to a more macho and sensual age when men and women know how to treat each other with respect.
September 17, 2006 - Bits of wisdom from Jared Spool, Inc.
First, several interesting audio clips (in mp3) of Jared talking to other knowledgeable design and usability folks. More usability audio at UXpod User Experience Podcasts by Gerry Gaffney.
Second, very good, insightful article on usability testing: Seven Common Usability Testing Mistakes (with concrete approaches to fixing the mistakes). There are more articles where this one came from.
September 15, 2006 - Look, mom, no clicks!
Dontclick.it - an example of the interface, where one doesn't have to click - mouse movement replaces the clicks. It's quite good, however (there is always however):
- The interface requires fairly precise mouse movements from the user. Slips are costly to correct, require large mouse movements.
- In the Autopilot example clicks are not eliminated, but replaced with additional and precise mouse movement - no gain in time or simplicity.
- The real problem arises when user needs to move cursor across the "reactive" areas to interact with nonadjacent parts of the interface, as in the recorded examples table (The 'Autopilot' reactive area).
- The fluid interface is somewhat disorienting in spite of thoughtful addition of animated transitions.
September 9, 2006 - Tango at YouTube
YouTube is addictive (in spite of it's far from perfect admin interface). There is a lot of shlock, of course, but there are also some diamonds. I have picked the later in Tango, Milonga, and Vals playlists. And one more list of clips of milongas from around the world - people dance tango everywhere.
If you do not smile, while watching this milonga performance, then either there is something terribly wrong with your sense of humor, or worse yet, you cannot appreciate the enormous effort, which went into making the performance. I am still wiping the tears of joy and humility, which welled into my eyes as I watched the dance. There are only three words to describe it: "Boom! Boom! Carnavalito..."
September 7, 2006 - The way I have danced yesterday
I have reached another steady level in my tango dancing and have realized that I significantly change my dance style about every one or two years. So, yesterday Jani, Betsy and I took video camera and went to Soda Springs park to record the way we dance at the moment for future reference.
I have uploaded video clips from the shoot to YouTube (too bad the site wasn’t around couple years ago, for comparison). The site does have some interesting clips though, which are unavailable at your local TV station. For example, in addition to the footage of ‘El Beso’ milonga, I have found some video of ‘Porteño y Bailarin’ milonga – the two are one block apart in Buenos Aires. ‘Porteño’ has more tourists. Well, both are rather touristy. The young girl zoomed in at 1 min and 7 seconds into the clip is not a tourist, she is local, and very young milonguera.
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