But wait, there's still more!

Would you like to see more?

Every summer I lead a Master's seminar on the neuropsychology of video games for the interdisciplinary graduate program in Game Studies and Engineering at Klagenfurt University in Austria.

A couple of months into the pandemic, I was asked to put together a series of short on-line lectures to help the staff cope with the unprecedented stresses of the year 2020.

If you're more interested in reading than in watching, I could recommend a few books.

My first book, "Anthropology-Based Computing: Putting the Human in Human-Computer Interaction", is about getting our computerised devices to stop insulting, hurting, and even killing us. The book presents a novel approach to the study and practice of how humans build, adapt, and use tools. It's full of stories and examples from my decades of work as a designer, ergonomist, human factors specialist, and research scientist, and presents new working models of the human brain, and a proposed metric for calm interaction. There are practical experiments you can perform to measure the way your phone, laptop, and other devices effect your body and your mind.
Oh yeah - and there are cartoons!

The cover of "Building an Intuitive Multimodal Interface for a Smart Home: Hunting the SNARK"

My second book, "Building an Intuitive Multimodal Interface for a Smart Home: Hunting the SNARK", was co-authored with Anton Fercher and Gerhard Leitner, who ran the Austrian Smart Home network called Casa Vecchia. This book tells the story of how we successfully built and tested a truly intuitive multimodal interface that lets people easily interact with networks of embedded systems and complex tools.

Fun fact: Many parts of the project got their names from Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark."

The cover of Set Phasers to Teach is an original oil painting by Doctor Victor Grech

I'm very pleased to have completed three books with the wonderful Beverley Ford and her team at Springer. In 2018 they released "Set Phasers to Teach: Star Trek in Research and Teaching", which was edited by Steve Rabitsch, Martin Gabriel, Wil Elmenreich, and myself. The book is a collection of essays by 16 international researchers from a wide variety of fields, discussing how Star Trek has influenced what they do and how they do it. Topics range from Astrophysics to Ethnology, from English and History to Medicine and Video Games, and from American Studies to the study of Collective Computing Systems.
And yes, once again, there are cartoons!

By the way, I'm no longer playing and singing on Saturday nights at the smallest bar in San Francisco.

Sorry if I never got around to your request.

Maybe somewhere down the road...

- John

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