Inventing Interactive
I just got back from a long relaxing and inspiring weekend in Paris and thought I’d post a handful pics of daily-life things I caught while was I traveling. First up – the touch-screen in-fight entertainment system on Air Canada. Nice big screens. But seeing a mouse cursor feels like a design mistake. Plus, the […]
Somehow, I’ve ended up with a handful of browser-based links — a mix of retro, low-res, and stuff that made me say “I didn’t know that you could do that.” Google BBS Terminal is what Google would have looked like if it existed in the 80s. PCE.js is a Mac Plus emulator running Mac OS […]
It’s been almost four years since I launched this blog. And it felt like it was time to do a little updating. So, here we are with a new visual theme. It’s nothing too fancy. But I’m hoping that by changing the home page, so that each post is less of a “big event,” it’ll […]
This past week the winners of the 2013 UK Music Video Awards were announced. (Creative Review has a nice summary of the event.) And what’s noteworthy for me was it was the first year they had an Interactive Video Award. This years winner was for the song Kilo by Light Light, and went to Amsterdam-based design studio Moniker. I had […]
A couple weeks ago I was at dinner with some friends. At some point, talking about recent trips, people wanted to see pictures. As iPhones ware passed around (always a little worried that swiping to the next photo might reveal something not intended to be shared), we realized that we could exchange photos with Apple’s […]
Despite the controversy surrounding Ender’s Game, I wanted to share a handful of images of UI from the film. Among the team involved in the work was Ash Thorp, who I’ve interviewed here before about his other work. It’s beautiful, complex, rich-looking infographics and interface stuff. There’s more on Ash’s site, too.
I’ve just fallen in love with “The Flavor Thesaurus” by Niki Segnit. The book takes 99 basic flavors and examines how each pairs with the remanding 98. The author acknowledges that the list of 99 and the pairings were only semi-scientific — instead it’s more a way of exploring pairings, categorizing recipes, and sharing personal […]
I’m a big fan of future vision and future scenario projects. And the recent article, The Future (According to Corporations), by Robert Bolton, gives an interesting read on them. The article is a response to a talk by Scott Smith who argued that such projects are watered-down corporate visions, lacking real-world emotions and needs, and encouraging […]
This past weekend I had a chance to experience Voice Tunnel — an interactive light and sound installation by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It’s a temporary installation in New York City’s Park Avenue Tunnel and open just three Saturdays this month as part of Summer Streets 2013. The 1,4000 foot long piece runs from East 33rd Street […]
Often, when I work on projects, they’re for a client’s internal use, or otherwise secret, and I can’t share the work. So I was excited to discover that some work that I had helped lead was finally online, and I could post some of it. In 2009 I was working for BMW Group DesignworksUSA and […]
I’ve worked on the design of a variety of enterprise software systems. And I know the desperate desire from their users for tools that feel less corporate, and more consumer. They want stuff at work that feels like what’ve become accustomed to on their iPhones. They want stuff that’s fun! The problem is that it’s […]
Dino Ignacio is the UI lead at Electronic Arts for the Dead Space franchise of games. His work is at an interesting intersection point between fantasy and reality. It has fantastical design elements, and exists in otherworldly environments, but it also needs to be usable, so that players can enjoy the game. Dino took some […]
Having recently restarted my design practice of Triplecode, I’ve become increasingly busy (and, of course interested in) projects involving data and “big data.” My own work tends to focus on information design and giving tools to make the data useful. But there’s a whole other community which explores artistic expression using the same types of […]
I remember visiting a group at Xerox PARC when I was working on a project with them in the 80’s. They had a closed-curcuit video link between their lounge and the lounge of another lab in Oregon. The idea, at the time pretty new, was that with the live link, it would foster communication between […]
I’m a massive Star Trek fan. So I’m super-excited that Jorge Almeida took some time to discuss his work on Star Trek Into Darkness — for which he was the lead designer of the UI elements. (If you’re paying attention you’ll remember this previous post with Jorge on his work for MI:4 and The Dark […]
I love my new Sonos system. It took me a while to understand what it offered and why I might want it, but now that I’ve got it, I just want more. So – it was pretty cool to discover that Sonos has been (quietly) periodically sponsoring interactive installations that feature their technology… Right now […]
More great work from Bradley Munkowitz (aka GMUNK) — this time a reel of GFX work from the film Oblivion. Take a look: The vimeo page as well as a page on his own website gives plenty of details on what’s what. A nice overview describes the “Graphic Language stressed functionality and minimalism while utilizing […]
This looks interesting. From Oblong comes Greenhouse, a creative coding toolkit for spatial interfaces. One of Oblong’s founders helped design the gesture interfaces of Minority Report. And much of the firm’s work has been developing tools to make such gesture-based interactions more common place. Their g-speak platform enables multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, spatial, networked applications. But […]
In design it’s often the small details that matter the most. And a couple recent finds have been great reminders of that. The first is the site KnobFeel. It’s a collection of “reviews based purely on the feel of the knob.” And it’s genius because, for so much industrial design, it really is the subtle […]
Microsoft Research recently held TechFest 2013 — an event showcasing research projects from Microsoft Research’s labs around the world. And, although the event’s website requires Silverlight and isn’t the easiest thing in the world to navigate, it’s worth a look — it’s full of all sorts of future-looking research and explorations. (Or – use their […]