Andy Cush applauds a new project that catalogues our gadget habits:
There’s the “Security Blanket” (checking your smartphone for no particular reason when faced with the slightest discomfort in a social situation), the “Halfway Courtesy” (taking one earbud out in order to show a person you’re listening to them), the “Haunted Interface” (performing actions an interface can’t react to, like shaking a video game controller), and many others. All of the actions are collected in a free ebook called Curious Rituals.
Mark Wilson nods:
“It’s actually a chicken-and-egg situation where both the design of the object and the way we look in public influence the gesture,” researcher Nicolas Nova explains, and he would know. Over five years of studying gesture interfaces at Near Future Laboratory, Nova began to notice trends–”common threads”–in how people postured themselves in response to everything from laptops to VR goggles.
Check out more great images from the book (PDF) and blog here.
The Dish 